The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

1

I HAD KNOWN LONG BEFORE I rode a covered wagon to Oregon that naïveté was the mother of adventure. I just didn’t understand how much of that I really had. Nicholas and I realized before we left Missouri with the mules that we would be the first wagon travelers in more than a century to make an authentic crossing of the Oregon Trail. But that was never the point for us. We pushed mules almost two thousand miles to learn something more important. Even more beautiful than the land that we passed, or the months spent camping on the plains, was learning to live with uncertainty.

The trip was my idea, and I fell into it in my usual barmy way. A few summers ago, while taking an afternoon off from a story I was working on in the Flint Hills of Kansas, I stopped on the road near a stout granite monument that marked a set of wheel ruts disappearing northwest across the plains.

Junction

of

Oregon Trail

with

Overland Trail

60 Rod S-E

Enchanted by the idea that I could step from a modern paved road onto the tracks of the nineteenth-century pioneers—not to mention walk all the way to Oregon—I paused just long enough to grab a water bottle and a brimmed hat from my car and set out along the ruts, heading west. It was a beautiful, breezy day, with sprays of yellow coreopsis blooming above the grasses and meadowlarks bobbing over the hills. The old ruts sloped over several gentle rises, past clumps of cottonwood trees and low shrubs at the watercourses, and handsome timber bridges that crossed two streams. The expansiveness of the landscape was hypnotic and physically exhilarating, and after the first mile I felt as if I were levitating on the plains. The distant hills of Nebraska seemed to draw my vision hundreds of miles away.

A few miles up I stopped to admire the view after climbing a steep rise. The valley below was one of those dreamy western vistas out of an Albert Bierstadt painting—a U-shaped canyon framed on one side by a large stream and on the other by green and brown hills. In the middle, a tidy group of shingled rooftops glowed orange in the sun, surrounded by browsing cattle. I walked down to the stream, where a sign announced that I had reached the old Hollenberg Ranch and Pony Express station along the Oregon Trail.

The restored ranch and Pony Express station are maintained by the Kansas State Historical Society, and at the interpretive center there, built near a modern parking lot, I learned about the place. Gerat Hollenberg was a German immigrant who had first crossed the Oregon Trail during the 1849 California Gold Rush. He made a small fortune in the northern California gold fields, then lost it in a shipwreck off Florida, and was drawn back to Kansas in 1854 by his memories of the beautiful prairie and dreams of founding a business along the busy covered wagon trail he had seen five years before. At the time, marginalized American farmers westering for cheap land in the Northwest, religious zealots, and just dreamers in search of adventure were flooding across the Kansas frontier, and in peak years as many as fifty thousand covered wagon immigrants spent the summer crossing the Oregon Trail and its two main tributaries, the California and Mormon trails. Entrepreneurs intent on profiting from this traffic were building a network of road ranches along remote stretches of the trail, providing a kind of early log-cabin convenience store for the passing wagons. Hollenberg selected a site along Cottonwood Creek to attract pioneers who needed to water their draft animals and replenish their drinking barrels at the end of their first week crossing the prairie, and apparently he chose well. The trading post and wagon-repair shop he built on the plains—later, his wife added an outdoor kitchen and sold hot meals—were quickly heralded in published trail guides as the last major layover until Fort Kearny in Nebraska, two hundred miles away.

I was intrigued by one display at the interpretive center, lying flat in a glass case. It was a facsimile reproduction of a journal entry made in May 1850 by an Oregon Trail pioneer from Indiana, Margaret Frink, describing the scene from the rise above the river that I had just left. Today, the Hollenberg Ranch sits on a lonely, deserted spot on the hilly plains, with only the green vastness of the prairie grasses, and the mosaic of yellow and purple flowers climbing the low rises, filling in the view. But Frink’s 1850 journal entry described a starkly different place, a scene that could only be imagined 157 years later, looking out over the empty hills.

In the afternoon we came to the junction of the emigrant road from St. Joseph with our road. . . . Both roads were thickly crowded with emigrants. It was a grand spectacle when we came, for the first time, in view of the vast migration, slowly winding its way westward over the broad plain. The country was so level we could see the long trains of white-topped wagons for many miles. It appeared to me that none of the population had been left behind. It seemed to me that I had never seen so many human beings before in all my life.

That was the moment when I first felt the rush of a dream about the Oregon Trail, but the thought quickly passed as I moved on to the other exhibits. They were mostly reproductions of paintings of the Kansas hills during the 1840s and 1850s, when dust billowing up from the wagon trains created a haze all the way to the horizon, collections of old wheel hubs and shards of harness unearthed during archeological digs, and a description of the ranch’s use as a Pony Express station and stagecoach stop in the 1860s.

The site administrator from the Kansas Historical Society, an elderly man named Duane Durst, stood behind the counter as I walked through the museum entrance. Duane was talkative and obviously lonely, glad to have some company for the afternoon. He was a retired farmer and feed mill manager from the nearby town of Washington, Kansas, who had spent most of his life studying the patchwork of nineteenth-century feeder trails in eastern Kansas that led to the beginning of the main Oregon Trail nearby. This network of roads was called the junction country of Kansas, and in many spots near Durst’s farm, the remnants of the old wagon ruts are still visible in unplowed pastures and stream crossings. He was exactly the kind of walking database I enjoyed meeting on such a day, and I was quickly drawn in by the details he shared.

The feeder trails that moved northwest through Kansas and then disappeared beyond the Flint Hills all emptied into the original Platte River Road, as it was initially called, the main fur-trapping route to the Rockies that passed through the Arapaho and Sioux tribal lands in western Nebraska in the 1820s and 1830s. Renamed the Oregon Trail in the 1840s, the route spanned some 2,100 miles from jumping-off towns such as St. Joseph and Independence, Missouri, to the Willamette Valley in Oregon, following the great river valleys of the West through five present-day states—Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon. Unlike the image projected in Hollywood westerns, where covered wagons are pulled by attractive teams of matched Percheron and Belgian horses, oxen and mules were the preferred draft animals, Duane told me. Horses require too much forage and they couldn’t take the heat and the long stretches between reliable sources of water. Many more immigrants were dispatched by shooting accidents and wagon crashes than were killed by Indians, and the river crossings were often treacherous in the spring, costing many pioneers their lives. But by the fall, families regrouped. At major stopovers like Soda Springs in Idaho, or Farewell Bend in eastern Oregon, the long wagon trains paused while partners widowed by the rivers remarried, and the festivities often lasted for three or four days.

My curiosity was aroused by another detail that Duane shared. Pulling from his wallet a laminated ID card, he told me that he was a twenty-five-year member of the Oregon-California Trails Association, the main preservationist group for the trail. Duane described himself as a rut nut, and his commitment to the group was pretty typical. Over the past twenty years he had rescued several Oregon Trail markers and monuments that had been overrun by farming and other development, relocating them closer to traveled roads where they could be seen. He had helped design and build a visitors’ center at the Hollenberg Ranch and created Oregon Trail education programs for local schools. An Oregon-California Trails Association newsletter that Duane gave me described how the group’s volunteer work crews fanned out on summer weekends across broad expanses of the West, restoring mile markers along the trail, checking fence lines for land encroachments, and preserving trail grave sites in Wyoming and Nebraska.

Feelings of inadequacy overwhelmed me as I listened to Duane. I am an obsessive-compulsive reader and a history junkie. I brake by rote at every historical marker, I buy out museum bookstores, and for years my interest in colonial forts and Shaker villages so exhausted my two children that they are now permanently allergic to the past. I can tell you, right down to the hour, everything that happened at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, during the first week of July 1863, and each setback that Franklin Roosevelt endured during World War II feels like it happened to me. Frequent summer junkets to Montana and Wyoming had convinced me that I knew a lot about the American West. But now, on a perfect Kansas day, at an exquisite historical site, I was listening to a rut nut empty his brain on the Oregon Trail, and I realized that I didn’t know a thing about it. How could I have missed so much about so iconic an American experience?

And what Duane told me next seemed even more astonishing. Today, almost the entire 2,100-mile expanse of the Oregon Trail—even where it has been covered over by modern highways or railroad tracks—has been meticulously charted and marked, with long, undeveloped spaces now preserved as a National Historic Trail. Except for two bad stretches of suburban sprawl around Scottsbluff, Nebraska, and Boise, Idaho, most of the rest of the trail is still accessible along remote farm and ranch roads in the West. In western Nebraska and central Wyoming, where the trail runs through relatively undisturbed federal lands or immense private ranches, there are still more than six hundred miles of original wagon ruts, just like the path I had hiked that day. The dreamscape chain of natural landmarks and river views that the pioneers saw—Signal Bluff and Chimney Rock along the Platte, Devil’s Gate on the Sweetwater, Rendezvous Point at the Green—is all still there, virtually intact.

When Duane began describing the trail, he handed me a foldout map published by the National Park Service, and I followed along as he spoke. End to end, the map stretched almost four feet across the counter, depicting an immensity of terrain, almost completely devoid of urban development, from the banks of the Missouri River at Kansas City to the end of the Columbia River gorge near the Pacific coast. The colored terrain shadings on the map looked like platters holding a giant smorgasbord of geology—plains, bluffs, high desert, and dramatic river gorges—along the route west. To me, the Oregon Trail had always been just another historic nameplate, like Manassas or Pikes Peak, but now the map in front of me was opening it up like a tableau of the enormous energy of the American experience. The visual prompt of the map was irresistible, and I formed a strong mental image as I looked out through the paned windows to the endless plains beyond the groves of cottonwood trees that curled along the floodplain of the Little Blue River. In my mind’s eye, a dusty two-track trail curved northwest into the mystery of Nebraska, and then disappeared into the snowcapped rim of Wyoming’s Medicine Bows.

The map, the hypnotic Flint Hills rising and falling all around me, the peaceful surroundings of the ranch, seemed an invitation to ramble. Who wouldn’t, given the chance, want to ride the trail end to end? Wanderlust has always acted like amphetamine for me and I could not prevent my head from making the next leap.

St. Joe to Farewell Bend in Oregon in a covered wagon. More than two thousand miles of open country to cross. What a dream.

So, in other words, I said to Duane, somebody could still do it. The whole trail.

Duane looked at me quizzically, as if I were asking a question that he’d never heard before. The modern trail, he explained, mostly existed as a tourist attraction. Families driving west in their RVs—headed for Yellowstone or Glacier National Park—stopped out of curiosity when they saw signs identifying Oregon Trail sites. Most of them just wanted to quickly read a brochure and then find the next campsite with a cable TV hookup.

But you could do it, I said. The trail is still there.

In theory, yeah, I suppose, Duane said. But it isn’t going to happen.

After poking around the grounds and the Pony Express station for a while, I stepped back inside to say good-bye to Duane, and then hiked back east across the rise. The words of Margaret Frink had stayed with me, and I stopped at the top to look back. It was tempting to look across the hills to Nebraska and imagine long trains of white-topped wagons for many miles, with men hollering at teams, whips cracking, and hundreds of wheels raising dust, while outriders galloped through the grasses to flush up game. At this time of day the river bottoms all the way to Nebraska would be obscured by gray clouds of smoke, as the pioneers stopped their trains for the night and cooked deer steaks and prairie chickens for their evening meal. But the plains were quiet now, the air crystalline. The cedar roofs of the Hollenberg Ranch, lit pink and amber by the falling sun, were all that I could see.

It was almost dark by the time I got back to my car. Dusk is my favorite part of the day, a time for expansive thoughts, and as I drove south my mind wandered back over the ruts and the vision of a journey that I had seen on a map at the Hollenberg Ranch. I dreamed about it all the way back to Topeka. Buy a team of mules and a covered wagon, jump off from St. Joe, and then spend an endless summer rusticating way out there, revived all day by the clangor of harness chains, the scent of mules sweating, and the vast soulful horizons of the West. I would camp at night at old pioneer stops and Pony Express corrals, soothed by the rushing waters as I fell asleep beside the Sweetwater or the Platte.

It was a completely lunatic notion. Except for the occasional faux reenactments staged for tourists by Wyoming outfitters—modern-day pioneers are trailed by convoys of sumptuously appointed RVs, and pampered at night with portable showers and catered meals—no one traveled more than sixty or seventy miles of the trail today. I would later read, in a history of the trail years and the subsequent homesteading period in the late nineteenth century, that the last documented crossing of the trail occurred in 1909. Just to reach my rendezvous with dementia out along the banks of the Missouri River, I would spend two or three days driving west from my home in New England with my gear loaded into a pickup. Then I would spend four months, via covered wagon and mules, crossing what nineteenth-century travelers called the Great American Desert. Across the high deserts of central Wyoming and Idaho, I would have to cover stretches of forty miles or more without water. And why did I think that the notorious and often fatal obstacles that the pioneers faced—mountain passes strewn with lava rock, hellacious winds and dust storms, rattlesnakes, and descents so steep that the wagons could only be lowered by ropes—would miraculously vanish from the trail for me? Only a delusional jackass, or someone seriously off his medications, would pull off the road at the Hollenberg Ranch one fine summer afternoon and concoct such a preposterous scheme.

But you can’t save an addictive dreamer from himself, and that jackass happens to be me. Already, powerful forces were drawing me west. I felt an irresistible urge to forsake my life back east for a rapturous journey across the plains.

•  •  •

The contagion of rogue travel started early with me. I was raised during the 1950s and early 1960s on a ramshackle old horse farm in New Jersey. My father, a magazine publisher in New York City, was boundlessly energetic and inventive, devoted to what he considered the pressing entertainment needs of his eleven children. While the rest of the country raged over Pontiac tailfins or played golf, we chased around the menagerie that my father had slapped together from a nineteenth-century dairy—barns converted to horse stables, chicken houses and goat pens, a collection of more than twenty-five antique carriages and wagons, and a large stone patio and picnic area set under giant shade maples, where my father entertained the lovable drunks from his local chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous. We drove to church every Sunday in a four-seat surrey pulled by a team of matched bays, and sleighed into the toy store in town in December to pick up our Christmas presents. On lazy summer nights, my father loved nothing more than loading his children and all of our neighborhood friends—there could be twenty kids or more—into the dilapidated yellow school bus that he had purchased at a junkyard for such outings. Then we drove down to the Dairy Queen in Bernardsville and gorged on ice cream sundaes.

Over the winter of 1958, brooding in front of his fireplace one night, my father announced that he was bored with the school bus. As a family, he thought, we needed an experience that would draw us together, something that would engender in us the spirit of the American pioneers. I don’t have any idea where this notion came from. But the top-rated American television show that year was NBC’s Wagon Train, starring Ward Bond, and we were all fans. We didn’t consider it outlandish when my father told us that, for our summer vacation, we were going on a covered wagon trip to Pennsylvania. It would be a combined camping and coaching expedition, with stops along the way at historic sites like Valley Forge and Gettysburg that my father wanted his children to see.

My father had a knack for making the complex seem simple, and we were relaxed about our preparations for the trip. One January weekend that year we drove down to the Pennsylvania Dutch country in Lancaster County and made arrangements with our regular Mennonite wagon builder, Jonas Reif, to convert a large farm wagon with hoops and a canvas top. We bought our draft horses, a team of Percheron-Morgan crosses named Benny and Betty, from Jonas’s son-in-law, Ivan Martin. My father, my older brother, and I spent a few delightful Saturday afternoons that spring banging around the barn with rusty hammers and saws, modifying our rig with racks for cooking pots and pans, hooks for water buckets, and a drop-down chuck wagon table for cooking meals. My father was a former barnstorming pilot and World War II flight instructor who had lost his left leg in a bad air crash in 1946. He stowed his maps for the trip in an old woolen stump sock that he placed underneath the wagon seat. With shoelaces, he hung a compass and a clock from the hoop over the front seat.

We clattered down our drive early one Saturday morning in July that year, bound for Pennsylvania, and that was a beautiful junket for a father to share with his children. I was seven years old and our covered wagon trip was the dream summer of my youth. In those days New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania were still undeveloped, and we drove down through the green farmlands of Somerset and Hunterdon counties on quiet state highways or dirt roads, camping at dairies and state parks. In the mornings, while the waters of the Delaware or the Schuylkill river gurgled past our campsite, my father would rise at dawn and cook up a big breakfast of scrambled eggs and home fries over a wood fire, while my older brother and I fed and watered the horses. Along the cool, shaded lanes of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, we sang songs together to pass the time, and took turns learning to drive the team. On warm afternoons the bumping of the wheels over gravel roads and the rhythmic clopping of hooves made me sleepy, and I loved stretching out in the back of the wagon and napping on a bale of hay.

My father wanted his children to see America slowly, to bond us as a family, and the journey loomed long in memory.

The highlight of my days that summer arrived in the late afternoon. We had brought along on the trip a very gentle and safe old western cow pony, a registered quarter horse named Texas, who was trailed behind the wagon on a lead line. At four or five in the afternoon, when my father decided that we had achieved our allotted mileage for the day, he would call for either my older brother or me to throw Texas’s saddle and bridle off the wagon, hitch up, and ride ahead to scout for a place to camp that night.

I am still thrilled by the sensation of those rides. As soon as I had Texas all saddled up I leaped on his back, dug in my heels, and neck-reined him around the wagon and the team, galloping ahead into the narrow aperture of light glowing between the shade trees on a Pennsylvania lane. Within a minute or two I had lost sight of the wagon. I often passed up the first two or three farms that looked good for camping, just to stretch out the ride, loping over picturesque stone bridges and past fields with browsing Herefords or tall corn. I felt so free and adventurous on those rides—loved and trusted enough to bear the responsibility of finding our camp for that night, but also completely unbounded, with the confines of family plodding along in a wagon behind me, unseen, far back on the road.

Those rides were my afternoons as an American boy, and I always returned to the wagon suffused with the thrill of spontaneous travel. The couples who owned the farms that I picked on my rides were always excited about the novelty of having a covered wagon stay for the night, and they offered us dinner, showers, or the use of their swimming pools. Sheriffs’ deputies chased us down with their pickups, offering loads of grain and hay. Restaurants along the way laid out meals for us on tables in their parking lots. All of this was completely unplanned, and covered wagon travel seemed to generate its own spontaneous reality and unique bounty of rewards. Not having specific goals for the day seemed to be the way to live. Just harness up in the morning and go. The rest would take care of itself. Three hundred miles of green roadways down and back from Pennsylvania opened as a succession of heavens for us.

On that trip, my father gave us more than the gift of imagination. Travel became my endorphin. In a covered wagon, while riding slowly out in the open air, every blade of grass, every fence post and farm, or the mallard ducks rising from the streams, assumes a visual and olfactory intensity that you can never feel while trapped inside a speeding car. While on a wagon seat, the land embraces you, emotionally. The rumbling wheels, the creaking top, and the pull of the driving lines in your hands multiply the pleasure of travel. A part of me would always long for that strength of feeling again, and no other form of travel could match it.

Our fifteen minutes of fame arrived in the form of a Look magazine spread about the 1958 trip.

The theme of escape became embedded with me—I escaped to live, I escaped to elude ennui and the boredom of everyday life, I escaped to chase off my hereditary chronic depression. By the time I was a teenager my father had lost interest in his wagons and horses for the other great love of his life, aviation, mostly because my older brother and I were now old enough to learn to fly. In 1966, when he was seventeen and I was fifteen, Kernahan and I rebuilt an old Piper Cub in our barn and flew it to California for the summer, becoming the youngest aviators ever to fly coast to coast. We navigated out past the Rockies without a radio, with just a wobbly magnetic compass and a shopping bag full of airmen’s charts. In college I took long semester breaks to motorcycle out west and down south, then across Europe.

In my senior year at college, my professors discouraged me from pursuing a life of writing because they said that I would never make any money. But I was drawn to writing and journalism for a career because I knew the calling would never require me to remain very long in an office. I wanted open air, horses, or the throbbing of old cylinders hanging out in the breeze. Journey was everything for me. I learned to live for those bright, joyful intervals of travel, lasting weeks and sometimes even months, when I was liberated by my latest obsession from the grinding routine of domesticity and work—trips to Wyoming to write about cattle rustling, trips to Europe and the Middle East to cover politics and wars, trips to Arizona or California to cover wildfires and earthquakes. Even after I married, had children, and moved to the country, at least one long getaway a year was as essential as oxygen for me. There were always enough magazines or newspapers around to reward the curious and footloose like me. I felt content as long as I knew that the boy galloping ahead of the wagon could still be alive.

By the time I reached the Hollenberg Ranch, however, those wandering years were nearing their end. My life seemed to have run its course. To make the payments on my daughters’ college education, I had stayed too long at my job, at America’s oldest continuously published newspaper, the Hartford Courant. The Courant was now controlled by a short billionaire from Chicago whose borrowings had bankrupted the Tribune Company less than a year after he bought it. My editors had once dreamed about great writing and scoops, and they loved it when I ran out at a moment’s notice and then scrambled back to the newsroom with something good about the family of a soldier just killed in Iraq, or the rude developer from New York who wanted to convert a priceless watershed into a golf course. But now my editors were ground down by the decline of print journalism, worshipping at the behest of their corporate masters the new web values of page hits, Twitter feeds, and cutting costs. They wanted stories about idiotic, reader-driven subjects that weren’t news at all—health fads, car wrecks, and celebrity scandals. (The most coveted stories combined more than one of these elements, a celebrity health fad, say, or even better, a celebrity car wreck.) Mostly owing to my own mistakes, my marriage had ended and I had moved out of my house, and its sixteen acres of fields and woods that I loved to roam and log. I lived now in a charming barn house higher up in the mountains, but the place was lonely. Simultaneously financing a separation and college tuitions had left me nearly bankrupt, and my house was over-mortgaged to its limits. Many of my new best friends were heavy drinkers.

In short, I had become that familiar subspecies of the North American male, the divorced boozehound with a bad driving record and emerging symptoms of low self-esteem. I knew that I had to escape again—this time in a big way. It was time for me to buy some maps and a team of mules and lose myself in the West.

But I also knew that I needed a convincing rationale, a truth about history and the American experience that would justify a risky, lyrical journey across the plains.

•  •  •

The urge to wander west with a team of mules appeased another one of my personality defaults. As a boy, I desperately felt a need to flee the chaotic din of our house—new babies wailing downstairs, younger brothers and sisters fighting over dolls and Tonka trucks, my father’s weekend asylum of Roman Catholic priests, AA buddies, and politicians streaming in and out. I often retreated upstairs to my attic room, or to a quiet corner of the barns, for bouts of reading that could last all afternoon or night. I devoured science, adventure, and especially history books, escaping my domestic reality for an alternative universe of Civil War battles or Klondike dogsled rides. My adolescent feasting on books was a protective search for privacy and self that worked for me at the time, and later became habitual and delivered other benefits. I compulsively read ahead in my course work in school and college, and as a journalist I became the newsroom idiot savant who could always be relied on to convert his vault of trivia into some useful angle on a breaking story. My modus operandi was fixed long before middle age. To escape in fact, I had to escape first into books.

That fall, after I returned from Kansas, I curled up before my fireplace in New England and binged on the trail. I began with literary classics like Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail, and Bernard DeVoto’s The Year of Decision, 1846, and then moved on to the steroidal, massively researched work of Merrill J. Mattes, author of The Great Platte River Road, and John D. Unruh Jr.’s The Plains Across. By the end of the winter my library was stacked high with piles of cardboard boxes and books, with separate archives containing maps, nineteenth-century trail guides, pioneer journals, and essays on wagon design and mules. I quickly realized that I had been missing a lot—almost the idiom of America itself—by not knowing more about the Oregon Trail.

The exodus across the plains in the fifteen years before the Civil War, when more than 400,000 pioneers made the trek between the frontier at the Missouri River and the Pacific coast, is still regarded by scholars as the largest single land migration in history. It virtually defined the American character—our plucky determination in the face of physical adversity, the joining of two coasts into one powerful country, our impetuous cycle of financial bubbles and busts, the endless, fractious clash of ethnic populations competing for the same jobs and space. Before the Oregon Trail, America was a loosely coordinated land of emerging industrial centers in the Northeast, and a plantation South, with a frontier of hotly contested soil mutating west. Post–Oregon Trail—with a big assist from the Civil War—America was a continental dynamo connected by railroads and the telegraph from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with certain precedents for settlement, statehood, and quickly establishing large commercial cities. For another generation the West would be destabilized, and our folklore made, by Indian fighters and gunslingers, mining and railroad plunderers, and range wars over cattle. But the trail experience had clarified our destiny and national character. Americans were those folks who loved to profess peace-loving values, but who fought about everything. Allegedly America was founded in part to promote religious freedom and harmony, but in fact we were a cauldron of denominational spats, prejudice, and even homicidal church wars. This created a lot of conflict, and for millions of Americans, the solution for problems where they were was to quickly sell out, pack their belongings, and move somewhere else, preferably west. Our economic affairs were chaotically mismanaged by government and exploited by cabals of stock swindlers and banks. But the huge national bounty was too considerable to destroy and America would quickly assemble a wealth and an élan unrivaled anywhere else in the world.

But you couldn’t get to the bottom of that without first knowing the Oregon Trail. The ruts crossing the plains had not only physically connected a finished continental space, but spiritually cohered a young country’s first principles into a national psyche. For most Americans, the time line between the American Revolution and the Civil War is a seventy-year black hole, as if nothing had happened in between. But now I saw in the Oregon Trail the big event that filled the void and explained what we came to be.

And the details of the prairie migration were wonderful, crying out for renewed attention. Historian Richard Slotkin has shown how the myth of Indian savagery was required to justify the subjugation of the tribes so that their prairie kingdoms could be seized by the Americans crossing the frontier after 1843. But that image, faithfully passed down by purple-sage novels and Hollywood westerns, is wildly inaccurate. The initial encounters between the first covered wagon trains and the tribes were extraordinarily friendly, and the pioneers would never have made it past Kansas without their Pawnee and Shoshone guides. The pioneers and their new Indian partners amply displayed the American penchant for technological prowess, developing shore-to-shore windlasses and flatboat ferries to cross the rivers, innovations as vital to the country’s progress as the steam engine and the telegraph. America’s default toward massive waste and environmental havoc was also, and hilariously, perfected along the trail. Scammed by the merchants of Independence and St. Joe into overloading their wagons, the pioneers jettisoned thousands of tons of excess gear, food, and even pianos along the ruts, turning vast riverfront regions of the West into America’s first and largest Superfund sites. On issue after issue—disease, religious strife, the fierce competition for water—the trail served as an incubator for conflicts that would continue to reverberate through American culture until our own day.

Another compelling detail emerged from my research that winter. Along the Oregon Trail—unlike such embalmed historic places as Independence Hall in Philadelphia or the Custer Battlefield in Montana—the continuum of history is still very much alive. After the Civil War, the rush to build a transcontinental railroad made the familiar and mapped wagon train path the preferred route, and the Union Pacific and Burlington Northern lines were quickly laid down within yards of the original trail. The Pony Express, the telegraph lines, and the stagecoach routes followed, usually right along the original ruts, and then the big ranches, cities, and beef packing yards followed. Early in the twentieth century, the nation’s first coast-to-coast motorway, the Lincoln Highway, was built along six hundred miles of the trail in Nebraska and eastern Wyoming. The western reaches of the interstate highway system—Route 80 through Nebraska and Wyoming, routes 86 and 84 through Idaho and Oregon—closely follow the old ruts. In the U.S. highway system, the marked auto trail following the emigrant road between Independence, Missouri, and Astoria, Oregon is now called the Old Oregon Trail Highway, and includes more than a dozen interstates and two-lane highways.

Today, at some of the loveliest and most historic spots along the trail, O’Fallon’s Bluff in Nebraska, or Register Rocks in Idaho, you can sit and watch a landscape that still hums with western movement. The whistles of the big yellow Union Pacific engines wail day and night at the track crossings, along what is now the busiest freight corridor in the world. Just a football field away, often even closer, the semitrailers race down the interstates in packs, their metal sides glaring under the sun like the white-tops of the pioneers.

And now there is a new scrum along the trail. Over the past fifteen years, from the Missouri to the Columbia, the old emigrant road has become dotted with innumerable energy projects—ethanol plants, massive wind farms, high-speed transmission lines, hydrofracked gas fields, and huge data centers for Google and Microsoft. The Oregon Trail could aptly be renamed the Energy Trail. All of this passes by an environmental treasure, a proud legacy of Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Era—nearly a dozen national forests, millions of acres of preserved land, that stretch 1,500 miles from the Medicine Bows in Wyoming to the Cascades in Oregon. The trail today, far from being a historic artifact, reverberates with the modern echoes of America’s most eternal struggle—the battle between those who would preserve the plains and the mountain forests, and those who gaze across the same pristine landscape and say, Drill, baby, drill.

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A sensible plan seemed to have emerged from my winter of reading. A long ride across the plains would allow me to experience the incomparable joys and physical rigors of wagon travel, and I would be seeing the country slowly, with plenty of time for reflecting on how a fabled landscape had matured and still bore spiritual meaning today. All the bombast and bravery of the overland years in the 1840s and 1850s, the religious strife, the scams at the jumping-off cities, the wonder the pioneers felt about the unfolding vistas of the West, could be conveyed, adequately enough, from the safe remove of a library. But actually riding the trail would deliver me to so much more, tangibly connecting me to the history I now felt so passionate about.

Roaming west would also embrace a very old American theme. Henry David Thoreau immortalized this urge with his poetic Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free. A century later, beat writer Jack Kerouac was still exploring this motif in his road books. Kerouac, as his friend John Clellon Holmes wrote, hankered for the West, for Western health and openness of spirit, for the immemorial dream of freedom [and] joy. The pioneers had found this too. William Barlow of Indiana, who crossed the trail in 1845 when he was twenty-three years old, was in many respects an emblematic American. His father, S. K. Barlow, led a company of fifty wagons across the trail, carrying several hundred pounds of tobacco for trading with the Indians. In Oregon, the Barlows were dissatisfied with the existing trail around the Cascades, so they built a new one, which became the famous Barlow Road. Later, the Barlows helped found Oregon City, a bustling lumber and industrial center along the Willamette River south of Portland. As an old man, William Barlow vividly recalled his five months on the plains. I will now say again, for myself and our company, that I never passed a more pleasant, cheerful and happy summer in my whole life.

One of my favorite pioneer journalists is George Law Curry, perhaps because his life story so reminded me of my own grandfather and father. A Pennsylvanian who couldn’t afford an education, Curry started his career as a printer’s apprentice and worked his way up to becoming a newspaper publisher. He crossed the trail in 1846 and later followed a career track common to many overland emigrants, becoming a prominent newspaperman and politician in Oregon, and briefly served as the state’s acting governor. In May 1846, Curry wrote back to the paper he had founded in St. Louis, The Reveille, from the banks of the Wakarusa River in Kansas.

Life on the plains far surpasses my expectation; there is a freedom and a nobleness about it that tend to bring forth the full manhood. A man upon the horizon-bound prairie feels his own strength and estimates his own weakness. He is alive to every thing around him. For him there is a joy in the lone elm grandeur on the mounds, beauty in the grassy and flower-besprinkled couch on which he rests, and a glory forever round him, stretching his spirit to its fullest tension.

In the trail journals, I often came across the phrase seeing the elephant, a term that the pioneers used to describe their anticipation about striking out across the unknowable wilderness of the plains. The origins of the phrase are not certain, but it seems to have been a popular nineteenth-century colloquialism that referred to the rare thrill that families felt when leaving their isolated farms to see the elephants marching through town when a traveling circus arrived. The term was a kind of destroyer-preserver image that changed in meaning over time, and depending on the circumstances.

Initially, the pioneers jubilantly expected to see the elephant in the endlessly scenic plains that they would encounter after embarking across the Missouri River. All hands early up anxious to see the path that leads to the Elephant, wrote gold seeker John Clark of Virginia in 1852, the day he left for the trail on the St. Joseph Road. But a mythic, baleful elephant also came to represent the many hazards of the trail—disease, drowning, or stampeding buffalo that carried off a wagon train’s cattle. Pioneer Lucy Cooke made a difficult early-season crossing of the trail in April 1851, when the waterways of Kansas were perilously swollen from heavy rains. The wagons of her train had to be tediously unloaded and then pulled across even small streams by chains. Oh, surely we are seeing the elephant, Cooke wrote in her journal. From the tip of his trunk to the end of his tail!

Seeing the elephant, as historian Merrill Mattes put it, was the popular symbol of the Great Adventure, all the wonder and the glory and the shivering thrill of the plunge into the ocean of prairie and plains, and the brave assault upon mountains and deserts that were gigantic barriers to California gold. It was the poetic imagery of all the deadly perils that threatened a westering emigrant.

In the early 1850s, during the frantic California Gold Rush, another popular phrase gained circulation among the mostly young, urban eastern men and Europeans who were rushing west on the trail. The cowards never started, they said. In a 1962 article on the covered wagon, a writer for American Heritage offered his own amendment for the old saying. Only the madmen started! he wrote. As I made my final preparations to depart for the West, I knew that many people would consider me unhinged for wanting to see the elephant. I was a madman for becoming a twenty-first-century traveler along the ruts. But I was cheerful about that. I would live for the summer according to my own personal creed.

I do not believe in organized religion, herbal remedies, yoga, Reiki, kabbalah, deep massage, slow food, or chicken soup for the soul. The nostrums of Deepak Chopra and Barbara De Angelis cannot rescue people like me.

I believe in crazyass passion. It was crazyass passion that dug America’s canals, flung the wagons west, built the railroads, and propelled the God-fearing to their deaths at Cold Harbor and Shiloh. My father’s generation gave great crazyass passion surviving the Depression and then fighting a noble world war. Brandy and words mixed with Winston Churchill became the crazyass passion that saved the last free country in Europe. Crazyass passion threw Herman Melville to the seas, Jack Kerouac on the road, and Wilfred Thesiger across the sands. My corporeal self would be driving mules across the plains, but it was crazyass passion that would deliver me to the trail.

2

MY DREAMS OF CROSSING MORE than two thousand miles of western terrain were fortified by two gloriously farcical delusions. I would cross the trail alone. And, in addition to the mules and a covered wagon, I would be taking along a riding horse. I knew that I would enjoy exploring on horseback the distant canyons and river bottoms that I could see from the wagon seat, especially after I reached the dramatic bluff country of western Nebraska, and my childhood memories required me to think of myself galloping across the sage every evening to scout for a camp. I pictured myself high atop my horse under a cowboy hat, cheerfully taking notes about my poetic surroundings as I simultaneously juggled the reins, a lead line for the mules, my canteens, a compass, and maps. I would be the happiest multitasker in the history of the Oregon Trail.

To accomplish this, however, I would need my old riding saddle, bought twenty years earlier on a Wyoming cattle drive. In a transaction typical of the arrangements between members of my family, I had lent the saddle many years ago to my younger brother Nicholas, in return for his help when I was renovating my house. The saddle had sat all those years, mostly unused, in a dusty corner of Nick’s barn in Maine. Early one morning in April, just a few weeks before I was scheduled to leave on the trip, I emailed Nick and asked him to ship me the saddle.

I wasn’t surprised when Nick’s reply arrived a few minutes later. He had plenty of time on his hands. The summer before, he had taken a bad fall from a neighbor’s roof and shattered the bones in his right foot into dozens of fragments. The injury had not healed quickly, and for the past eight months he had been confined to either the postoperative ward of the Veterans Administration hospital in Augusta or his living room couch. Nick’s postcards and emails have always been a tonic for me, evoking the literacy standards of the nineteenth century, when Civil War soldiers and stagecoach drivers were too busy leading interesting lives to bother much about punctuation or spelling. Hearing from Nick instantly put me in the mood for pioneer travel.

I can send you the sadle just tell me were and when and listen hear you ashol why didn’t you tell me you were making the Oregin trip this year Im comin.

Some of you are already familiar with my brother Nick. Last summer, while you were touring the beautiful seacoast of Maine, Nick Buck was that rather generously proportioned, gregarious fellow with the Fu Manchu mustache and a NAPA Auto Parts cap, rumbling north on U.S. Route 1 near Damariscotta in a battered old farm wagon pulled by a team of mismatched draft horses. Stopping traffic in both directions on the busy coastal highway, Nick wheeled into the parking lot of the Hannaford Supermarket and then trotted over to the handicapped parking space, where he tied up his team. ("Whadya mean why do I park in handicapped? Nick said to me once, when I was along for his Saturday-morning ride. That’s the only place where they put a sign so I can tie my horses.") It takes Nick a long time to shop at Hannaford’s, and not simply because he is an ambitious eater. Nick is a much beloved figure along the mid-coast of Maine, and everyone wants to stop and talk when they see him. At the supermarket, Nick’s whereabouts are rarely a mystery. His booming baritone voice carries everywhere, even through hardened walls.

OH, YEAH! Did you see that team of mine jump the ditch? I thought I was going to lose that whole frickin load of kids off the back of the sleigh!

Nick is our family’s Renaissance man. He volunteers his wagon and team every year for free kiddie rides at local fund-raisers, he’s a popular actor in community theaters, a mainstay of several local self-help groups, and his lectures about horses, stagecoaches, and the old Boston Post Road have been some of the most highly attended events in the history of several Maine libraries and museums. Nick is also well known for being able to build or repair anything, a kind of local handyman and global Robin Hood rolled into one. If your grandmother in Waldoboro is complaining about her leaky water heater, Nick will generously offer to drive up there and install a new one, probably forgetting to send her a bill, but he’s just as likely to be found rebuilding homes for hurricane or earthquake victims in New Orleans or Peru.

Many people, after they have met Nick and spoken with him for a while, drool over his curriculum vitae. He epitomizes the personality type that down-easters call the Mainiac—a person so completely devoid of practicality, yet so devoted to fun, that his life can only be considered utterly romantic. He is also something of a prototype for the middle sons in large families. By the time Nick arrived, there were already seven Buck children. My father and mother devoted a lot of care to raising children properly, but they can be classified only as burned-out parents by the time number eight was born. This led to a curious phenomenon that I saw in other families. The older sons and daughters received an extraordinary amount of attention and contributed to my father’s personal bankruptcy scheme by attending the best private schools. But the middle boys were just surplus carnal results, afterthoughts, and no one cared how they dressed or what they did in school. Then the parents of these large Catholic clans gathered a second wind and showered the youngest children with affection. But the middle boys were neglected truants who could do whatever they wanted.

During his senior year in high school, Nick was suspended for a minor smoking violation—he says that he was taking the rap for a friend—and never went back, finding that he enjoyed jacking up barns and working in a gas station a lot more than classes in algebra and European history. A few months later he enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard. Nick became certified as a marine engineer and was assigned to work on icebreakers along the Penobscot and Kennebec rivers in Maine. He crewed boats that performed several dramatic sea rescues, and then he became the last lighthouse keeper in Maine when he took over the windswept, historic Whitehead Light Station, on an island south of Rockland, running it for eighteen months before it was automated and abandoned as a manned station. The trajectory of Nick’s life was celebrated twenty years later, when he returned to Whitehead to lovingly restore the light keeper’s house for the wealthy family who bought the island after it was sold at a government auction.

After the Coast Guard, Nick converted the love of horses and antique rigs that he picked up on our old farm in New Jersey into a successful sleigh-ride business at New Hampshire ski resorts. He spent the next ten winters up there, building huge, thirty-passenger sleighs from scratch. By day he pranced his big, dappled teams of Percheron and Belgian draft horses across icy parking lots and through the porte cocheres of fancy inns, building a considerable reputation as a horseman, and by night he partied with the ski bunnies that he met in the bars. Every summer he decamped for Dutch Harbor in Alaska, where he ran the engine room of the largest American fish processing boat in the Bering Sea. When he was in his thirties, a girlfriend persuaded him to stop drinking and settle down in Maine. Nick bought a run-down farm in Newcastle and—sort of—fixed it up. The next fifteen years were devoted to building and restoring trophy mansions along the Maine coast, and collecting carriages and sleighs, and Nick imaginatively treated his ferocious attention deficit disorder with a busy weekend schedule of team driving, acting in plays, and Habitat for Humanity projects.

But the recession of 2008 had wiped out mansion-building in Maine, and then Nick had fallen off his neighbor’s roof. He was now unemployed, and an invalid, so financially desperate that his family and friends had to throw fund-raisers to help him catch up on his mortgage payments and credit card bills. I hadn’t considered Nick for the Oregon trip, because he was so immobilized by pain and recurrent infections in his foot that he couldn’t even rise from his couch to cook his own meals. My sisters in Boston had been running up to Maine on weekends, housekeeping and caring for Nick as best as they could.

Now, on the eve of my departure, Nick was flooding me with emails, insisting that he could make the trip. His doctors were promising to give him a clean bill of health soon. He was passionate about going not only because, as an experienced horseman—arguably one of the best team drivers of his generation—Nick knew that I couldn’t possibly