The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

508 Pages·2015·4.96 MB·English

by  Rinker Buck

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This book is for my brother, Nicholas McMahon Buck, who got us there with
rare gumption and skill. Among New England horsemen, he has long been
known as one of the great team drivers of his generation and he affirmed this
—and more—crossing the Oregon Trail.
When I strike the open plains, something happens. I’m home. I breathe
differently. That love of great spaces, of rolling open country like the sea, it’s
the grand passion of my life.
—WILLA CATHER

1
I rode a covered wagon to Oregon that naïveté
I HAD KNOWN LONG BEFORE
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