Chapter 17. Atlantic to Pacific (Oregon Trail)

When the grass had greened for oxen, Oregon pioneers would leave Independence, follow the Kaw or Kansas to Little Blue River, then head up it toward the Platte, Wyoming, and promised land. They were soon out of the United States; I had my country all the way, although a footer does sometimes feel alien among the cars.

Skirting south Kansas City to avoid traffic, I was stopped by a policeman. We discussed whether walkers are automatically suspicious characters; he said it was a standing order to question anyone with a pack. But when I inquired later, his chief said the order was invented to cover his embarrassment at having stopped me. Walkers were welcome in Kansas, and indeed, I found it so.

Near Lawrence I missed Blue Hill, popular viewpoint of the pioneers. Flowers were blooming; I shared the happy surprise noted in emigrant journals that the prairie could be so beautiful in spring. In Lawrence I met the mother of the girl who had repaired my sleeping bag; she introduced a retired couple, train enthusiasts, who invited me into their home. My host gave an unforgettable ride in his road-going steam locomotive that had been converted for fun and parades.

One night we stayed up very late to see a film of the French keeping Nazis from taking their art treasures, because the film was full of old-time steam trains. Moreover, a friend of the train buffs took me chugging around the block in a restored Model T; its controls were so different I could understand the old gentleman in Missouri not wanting to change. That rest, a walker enjoyed some wonderfully nostalgic wheels.

At a park before Topeka I talked to picnickers. He was a giant and she asked good questions; her little boy had welkin eyes. The conversation became a newspaper interview, for she was a reporter. We became friends for whatever good reason. In Topeka they had me to supper, and afterward I watched with the boy his favorite television program, "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman."

On capitol grounds I admired the city's ceremonial trees, but when I discussed with recreation officials my hope that the Oregon Trail would become a National Scenic Trail, they told me the federal agency looking into it had concluded that the prairie parts weren't scenic enough. I disagreed, citing the pioneer journals filled with praise.

It may be a question of pace; afoot or in a wagon the nearly instantaneous changes in landscape that a motorist has become addicted to aren't expected; then the prairie becomes visually exciting. To a mountaineer it seems wall-to-wall summit, day-long immensity instead of just a few minutes at the top.

Turning northwest, I followed Little Blue River toward Marysville. On the way there were historic sites and pioneer graves to visit, and a gigantic elm to see in its Saturnian ring of corncobs left by marauding raccoons. When a fierce Kansas storm struck, someone took me over a bridge to camp in a fairgrounds barn, returning me in the morning sun. But while it raged I thought mountain storms gentle in comparison. Rainwashed mulberries were everywhere June-ripe and sweet.

In Marysville, home of black squirrels, my Topeka friends visited, bringing a pecan pie. We picnicked together; it was sad to see them go and know the Nebraska road beckoned.

Midwesterners are proud of their history. There were many well-kept county museums, and granite markers had been placed to commemorate crossings of the Oregon Trail. One sweet old lady from the Kansas Historical Society gave a tour of sites I'd missed walking. From the car she gleefully identified a rank weed, "Marijuana, grows everywhere here, but no good for smoking." There was even supposed to be a walking cane made of it in a museum collection of canes that I didn't see.

In a soft summer evening I got to Oak, Nebraska. A kid who resembled a long-ago brother found me a cot in the firehall to sleep on. Despite my tiredness he wanted me to meet some members of a wedding. The party was breaking up, but there were happy faces and cake for the stranger.

When I chose supplies next day in the town's one store, the grocer and his wife wouldn't accept money, just marked a receipt "paid in full". My ear hurt; the kid's mother drove me to another town, one with a doctor. He was old, they said, and himself undergoing cobalt treatment but wouldn't retire because there was no replacement. It wasn't so much that physicians were reluctant to come, and the pay was good, but their wives would reject the country towns as too dull.

This healer examined the infected ear, gave antibiotics and also wouldn't be paid, not even taken to lunch. "Too busy, but have the Foote Clinic, friends of mine, check the ear again when you're near Hastings." At a farewell supper with the kid's family, who had moved me from firehall into their home, there were no strangers.

On the road past Crystal Springs came a different, more reticent community. It was the town that hanged Elizabeth Taylor and Tom Jones, sister and brother Welsh emigrant farmers. Elizabeth was thought to have poisoned husband Taylor, but her real crime may have been contempt for him and hard ability to run a farm in a man's world, and Tom's fault to be her brother.

She had arrogantly turned down a neighbor's offer of remarriage; then the mob was recruited that tore them from home and broke their necks by rope. An hour's anger to live forever. A trial was later held to try to justify the lynching. It was long ago; the few I spoke to didn't do it, but they seemed somehow to have inherited the shame. A pamphlet claimed her to be the only woman Nebraska ever hanged.

It was here too, where nearly everyone was so warmly hospitable, that some evil aimed his car at the vulnerable. I though it was forgotten, but years later this bitter poem came:

Madness aside, I neared Hastings. A man took me to the Foote Clinic, where I expected finally to pay plenty. But they found the ear well, gave more medicine in case, and wouldn't charge a penny. A bemused and grateful pilgrim was put back where he had left off walking. Unicameral Nebraska seemed to me all heart.

By now it was so hot that I walked at night, sleeping by day in church basements, farmers' screened porches, and sometimes motels—whatever would have me when fiery noon approached. Once it was a battered hotel room with a borrowed fan; another lodger, old, asked if his playing would disturb me? He was a violin-maker; now that his hands could build no more, he had kept the last one for his own music. That day was no shrieking heat, but soft fan and old man's mockingbird.

I reached the Platte River near reconstructed Fort Kearney, whose caretakers made me welcome. Along the Platte there are now well-wooded tracts, in contrast to pioneer days when the emigrants noted the barren riverside and marvelled at the greater fertility of islands out in the stream.

What they didn't realize was that Indians fired the prairie, destroying perennial growth up to water's edge, to bring rich grass for the buffalo. Thus in this case it was the Indian who practiced monoculture. If diversity is taken as a measure of ecological richness, we emerge as better stewards of the land than they, on one river at least.

Perhaps the most intelligent person I met in all my travels was a five-year old named Kirsten, with whose parents I celebrated July 4th of '74 along the Platte. Not only could she carry on an interesting conversation with adults, but her perception was quick and deep. When I explained the unity of my walk, that it followed the fortieth parallel and mainly retraced historic trails, she immediately asked if I would continue across China? Since I myself had realized only a few weeks before that retracing Marco Polo's trip was the natural extension of my journey and no adult had guessed it, I was in awe of that friendly little girl.

One early morning I met a sociable man who invited me to tea in the shade by his camper. He and his wife were transplanted English who now lived in Illinois but spent every vacation doing historical field work on the Oregon Trail. From them and from reading I gained an idea of the importance that historians attach to the trail.

A quarter million moving in their wagons, carts, and afoot (some, like a poor Mormon contingent, pushed the carts themselves) make our Oregon Trail the greatest known migration of mankind over a fixed route. Students from many lands come here to seek out obscure grave-sites and markers, to examine wagon ruts, and to experience parts of the trail by their own effort. Can we afford to lose this national treasure, to let the plows and corn rob us of a unique window into the past?

There is even danger that a clear knowledge of the pioneer route may fade from our memory. The only good maps I saw were at Bridgeport, Nebraska in the superb collection of Paul Henderson, whose lifelong hobby has been to accurately chart the Oregon Trail on topographic sheets. Mr. and Mrs. Henderson welcomed me, let me study all the maps, and loaned some copies to be returned later by mail. He told how as a young man he would have his railroad employers drop him off on the prairie, in order to walk back along parts of the trail.

And at the Henderson home I met a vivacious young woman doing background research for a historical novel about the trail. We talked and became friends, and quarreled and became friends. Now Samson lost his beard. When she wondered what he'd look like without it, he shaved it off. Result: too young for her. Which must have been what he wanted to hear, since he has never regrown it.

In Wyoming, Laramie Peak was a beacon for me as it had been for the emigrants. Long before the peak itself, there was rebuilt Fort Laramie with its summer students in period costumes. They told me Custer had been maligned; an organist among them played "Garry Owen", fighting song of the Seventh Calvary, that his buglers may have sounded as they rode to death against the mighty Sioux.

Between the small towns along North Platte River my friend and I tried an experiment; she carried the pack in her car while I walked with only the Moses staff for support. Whereas before I'd had a ride or two offered in a day, now I was deluged with offers to turn down. I concluded it is the pack makes a hippie. But since I can't get my gear in an overcoat pocket like John Muir, it's an academic result.

Knowing how I missed my son, the novelist took me on a vacation sidetrip to visit him as he attended a self-improvement course in Aspen, Colorado. After the all-day lecture was over, he delighted us with jokes to be rated on a scale of one to ten, and my friend sang in her beautiful voice. A spirited time.

Near Glenwood Springs on the return there rapidly strode along the highway a man in a faded hat, with a tiny rucksack on his back. We stopped to question him. The pack contained mostly circulars describing the hike (highway patrolmen brought him water), and his light street shoes had slits cut in them to let escape the heat generated by fast walking.

The walker was Dave Kuntz, completing the last leg of his monumental round-the-world hike. He accepted a cookie, and we heard his account of what happened in Afghanistan. The newspapers there had treated the UNICEF pledges he and his brother were collecting as actual money; hence robbers attacked in a place where the Afghan army, expecting no trouble, had offered no protection. Both shot, he played dead but his brother hurt so much that he moaned, and they finished him off. After recovery in the U.S., Dave returned by plane to continue, this time heavily escorted.

It was interesting to compare our walks, he a pedestrian in the classic sense (at forty miles a day you can always make a town and don't have to camp) and me a backpacker, but I remember best his hurt eyes, especially when speaking of his brother.

Heavy-booted again, I walked from where I'd left off toward Casper. Then my friend drove back to say there were covered wagons ahead! A group from Casper was reenacting an Oregon Trail ride. She took me to meet them; for a day we rode in a Conestoga, cursing dust like pioneers.

Back to his walk, the yoyo finally reached Casper where he and she feasted with old friends of his and, unfortunately, quarreled again. This time she drove back no more.

From Casper I changed to lighter boots that had come by mail. In them I burned up the road, blistered my feet, and had to change back to old reliables. Now I finally left the North Platte which turned south. As a goodbye the river gave a lone sandhill crane silhouetted against grey rock and sky.

I remembered other birds along the Platte, little shrub-flitting goldfinches, the white-breasted ospreys who screamed as their nest-tree was approached, and a soaring great blue heron in Nebraska. Then westward like the emigrants I followed Sweetwater River, more a creek in comparison to the North Platte, but any water here is precious.

At Independence Rock, carved full of pioneer names and messages, there was a camp with hunters, who shared their supper of roast antelope. I prayed not for that animal's fleetness but for his tough feet, and mine hardened again as fall approached.

The Oregon Trail is often covered by modern highway or county gravel but along the Sweetwater, after the main road has diverged south, one can walk in the actual ruts of emigrant wagons. It is a swale, or little valley, cut by the passage of a quarter million, rather than individual ruts. Knee high in the trace of lost generations you wade time's river.

Now the road curves back to meet the Sweetwater; along it I came to Jefferson City, uranium boom town where one could wait in a café two hours just to pay a bill. No one complained; the waitress then was clearly the most harassed person on earth.

Walking on I reached Icy Slough which had cooled pioneer lemonade, but yielded me not even water. I asked at a camp where cowboys were preparing for one of the last big roundups by horse. They gave me water, and the distinct impression that they felt the West was not won on foot. A half mile farther, someone in a pickup coming toward me swerved and tried to run me down. I invited the knight out of his armor to joust by stick, but he drove on.

Calming, I remembered the first time it had happened, in Quebec, when staring in the mud at the tire tracks just missing me I still couldn't accept that anyone would do such a thing. Now I was a believer and had on my tongue the dirty taste of non-person, hippie, kike, nigger, for no one could do that to another person.

It is a small statistic, three out of the thousands of vehicles encountered, but what of that? If society can so brutally try to reform my eccentricity even once, doesn't that set the rift in stone? But we choose, in free election, to hear the other voices.

Before leaving that road to follow the Sweetwater cross-country toward South Pass, I met a Wyoming Fish and Game supervisor who offered to fetch me from Atlantic City (where there wasn't the store I'd counted on) to Lander for supplies. All through here I checked the washes for Lander jade, prized by Chinese, but found only Sweetwater agate.

In the restored mining camp of Atlantic City, I stayed at the retirement cabin of Doctor Mary (who is said to have delivered half the babies in Wyoming) and her cowboy husband. She called the supervisor in Lander, who came for me. After shopping was done, the Fish and Game man took me to meet Paul Petzoldt, distinguished mountaineer and director of the National Outdoor Leadership School.

Mr. Petzoldt presented a copy of his handbook on wilderness travel; we discussed the proposed Continental Divide Trail (he was for trail-less wild country, but I feared that no trail along a natural route meant a dozen bad trails). He spoke also of the Ryback brothers' recent hike of the Divide (they'd suffered in the Red Desert and needed help in Lander; he had trusted them for supplies until their father sent money).

Back in Atlantic City, well supplied and thankful, I walked on to South Pass City, another former mining camp, then up gentle grades to South Pass itself, gateway to Oregon Territory. Perhaps a very ancient gateway:

There was more water right away on the Pacific side. At Green River, instead of following it to a southern link that avoided mountains but crossed a desert, I chose a rougher shortcut as had most of the pioneers after Colonel Lander and his men hacked it out of the mountainous region that has since become Bridger National Forest.

Resupplying at Big Piney I set off in brisk fall weather. There'd been a brief snow already (ranchers put me up in an empty bunkhouse the night it fell); I was praying for no deep stuff until over the high country.

One evening from an abandoned ranger station (shelter for the night) I saw a moose with perfect white-stockinged hind feet. Staring fascinated at those stockinged feet, who could notice if it was a bull or cow? Deer came, and browsed about the cabin window until a chill stirred—time for me to curl into sleeping bag.

The weather held but it got very cold. One morning in a creek past Commissary Ridge, the ice was too thick to break with my oak staff. There were route markers but not enough; I was sometimes lost. Better marked or more used, the Lander Cut-off would make an excellent hiking trail.

Just before Idaho there were Mormon valleys rich in horses, dairy farms, and cheese factories. Resupply and walk on, Ishmael, pick luscious serviceberries along the creek. The main Oregon Trail was rejoined above Soda Springs, to be followed on mostly dirt roads through an Indian reservation to Fort Hall. In the Snake River valley at last, fall or Indian summer was my reward.

While walking through Pocatello for mail and supplies I stopped at a backpacking shop to chat, and found a very warm welcome. Besides offering a bed (where had slept not George Washington but rock climber Royal Robbins) they introduced me to Eric Ryback, who had transferred from University of Denver to Pocatello State.

Ryback was a shy young man, but we had a good talk, and I relayed the messages of those along the Pacific Crest Trail who were due a postcard. We agreed he should have carried an ice axe for Washington snow, but disagreed on whether the Crest or Appalachian Trail was harder. Like an easterner, he voted for the Crest Trail.

We also spoke of the mental depression that follows the euphoria of finishing a long walk, when one is like a watch without its mainspring. It seems his letdown was especially severe after the Continental Divide hike. He planned no more really long walks, but wanted to explore the coastal ranges of British Columbia. I thought I knew something of that jungle from climbs in Washington State, and wished him luck.

Leaving Pocatello by an industrial road to avoid traffic got me satanic mills instead. Where the sky could be seen, it spelled snow; at the airport out of town, permission was granted to sleep inside. While I awaited closing time, the weatherman adopted me. He gave brisk assurance that snow wouldn't descend to our elevation but, by the time we reached his home, two inches had fallen. We grinned. The breakfast his wife served next morning was as good as if he'd been infallible.

The snow melted, and Snake Valley towns vanished as I walked them by: American Falls, Burley, Mountain Home. Somewhere a county doctor gave me a flu shot and somewhere the sea gulls began their pointing to Pacific salt. Brown and blue-grey are the northwestern colors, lava earth and merging ocean-sky. From Snake River canyons to Puget Sound, Oregon is still a territory.

Just before Boise I got sick; a lawyer and his beautiful wife took me in and cared for me. In a wilderness equipment shop it was asked if I really wanted to carry that pack held together by coat hangers? Could the proprietor and his wife fix me up with gear more worthy of my journey?

She sewed an expedition bag to fit a new heli-arc welded frame; then from foam pad to new down sleeping bag to perfectly sized tarp with tie-tapes, they outfitted me. The payment? "You can buy dinner when you come to see us again after reaching the Pacific." After a farewell breakfast with the two couples I walked from Boise, shiny-new even to replaced boot-heels, and my heart was high, to have such friends.

At Parma I met a man with long white beard who'd been to heaven. In a car wreck, left for dead in the ditch, he'd had this remarkable vision of travelling through a dark tunnel to emerge among beings of light whose loving serenity made him reluctant to return to the harsher world.

From him and his wife I also heard how he had come by the beard. A retired schoolteacher, respectable as you or me, he had hankered for a part as extra in the film "Paint Your Wagon," to be shot over in Baker, Oregon. Nobody gave him much chance but he patiently grew the beard, got the job, and returned after a high time in the movies to discover that his community was not ready for beards.

It was reviled, especially by the ladies; one woman went so far as to claim it had urine streaks in it. Instead of crushing him, this got his dander up; he kept the beard, vowing to be buried in it the next time he went to heaven.

At Farewell Bend I left the Snake, as had the emigrants, entering the promised land of Oregon.

In Baker a city council member and her husband invited me to share Thanksgiving dinner. From them I gleaned the first definite memories of Grandma Gatewood's walk of the Oregon Trail, fifteen years earlier. A delegation had met her before town with iced tea, which was declined.

In town a shoemaker tried to replace her famous tennis shoes with sturdier footgear, same result. It seems she was gracious, but firm. (Later in Hood River, I heard that the reporter who took her picture without permission found the umbrella with which she hit him to be equally firm). I found Mrs. Gatewood's footsteps a cheerful tread to follow.

Now the weather was turning cold; in Baker I bought a windshell parka to replace the waterproof jacket that I had tried for blocking the wind, an experiment that failed because of excessive condensation inside. In the Blue Mountains, cold rain fell instead of the heavy snow dreaded by emigrants, and me, through the summer. My new parka wet through, but dried quickly. A hooded coat, like monk's cowl, reconciles the traveler to winter.

Down the steep mountains an old highway led to Pendleton where I slept in a hotel. On the edge of town a policeman made the astonishing offer to fly me in his private plane out of any difficulty encountered between there and the coast. I expected no trouble but thanked him warmly.

After one particular snow it seemed night fell very quickly. Evening caught me between towns without even water for camping. But there was a long-disused tunnel for moving cattle from one side of the freeway to another (the trail is here covered by interstate highway, which may be legally walked in Oregon).

The tunnel was dry, with a few twigs and many desiccated cow chips for fuel, the bois de vache (wood of cow) of the emigrants. I melted clean snow for water and soon had a mulligan stew boiling merrily. A snug and cheerful camp after all. It is fire on such occasions that turns outdoors into home. The blaze, sun's miniature, our ancient and sovereign remedy for ice. Cow chips burn hot; then don't fall down like wood, but leave a little glowing castle.

In Arlington the motel manager, a naturalized Briton, put me up for nothing and treated to a steak dinner. While I rested, a high-school teacher helped transform the seven by nine foot tarp into an oversize poncho, in preparation for coastal rains. The cutting out of a neck hole and sewing on of the hood required skill; I couldn't have done it without her help. We used buttons to close the sides; unlike snaps, they have never failed.

When done I had a raincoat to cover pack and me by day, and folded out unbuttoned, a pup tent by night. It weighed one and a half pounds; since a poncho alone weighs about a pound, that amounted to carrying a half-pound tent, an event not unnoticed by the back.

Near Hood River the countryside changes, under the influence of wet Pacific winds, from Biblical starkness to the studied complexity of a Chinese silkscreen. Gardens hang from unlikely rocks, waterfalls tumble as the sky narrows in the close intimacy of Columbia Gorge proper. But in spite of the beauty, or because of it, there was still one foot to be put in front of the other.

The Gorge families opened their hearts and homes, passing me along as in Kansas and east Tennessee. One of their sons even lent his apartment in Portland for the holidays. There, in a rash of good feeling, I offered myself as a Christmas present to the stately Oregonian , but they returned me unopened.

A bracing tonic that; walking across the continent to universal acclaim would swell the head awfully. (There were other stories, including one here by the Journal ). On the Christmas Day itself I joined many dues-paid members of the Lonely Heart's Club for solitary dinners at the Virginia Café. As we tipped waitresses and reflected on the ghosts of Christmases past, I thought the police should have run us all in. It is a crime anytime to be lonely, but a holiday disgrace.

From Portland by walking hard I could be to the Pacific on New Year's Day. So I made for it. Friendly people and good hiking until the last two days, when I strained something in one foot. But no limp could mar the final movement of a fifteen-month symphony. In a frenzy I'd have crawled the last miles if need be. The evening before, I stopped for a hamburger. The restaurant owner invited me to join him and his girl friend for a midnight snack. It was feast of king crab, a victory supper.

After a sound sleep in his home I woke strong, and walked the last few. Should they have resounded more than Maryland miles? I couldn't tell, in that waking dream of Pacific attained. My host had called television reporters. In the city of Astoria they met me; I spoke to a camera thanking Oregon and God for their kindnesses, and sank into a hotel rest. It was New Year's Eve; my transcontinental walk was over.

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