Trail To Oregon Quotes

I find that anything culturally significant that happened before '93 I associate with the decade before it. In fact, Oregon Trail is one of a handful of signposts that middle school existed at all.

This dream the world is having about itself includes a trace on the plains of the Oregon trail, a groove in the grass my father showed us all one day while meadowlarks were trying to tell something better about to happen.

I still think of Oregon Trail as a great leveler. If, for example, you were a twelve-year-old girl from Westchester with frizzy hair, a bite plate, and no control over your own life, suddenly you could drown whomever you pleased. Say you have shot four bison, eleven rabbits, and Bambi's mom. Say your wagon weighs 9,783 pounds and this arduous journey has been most arduous. The banker's sick. The carpenter's sick. The butcher, the baker, the algebra-maker. Your fellow pioneers are hanging on by a spool of flax. Your whole life is in flux and all you have is this moment. Are you sure you want to forge the river? Yes. Yes, you are.

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.

All I am saying is that sometimes you're doing quite a lot by not doing anything. You're not quitting. You just keep going. That's the pioneer spirit.

If everyone in the world took care of each other the way folks do out on the trail, and if everyone approached each day with as much hope and optimism as hikers do, the world would be a better place.

History almost everywhere is tragic and ironic, but in America the contrasts are more stark because we set such high ideals.

Crazyass passion is the staple of life and persistence its nourishing force. Without them, you cannot cross the trail.

It is astonishing how ideas can change an experience. How we can be in a beautiful forest, on a hike through verdant beauty, but if someone told us that the forest was the site of a brutal massacre, the entire hike would be transformed. It would turn ominous and sad. Or if I was told the forest was where Walk Whitman had walked every morning before working on "Leaves of Grass," the place would take on a holy majesty. Same forest. Same trail and trees. But the idea layered on top of it mutates it, glorifies or damns it.

I was having a great time, enjoying the best summer of my life, fucked up. Fucked up is good.

As for the Mormons one meets, however their doctrines be regarded, they will be found as rich in human kindness as any people in all our broad land, while the dark memories that cloud their earlier history will vanish from the mind as completely as when we bathe in the fountain azure of the Sierra.

They think that the past is dead. They don’t see that the past is just the beginning of the future.

It’s like God is trying to tell us something when the most beautiful people in the world are racially mixed.

In modern life we move from one insulated igloo to another...serially abstracting ourselves from nature and its impacts.

Americans were those folks who loved to profess peace-loving values, but who fought about everything. Allegedly

Oregon was discovered when someone followed the Oregon Trail right out to the end.

The cops of America are poster-boys of low self-esteem. Their uniforms, silly hats, and sparkling patent leather girdles freighted down with shiny handcuffs, walkie-talkies, and spray canisters of Mace apparently do not make them feel secure enough, so they always add the hostile interrogation to make sure that the accosted citizens know who is in charge.

We arrived at Council Bluffs at dawn; I looked out. All winter I’d been reading of the great wagon parties that held council there before hitting the Oregon and Santa Fe trails; and of course now it was only cute suburban cottages of one damn kind and another,

So safe had the Oregon Trail become that by 1860 the newly formed Pony Express began carrying mail along a 2,000-mile route between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California, completing the circuit in ten days during good weather and fourteen in the dead of winter.

Oregon. Oregon. Oregon.

Seeing America slowly was, in a way, like eating slow food-I wasn't covering much ground in a single day, but I was digesting a lot more.

Remember Hattie, tell the good and the bad.

Paul Darton smiled back and she was certain her ovaries released three eggs for the man to fertilize to make their children. 

As the distance between us and nature grows, the less we care and notice about the natural world, including one another.

Commander Keen, Myst, Doom, Diablo, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, Leisure Suit Larry, The Colonel’s Bequest, Ultima, Warcraft, Monkey Island, The Oregon Trail,

Among males, conflict resolution requires a rapid return to the basics, preferably sports or automotive mechanics.

facts about The Oregon Trail, can be found in You Have Died of Dysentery: The Creation of the Oregon Trail—the Iconic Educational Game of the 1980s, by R. Philip Bouchard,

Riding across Nebraska in a covered wagon was a monthlong immersion therapy in kindness, a reminder of the essential decency of my country.

Some of the men traveling alone hadn’t bothered with wagons. Henry and Ezra Beard, brothers from St. Louis, only had mules.

At the time of our hike, the Appalachian Trail was fifty-nine years old. That is, by American standards, incredibly venerable. The Oregon and Santa Fe trails didn't last as long. Route 66 didn't last as long. The old coast-to-coast Lincoln Highway, a road that brought transforming wealth and life to hundreds of little towns, so important and familiar that it became known as "America's Main Street," didn't last as long. Nothing in America does. If a product or enterprise doesn't constantly reinvent itself, it is superseded, cast aside, abandoned without sentiment in favor of something bigger, newer, and, alas, nearly always uglier. And then there is the good old AT, still quietly ticking along after six decades, unassuming, splendid, faithful to its founding principles, sweetly unaware that the world has quite moved on. It's a miracle really.

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?

Historians have long been squeamish about acknowledging that General Washington, like many of the American founders, was a voracious land speculator. Few academics and high school history teachers want to risk their careers by suggesting to their students that the father of their country worked the same day job as Donald Trump.

I was comfortable about my own western quest. The wrong outcome, or no outcome at all, is often the only result of a journey. Walkabouts and odysseys have always been common, and we needn’t search too hard for tangible returns. Journey for journey’s sake is enough. For weeks or months of a climb or a trek, we are forced to be in the moment.

clean boyfriend someday. I love you. Joe. On the other side was a photograph of the Sylvia Beach Hotel on the Oregon coast, where we’d stayed together once. I stared at the photograph for several moments, a series of feelings washing over me in waves: grateful for a word from someone I knew, nostalgic for Joe, disappointed that only one person had written to me, and heartbroken, unreasonable as it was, that the one person who had wasn’t Paul. I bought two bottles of Snapple lemonade, a king-sized Butterfinger, and a bag of Doritos and went outside and sat on the front steps, devouring the things I’d purchased while reading the postcard over and over again. After a while, I noticed a box in the corner of the porch stuffed

Fucked up is the universal condition of man. We were crossing to Oregon behind a cranky team of mules—the very definition, the apotheosis, the pinnacle, of fucked up. I woke in the morning to harness mules, fucked up, obsessed all day on making more miles, fucked up, and collapsed onto my squalid wagon matteess every night, fucked up. I was having a great time, enjoying the best summer of my life, fucked up. Fucked up is good.

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.

Raw or not, the women did their part and more. They traveled head to head with men, showing no more fear and asking no favor. ...... They had a kind of toughness in them that you might not think, seeing them in a parlor. So on a trail, women came to speak and men to listen almost as if to other men. It was lucky for the pride of men that few traveled with their wives to Oregon. They'd never quite believe again a woman was to look at but not to listen to.

Gen X straddles the pre- and post-internet worlds. The youngest Gen Xers belonged to the last graduating class to finish college pre–social media.2 Facebook was invented in 2004. The iPhone came out in 2007. How fitting that many younger Gen Xers and older Millennials were introduced to computing by the bleak Oregon Trail—which frequently ended with you and all your friends dying from dysentery.3 Personally, I loved the game. Again, again! Maybe this time we’ll get cholera!

The grandparents are raising the children because the biological parents have skipped off—for whatever reason, not always meth. The demands of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have often meant that both parents in a military family get deployed at once, and they leave their children with their grandparents. Layoffs of single working mothers lead a lot of families to decide to become multigenerational again. A wave of bipolar disorders and addiction to video games and gambling has also taken a toll on families.

In unfamiliar terrain, a plastic bag impaled on barbed wire is snapping in the breeze. Mules are skittish about that because they haven’t seen it before, and it reminds them of a predator. So the “muleteer” beats them there too. Eventually, when the mules tire of getting beaten, or are just fed up dealing with a less intelligent species, they use the tremendous power of their hind legs to kick out the tug chains and run away. For this, mules are known as “ornery.” In English we use the common phrase “stubborn as a mule,” a classic example of man ascribing stupidity to the beast instead of to himself.

I think we're all just doing our best to survive the inevitable pain and suffering that walks alongside us through life. Long ago, it was wild animals and deadly poxes and harsh terrain. I learned about it playing The Oregon Trail on an old IBM in my computer class in the fourth grade. The nature of the trail has changed, but we keep trekking along. We trek through the death of a sibling, a child, a parent, a partner, a spouse; the failed marriage, the crippling debt, the necessary abortion, the paralyzing infertility, the permanent disability, the job you can't seem to land; the assault, the robbery, the break-in, the accident, the flood, the fire; the sickness, the anxiety, the depression, the loneliness, the betrayal, the disappointment, and the heartbreak. There are these moments in life where you change instantly. In one moment, you're the way you were, and in the next, you're someone else. Like becoming a parent: you're adding, of course, instead of subtracting, as it is when someone dies, and the tone of the occasion is obviously different, but the principal is the same. Birth is an inciting incident, a point of no return, that changes one's circumstances forever. The second that beautiful baby onto whom you have projected all your hopes and dreams comes out of your body, you will never again do anything for yourself. It changes you suddenly and entirely. Birth and death are the same in that way.

I gazed at my bare and battered feet, with their smattering of remaining toenails. They were ghostly pale to the line a few inches above my ankles, where the wool socks I usually wore ended. My calves above them were muscled and golden and hairy, dusted with dirt and a constellation of bruises and scratches. I’d started walking in the Mojave Desert and I didn’t plan to stop until I touched my hand to a bridge that crosses the Columbia River at the Oregon-Washington border with the grandiose name the Bridge of the Gods. I looked north, in its direction—the very thought of that bridge a beacon to me. I looked south, to where I’d been, to the wild land that had schooled and scorched me, and considered my options. There was only one, I knew. There was always only one. To keep walking.

BOOKS BURNED ON THE PCT The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California, Jeffrey P. Schaffer, Thomas Winnett, Ben Schifrin, and Ruby Jenkins. Fourth edition, Wilderness Press, January 1989. Staying Found: The Complete Map and Compass Handbook, June Fleming. *The Dream of a Common Language, Adrienne Rich. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner. **The Complete Stories, Flannery O’Connor. The Novel, James Michener. A Summer Bird-Cage, Margaret Drabble. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov. Dubliners, James Joyce. Waiting for the Barbarians, J. M. Coetzee. The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 2: Oregon and Washington, Jeffrey P. Schaffer and Andy Selters. Fifth edition, Wilderness Press, May 1992. The Best American Essays 1991, edited by Robert Atwan and Joyce Carol Oates. The Ten Thousand Things, Maria Dermoût.

A cavalry of sweaty but righteous blond gods chased pesky, unkempt people across an annoyingly leaky Mexican border. A grimy cowboy with a headdress of scrawny vultures lay facedown in fiery sands at the end of a trail of his own groveling claw marks, body flattened like a roadkill, his back a pincushion of Apache arrows. He rose and shook his head as if he had merely walked into a doorknob. Never mind John Wayne and his vultures and an “Oregon Trail” lined with the Mesozoic buttes of the Southwest, where the movies were filmed, or the Indians who were supposed to be northern plains Cheyenne but actually were Navajo extras in costume department Sioux war bonnets saying mischievous, naughty things in Navajo, a language neither filmmaker nor audience understood anyway, but which the interpreter onscreen translated as soberly as his forked tongue could manage, “Well give you three cents an acre.” Never mind the ecologically incorrect arctic loon cries on the soundtrack. I loved that desert.

In fact, mostly what the Forest Service does is build roads. I am not kidding. There are 378,000 miles of roads in America’s national forests. That may seem a meaningless figure, but look at it this way—it is eight times the total mileage of America’s interstate highway system. It is the largest road system in the world in the control of a single body. The Forest Service has the second highest number of road engineers of any government institution on the planet. To say that these guys like to build roads barely hints at their level of dedication. Show them a stand of trees anywhere and they will regard it thoughtfully for a long while, and say at last, “You know, we could put a road here.” It is the avowed aim of the U.S. Forest Service to construct 580,000 miles of additional forest road by the middle of the next century. The reason the Forest Service builds these roads, quite apart from the deep pleasure of doing noisy things in the woods with big yellow machines, is to allow private timber companies to get to previously inaccessible stands of trees. Of the Forest Service’s 150 million acres of loggable land, about two-thirds is held in store for the future. The remaining one-third—49 million acres, or an area roughly twice the size of Ohio—is available for logging. It allows huge swathes of land to be clear-cut, including (to take one recent but heartbreaking example) 209 acres of thousand-year-old redwoods in Oregon’s Umpqua National Forest.

she thought of the mix of kids in her class and in Melissa’s and she knew that the future could be bright. No one had tried to say she didn’t have a right to be in that school, or acted interested in who her ancestors were, but they had been interested in who she was and where she had moved from. They wanted to know what she did and wore and liked.

I wanted you to know...” he started and then hesitated. “What?” she asked. “I did not vote to kill the dogs.” She caught her breath, surprise mixing with relief. Jack had stood up for what was right. “You only wanted me to trust you.” He nodded. “One day you’ll love a man, Samantha. A man you will trust.” She hoped he was right. One day she hoped to marry a man she trusted with her life and her heart.

Joe Chiles referred to Pierson’s condition, and

some of our descendents

I do not disapprove of you personally, Miss Waldron. These children are an unruly group. I do think we need a man to temper them before any teaching is done. We have had so many teachers...” A slight smile crept up her lips. “‘Unruly’ doesn’t frighten me.” “I wonder, Miss Waldron,” He leaned toward her. “What does frighten you?” She glanced out the window, at Micah and his friend walking away from her. “Losing someone else I love.

Those kids are going to eat her alive,” Simon said, walking up to stand beside Alex. “I am not so sure. She has spirit.” “I don’t know about spirit, but she’s about the loveliest lady I’ve ever seen.” Alex bristled. He knew that many of these men were already hounding her with marriage proposals, but he didn’t want her to have to marry one of them for provision. “You had better take care not to make a fool of yourself, my friend.” Simon laughed, clapping him on the back. “L’amour always makes a fool of itself.

Papa stirred in the candlelight, opening his eyes. “Oh, Samantha,” he murmured, his smile weak. “You’re as pretty as your mother.” She shook her head. Her body was covered with dust, her hair windblown, her nose burnt from the sun. And she was tired to her core. “I’m not pretty, Papa.” “Yes, you are.” Papa reached for her hand, squeezed it. “And you are strong—much stronger than your mama, and stronger than me.

Look at this view, Papa.” Samantha gently lifted his head so he could see the splendor outside. “You made it to the Columbia River.” He rested against her. “The Columbia,” he said slowly. “We did it.” “Yes, we did.” She lay Papa back down to rest, but moments later he sat up again, his voice more urgent this time. “I haven’t been a good father to you.” “Yes, you have.” He shook his head. “Forgive me?” She had nothing to forgive him for, but she kissed his forehead anyway. “Of course.” “You take care of Micah, good care of him.” She looked over at her brother, asleep under the blanket. “We’ll both take care of him.” Papa shook her arm with surprising strength, like he had to make Samantha understand. “You need to care for him.” She choked out, “I will, Papa. Don’t worry.

Jack rode back into the river, steering his horse toward their raft. Samantha couldn’t see his dark brown hair under his wide-brimmed hat, but she could see the focus in his face, the strength of his arms as he guided his horse. When he glanced over at her, she blushed. Micah elbowed her. “Someone’s sweet on you.” “Hush,” she whispered. “Papa says you’re going to marry him.” She elbowed him back. “I told you to hush.” Micah tipped his hat low over his shaggy hair, but she could still see the grin on his face.

Alex stepped forward. “Who is gone?” Both men turned, and Huey’s eyes filled with surprise. And then fear. “Who is gone?” he repeated. Huey cleared his throat. “Samantha and the boy.” Alex clutched his fists. “Where did they go?” “Across the river.” Alex grabbed the man’s collar, pushing him up against the wall. “What do you mean, they went across the river?” “I told her you wouldn’t like it if she left.” “Told her?” Alex raged. “Why didn’t you stop her?” “I couldn’t. She insisted on paddling herself across the river.” He shook his head. Samantha had almost drowned on that river. Why would she insist on leaving on her own? He relaxed his grip on Huey’s collar. “What did she say when you told her I wouldn’t like it?” “She said it didn’t matter, that you were leaving first.

I asked her to marry me,” Huey continued, staring at Alex. “But she said her heart belonged to someone else.” The man’s words emboldened him, calming his fury. Perhaps she had run for the same reason he’d decided to stay. Perhaps she did love him as much as he loved her. His heart raced. “What did they take with them?” “They both had packs...and their dog was carrying supplies on his back too.” At least they had Boaz.

Do you know a woman by the name of Samantha Waldron?” he asked. “Of course I do.” The woman tilted her head. “But how do you know her?” “I met her at Fort Vancouver.” “And you came all the way down here looking for her.” He nodded. “I have come to ask her to be my wife.” With a big smile, the woman directed him to the house where she said Samantha lived. He crossed the grassy field, eyeing a small wooden home with a split-rail fence circling it. Then he took a deep breath and knocked on the front door. When it opened, he bit back a gasp. There in front of him, with a hammer in his hands, was Jack Doyle. Stunned, Alex stared at the man. “I am sorry—I thought this was Miss Waldron’s house.” “It is.” “What—what are you doing here?” Doyle lifted the hammer. “Just fixing up a few things. What are you doing here?” Alex didn’t answer his question. “I thought you married.” “I did,” Doyle said with a laugh. “My wife is in the garden out back.” His heart seemed to stop. He was too late. Samantha had thought he was on the ship back to London. She thought he was getting married.

Lord Alexander Clarke stood before her, looking quite regal in his frock coat and top hat. She couldn’t breathe. “You’re supposed to be on that boat,” she said, her voice trembling. “Going to London.” “London is no longer my home.” “But Lady Judith—” He stopped her. “She did not want to stay here.” “You were supposed to marry.” He shook his head. “I did not love her, nor did she love me.” She brushed her hands over her yellow apron, streaking dirt down the front of it as he stepped closer to her. The pounding of her heart seemed to echo in her ears. “Why do you Waldrons keep running?” “Micah and I—” she whispered. “We had to finish our journey.” He reached for her hand, and her heart leaped as he wrapped his strong fingers over hers and placed them on his heart. “The trail ends right here, Miss Waldron. With you and me.” “If you don’t call me ‘Samantha’—” He leaned forward and drowned her words with his kiss. Her body warmed in his embrace, her skin fluttering at his touch. Strong and tender. Powerful and passionate. Alex Clarke hadn’t gone to London. He was here, and he wanted to be with her.

Micah set down his gift and wrapped his arms around both of them. Alex leaned down and lifted the boy with one arm. The other he put around Samantha. “I no longer have an income, or a position for that matter, but we can find our way together, can’t we?” Samantha smiled. “I have a surprise for you.” He kissed the top of her head. Micah grinned. “Does this mean you’re going to marry her?” “If your sister says it is all right.” Tears trickled down her cheeks. “It’s fine with me.” Alex looked into her eyes, and she never wanted him to look away again. “Is there a reverend around here?” he asked. Samantha laughed. “I believe we can find one.” He leaned close to her. “Will you marry me, Miss Waldron?” She put her hands on her hips. “Only if you’ll stop calling me ‘Miss Waldron.’” “All right.” He paused, leaning closer as he whispered in her ear, “How would you like to be called Mrs. Clarke?” “Samantha,” she insisted. He smiled. “I think I’ll just call you Sam.

Over time “Pikers” became accepted as a term that referred to people who were slow of speech, plodding, and not ambitious in business.

The original Pikers from Kentucky and Missouri, in the words of pioneer diarist William Audley Maxwell, were considered “of a ‘backwoods’ class,

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

The very idea of wagon travel across the plains might have been indefinitely delayed had it not been for Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, a dreamy but persistent evangelist from the Finger Lakes of New York, who in 1836 became the first white woman to cross the Rockies. Narcissa Whitman is largely forgotten today, but her impact on American history was enormous, and for a time she was one of the most famous women in antebellum America.

spring. The enormous economic impact of the mule trade and how Oregon Trail traffic stimulated the American economy have been frequently ignored by historians, mostly because it is a lot more prestigious for professional academics to sound learned about Senator Thomas Hart Benton or the Missouri Compromise than to actually know something about America’s basic means of transportation for a century—wagons and mules. Yes,

belongings

Gabriel invades Bella Blackcoat as the conquistadors, firewater and smallpox rolled into one. Like her ancestors on either side, she never stood a chance. The sound of his Harley is the pounding of the cavalry hooves of horses that forced her people off the plains. His helmet comes off his head like the hide off a slain buffalo. He pushes through the swinging doors to the bar like he is opening up the Oregon Trail. He strides towards her like a wagon train full of Mormons. His smile is the 1860 Henry repeating rifle, called by its victims the Spirit Gun, capable of mowing down 15 darker-skinned humans in even time. His black leather jacket and his mystery are a second and third clip of 44:02 cartridges. He sits down on a stool, a gold prospector staking a claim, and leans his penile forearm on the bar like it is a revoked treaty. He sings his song and it is Wounded Knee ready to bury Bella’s heart. Gabriel Ahrumet is one-man genocide. Behind the bar, a previously unknown chemical reaction takes place inside Bella as her hormones wake from a long afternoon nap, stretch languorously and start an ancient ceremony around a hurriedly erected campfire. The intensity increases with a ferocity that is disconcerting. A glow begins between her legs, melting the bottom half of her body like licorice on a griddle. Her eggs begin to jiggle and then to sizzle, spattering gooey chunks all over the stove. She slides off her stool. Her legs flow along the sawdust floor, slink up over the bar and wrap themselves around Gabe’s waist. He is too busy admiring the tousle of his hair in the Jim Beam mirror that hangs behind the bar to notice.

This was 1849, a year when the frenzy to reach California gold was so intense that all wisdom had percolated from the American brain. Speed in reaching northern California was everything, and Turner and Allen were actually pikers in that department. The craziest westering scheme of all was devised by a head case New Yorker named Rufus Porter, an inventor and balloon enthusiast who was the founder of Scientific American magazine. Like many Americans, Porter was swept up by the visionary possibilities of a mass crossing to plunder the gold fields of the Pacific West. Porter became convinced that giant balloons, powered by twin steam engines borrowed from a paddle-wheeler, could loft as many as two hundred Gold Rush miners to California at once.

Porter’s aerial palace, complete with twenty-six windows, a long exhaust pipe for steam sticking out the rear, and a giant American flag fluttering over the rudders, was designed to ride beneath an immense cigar-shaped dirigible. The engineering was lunacy, but Porter’s marketing was brilliant. He proposed dispensing entirely with the notorious jumping-off hassles along the Missouri River by launching his “aerial locomotive” from New York. The coast-to-coast trip, Porter’s calculations showed, could be made in just three days—five days if the prevailing headwinds were particularly bad that week. Porter aggressively advertised his “Air Line to California” in eastern newspapers and magazines. Amazingly, over two hundred suckers paid a subscription price of $50, which included three-course meals and wine, for the inaugural balloon hop to the gold fields. That winter, a large crowd gathered in a Long Island cornfield to watch Porter test a model of his airship. But the craft never left the ground because the steam engines were far too heavy for the balloon. The would-be Porter aeronauts, however, were the lucky ones—they never had to leave in the first place. The 125 paying passengers on the first Turner and Allen Pioneer Train were not so fortunate. The Turner and Allen expedition of 1849

life, Meeker continued on to New York, where he scuffled with police who wouldn’t allow him to run his oxen down Fifth Avenue. In Washington, D.C., he ran his rig onto the White House lawn and enlisted President Theodore Roosevelt to help him preserve the trail. Meeker was a big, visionary thinker. Not content with merely preserving the trail, he advocated the creation of a national commercial and military road across the West, linking growing cities like Denver and Salt Lake with the East, and spur roads that would connect with the vast national parks that had been created during the Progressive Era. Swimming and fishing facilities, hotels, and even towers with navigational beacons for passing airmail planes were all part of Meeker’s plan. None of this was built during his lifetime, and Meeker would receive no credit for his elaborate transportation dreams. But the national parks system built during the New Deal, and the interstate highways paved in the 1950s, eventually created a network of concrete and open spaces remarkably similar to Meeker’s original scheme. Meeker

One of Brown’s best monograph sketches, for example, narrates the tragedy of Charles Stull, a deaf and mute man from Philadelphia who decided to cross the Oregon Trail, alone and on foot, during the peak emigration year of 1852. Stull died of cholera at Castle Creek, just west of Ash Hollow. He was found by the members of a passing wagon train, who examined his body and found $2.75 in his pockets, along with a certificate attesting to his graduation from the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf and Dumb in Philadelphia. I learned from Brown’s account how crowded the trail was that year, and new details about the cholera plagues. Brown also portrayed how early-nineteenth-century educators and philanthropists founded schools for the deaf and circulated beautifully illustrated pamphlets on sign language. Stull was an exemplary product of that era. He was one of the first students at the Philadelphia school for the deaf, and he and his brother, an engraver, published one of the first sign-language manuals, an illustrated broadsheet titled An Alphabet for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb. The

In 1857, to encourage continued settlement of the West, Congress passed the Pacific Wagon Road Act, which among other improvements to the trail called for the surveying of a shorter route to Idaho across the bottom of the Wind Rivers and the forested Bridger-Teton wilderness to the west. Frederick W. Lander, a hotheaded but experienced explorer and engineer, was assigned the job. He made Burnt Ranch the trailhead and main supply depot for the trail-building job, which became one of the largest government-financed projects of the nineteenth century. Lander hired hundreds of workers from the new Mormon settlement at Salt Lake and supplied the enterprise with large mule-team caravans that ferried provisions and equipment from U.S. Army depots in Nebraska and eastern Wyoming. “With crowds of laborers hauling wood, erecting buildings and tending stock,” writes historian Todd Guenther, “the area was a beehive of activity.” The engineers, logging crews, and workers quickly hacked out what became known as the Lander Cutoff, which saved more than sixty miles, almost a week’s travel, across the mountains. In places, the Lander Cutoff was a steep up-and-down ride, but the route offered cooler, high terrain and plentiful water, an advantage over the scorching desert of the main ruts to the south. Eventually an estimated 100,000 pioneers took this route, and the 230-mile Lander Cutoff was considered an engineering marvel of its time. This

something

Their era was ending when Jim Clyman got to Independence in ’44 and found Bill Sublette, who had first taken wagons up the Platte Valley in 1830, now taking invalids to Brown’s Hole for a summer’s outing. It was twenty-one years since Jim had first gone up the Missouri, forty years since Lewis and Clark wintered at the Mandan villages, thirty-three years since Wilson Hunt led the Astorians westward, twenty years since Clyman with Smith and Fitzpatrick crossed South Pass, eighteen years since Ashley, in the Wasatch Mountains, sold his fur company to Smith, Sublette, and Jackson. Thirty-two years ago Robert McKnight had been imprisoned by the Spanish for taking goods to Santa Fe. Twenty-three years ago William Becknell had defied the prohibition and returned from Santa Fe in triumph. Eighteen years ago the Patties had got to San Diego by the Gila route and Jed Smith had blazed the desert trail to San Bernardino Valley; fourteen years ago Ewing Young, with Kit Carson, had come over the San Bernardino Mountains, making for the San Joaquin. There had been a trading post at the mouth of Laramie Creek for just ten years. Bent’s Fort was fifteen years old. Now the streams were trapped out, and even if beaver should come back, the price of plews would never rise again. There were two or three thousand Americans in Oregon, a couple of hundred in California, and in Independence hundreds of wagons were yoking up. Bill Sublette and Black Harris were guiding movers. Carson and Fitzpatrick were completing the education of John Charles Frémont. Forty years since Lewis and Clark. Think back to that blank paper with some names sketched in, the Wind River peaks, the Tetons, the Picketwire River, the Siskidee, names which, mostly, the mountain men sketched in — something under a million square miles, the fundamental watershed, a thousand mountain men scalped in this wilderness, the deserts crossed, the trails blazed and packed down, the mountains made known, the caravans carrying freight to Santa Fe, Bill Bowen selling his place to go to Oregon, half a dozen wagonwrights setting up at Independence … and, far off, like a fly buzzing against a screen, Joe Meek’s cousin, Mr. Polk, preparing war. Whose country was it? III Pillar of Cloud ALL through February Congress debated the resolution to terminate the joint occupancy of Oregon, and by its deliberation, Polk thought, informed the British that we were irresolute.

Fear was just a deceptive veil obscuring the unknown.

consigning

It was an epochal moment for western migration, and few Americans who read about the women summiting South Pass failed to grasp the symbolism of their timing. It was July 4, 1836. The first white women had crossed the Rockies on Independence Day.

Even more beautiful than the land that we passed, or the months spent camping on the plains, was learning to live with uncertainty.

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.

boss,

Neither made any further comment.  Wyatt stared disbelievingly at Kate. Thankfully, he didn't say anything. But she

Isn’t the essence of adventure, be it big or small, the very idea that we might fail? Isn’t it the tension that gives meaning to a story, the obstacles that steel us for the journey of life?

Welcome to the Pacific Crest Trail. Sometimes it was your friend, sometimes your adversary, but always it was a mystery.

wagon trains. Today, the West is still full of such places, creating an interesting political irony. Some of the most conservative, red-state bastions in America—Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho—are the most park-rich states of all, with rodeo corrals, state fairgrounds, and free or inexpensive municipal campgrounds nearly everywhere. Untold millions in tax dollars were spent to build these national assets, and millions of dollars of public funds are spent every year to maintain them. The public corrals and parks measurably improve the quality of life and the local economies. But this region is also the Tea Party belt, where the central ideological pretense of the day is that government is the enemy and that every penny of taxes collected is a political crime.

immediately forthcoming. Sheridan did all he could to meet the treaty obligations. "An abundant supply of rations is usually effective to keep matters quiet in such cases," he wrote in his Memoirs, "so I fed them pretty freely." The Indians had food in any case, for the buffalo still roamed the plains, despite the herds killed by Cody and other professional hunters. The Indians themselves were responsible for some of the slaughter inflicted on the buffalo. On occasion they would stampede a herd over a cliff, to pile up in heaps of meat. A German visitor to the plains in 1853, Baron Mollhausen, described the typical Indian buffalo hunt: "The buffalo has many enemies, but the most dangerous is still the Indian who has all manner of wily tricks. Buffalo hunting for the Indian is a necessity; but it is also his favorite pastime. Life holds no higher pleasure than to mount one of the handy, patient little ponies ... and gallop into a herd dealing death and destruction. Everything which might interfere with the movements of man or horse is flung away. Clothing and saddle are cast aside; all the rider retains is a big leather strap ... which is fastened around the pony's neck and allowed to trail behind. This trailrope acts as a bridle, and as a life-line too, for recapturing the horse should its rider be dismounted. In his left hand the hunter carries his bow and as many arrows as he can hold; in his right a whip with which he belabors his beast without pity. Indian ponies are trained to gallop close alongside the buffalo, providing an easy shot; the instant the bow twangs the pony instinctively dodges to escape the buffalo's horns, and approaches another victim. Thus the hunt continues until his pony's exhaustion warns the hunter to desist." Buffalo Bill often followed the Indian's hunting tactics closely, riding in near his target, bareback and with only a bridle to control his mount. Originally the several species of bison ranged from the Great Slave Lake in Canada to the Chihuahua in Mexico; they were also found in northern Nevada and eastern Oregon. Sometimes in pre-Columbian days they wandered into the grasslands of Kentucky, Tennessee, and even as far east as Ohio. A few may even have migrated as far as the shores of Lake

the mountains with their purpling canyons and glittering snow peaks were a book to which there was no end. The beauty of the hills was a sermon, the whispering trees a prayer, the mountain streams songs of gladness and hymns of peace. The forest was his temple, and there he worshiped.

until

Now I knew a little bit more about how the pioneers felt as they embarked for the West. It was my jumping-off time and I was getting jacked around by the outfitters. •

Ninety percent would arrive safely. According to historians, a best guess is that about one percent, 1,000 of the immigrants, were killed by Indians, which consigns the remaining 9,000 fatalities to accident and disease.

Is that all you want, Paul?"  "No, it's not.  I would also like some hot sex twice a week, and meat and potatoes on Wednesday would be really nice," he said, chuckling at this own boldness.  She made him feel confident.  He liked that.  "You make it sound so simple," she said to him. 

opened the conference room door and nearly shoved the old lady inside.  "Jesus hold my hand and build a fence! If my hands are busy in your Glory I can't go to Hell for killing that old woman!" 

Jake eyed the fire, remembering what Gene Bell had told him about attracting the Thunderbird. He thought about going over to say something, but quickly changed his mind. It would be just another reason for the older boys to tease him about flying creatures and make-believe. In fact, they would be right to tease, because Jake believed that the Thunderbird might be his only chance of a proper pioneering adventure on the boring Oregon Trail. Thinking about the Thunderbird made Jake Polson feel a little bit like his hero Julius Greengrass, and that had to be a good thing.

himself

Cody was a classic résumé-bloater, a braggart impresario who prospered by exploiting the gullibility of the American people, most of whom are so poorly read, so bamboozled by religion and the sensationalist, mogul-worshipping press, and so desperate for heroes, that they’ll believe almost anything that a grand bullshitter like Cody shovels out.

The sun lost its heat and wore down to the western horizon, where it changed from white to gold and rested like a huge ball about to roll on its golden shadows down the

This is the only place in the whole Rocky Mountain front where you can go from the Great Plains to the summit of the mountains without snaking your way up a mountain face or going through a tunnel. This one feature had more to do with the building of the West than any other factor. I don’t diminish the importance of the Oregon Trail, but here you had everything going for you. This point hasn’t been made before.

party

an inReach device. It clipped on my chest strap just as my Garmin Oregon had done, and the inReach had an even better GPS map with the CDT already indicated on it. Not just replacing my older GPS, it would record my progress in real time to anyone to whom I gave the connecting information. Every 10 minutes a little dot recorded my location. My children could see what their mother was doing, and where she was. In a macabre sense, they would know how to find the body. In a more hopeful sense, I could press the SOS button, and help would come no matter where I was in the world. I hoped neither of those uses would ever be necessary. But I would carry the device for a GPS, and as a concession to old age and safety. The inReach also had the capability for limited two-way communication, which turned out to be very helpful for RockStar supporting me.

I write these last lines on Sauvie's Island - the Wappatto of the Indians - sitting upon the bank of the river, beneath the gnarled and ancient cottonwood that still marks the spot where the old Columbia trail led up from the water to the interior of the island. Stately and beautiful are the far snow-peaks and the sweeping forest. The woods are rich in the colors of an Oregon autumn. The white wappatto blooms along the marshes, its roots ungathered, the dusky hands that once reaped the harvest long crumbled into dust. Blue and majestic in the sunlight flows the Columbia, river of many names -- the Wauna and the Wemath of the Indians, the St. Roque of the Spaniards, the Oregon of poetry -- always vast and grand, always flowing placidly to the sea. Steamboats of the present; batteaux of the fur traders; ships, Grey's and Vancouver's, of discovery; Indian canoes of the old unknown time -- the stately river has seen them all come and go, and yet holds its way past forest and promontory, still beautiful and unchanging. Generation after generation, daring hunter, ardent discoverer, silent Indian -- all the shadowy peoples of the past have sailed its waters as we sail them, have lived perplexed and haunted by mystery as we live, have gone out into the Great Darkness with hearts full of wistful doubt and questioning, as we go; and still the river holds its course, bright, beautiful, inscrutable. It stays; we go. It there anything beyond the darkness into which generation follows generation and race follows race? Surely there is an after-life, where light and peace shall come to all who, however defeated, have tried to be true and loyal; where the burden shall be lifted and the heartache shall cease; where all the love and hope that slipped away from us here shall be given back to us again, and given back forever Via crucis, via lucis.

In fact, we often judge ourselves against the standards of our forebears. Great-grandma drove a munitions jeep in World War II. Uncle Bill fought in Vietnam. Great-great-aunt so-and-so rode across the prairie in a covered wagon and survived cholera three times on the Oregon Trail. What on earth would they think of us, knowing that we’re one broken shoelace away from a complete breakdown simply because we forgot that one of our kids had soccer practice Tuesday night at five?

I had never realized before just how tiring and dehydrating long exposure to the wind can be, but this made me feel closer to nature.