Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail

<h3>REVIVING OLD MEMORIES OF THE TRAIL</h3> <div class='unindent'><span class="smcap">The</span> sight of Sweetwater River, twenty miles out from South Pass, revived many pleasant memories and some that were sad. I could remember the sparkling, clear water, the green skirt of undergrowth along the banks, and the restful camps, as we trudged along up the stream so many years ago. And now I saw the same channel, the same hills, and apparently the same waters swiftly passing. But where were the camp fires? Where was the herd of gaunt cattle? Where the sound of the din of bells? The hallooing for lost children? Or the little groups off on the hillside to bury the dead? All were gone.</div> <p>An oppressive silence prevailed as we drove to the river and pitched our camp within a few feet of the bank, where we could hear the rippling waters passing and see the fish leaping in the eddies. We had our choice of a camping place just by the skirt of a refreshing green<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_196" id="Page_196"></SPAN></span> brush with an opening to give full view of the river. It had not been so fifty-four years before, with hundreds of camps ahead of you. The traveler then had to take what he could get, and in many cases that was a place far back from the water and removed from other conveniences.</p> <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/illus-206.jpg" width-obs="500" height-obs="308" alt="Devil&#39;s Gate, on the Sweetwater River, one of the many beautiful streams in the uplands of Wyoming. The pioneer trail followed the course of this river." title="" /> <div class="attrib">United States Geological Survey</div> <span class="caption">Devil&#39;s Gate, on the Sweetwater River, one of the many beautiful streams in the uplands of Wyoming. The pioneer trail followed the course of this river.</span></div> <p>The sight and smell of carrion, so common in camping places during that first journey, also were gone. No bleached bones, even, showed where the exhausted dumb brute had died. The graves of the dead pioneers had all been leveled by the hoofs of stock and the lapse of time.</p> <p>The country remains as it was in '52. There the trail is to be seen miles and miles ahead, worn bare and deep, with but one narrow track where there used to be a dozen, and with the beaten path that vegetation has not yet recovered from the scourge of passing hoofs and tires of wagons years ago.</p> <p>As in 1852, when the summit was passed I felt that<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_197" id="Page_197"></SPAN></span> my task was much more than half done, though half the distance was scarcely compassed.</p> <p>On June 30, at about ten o'clock, we encountered a large number of big flies that ran the cattle nearly wild. I stood on the wagon tongue for miles to reach them with the whipstock. The cattle were so excited that we did not stop at noon, but drove on. By half-past two we camped at a farmhouse, the Split Rock post office, the first we had found in a hundred miles of travel since leaving Pacific Springs.</p> <p>The Devil's Gate, a few miles distant, is one of the two best-known landmarks on the trail. Here, as at Split Rock, the mountain seems to have been split apart, leaving an opening a few rods wide, through which the Sweetwater River pours in a veritable torrent. The river first approaches to within a few hundred feet of the gap, then suddenly curves away from it, and after winding through the valley for half a mile or so, a quarter of a mile away, it takes a straight shoot and makes the plunge through the canyon. Those who have had the impression that the emigrants drove their teams through this gap are mistaken, for it's a feat no mortal man has done or can do, any more than he could drive up the falls of the Niagara.</p> <p>This year, on my 1906 trip, I did clamber through on the left bank, over boulders head high, under shelving rocks. I ate some ripe gooseberries from the bushes growing on the border of the river, and plucked some beautiful wild roses, wondering the while why those wild roses grew where nobody would see them.</p> <p>The gap through the mountains looked familiar as I spied it from the distance, but the roadbed to the right I had forgotten. I longed to see this place; for here, somewhere under the sands, lies all that was mortal of my brother, Clark Meeker, drowned in the Sweetwater in 1854.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_198" id="Page_198"></SPAN></span></p> <div class="figleft"> <ANTIMG src="images/illus-208.jpg" width-obs="264" height-obs="350" alt="Devil&#39;s Gate, on the Sweetwater River, one of the famous landmarks on the old trail." title="" /> <div class="attrib">United States Geological Survey</div> <span class="caption">Devil&#39;s Gate, on the Sweetwater River, one of the famous landmarks on the old trail.</span></div> <p>Independence Rock is the other most famous landmark. We drove over to the Rock, a distance of six miles from the Devil's Gate, and camped at ten o'clock for the day. This famous boulder covers about thirty acres. We groped our way among the inscriptions, to find some of them nearly obliterated and many legible only in part. We walked all the way around the stone, nearly a mile. The huge rock is of irregular shape, and it is more than a hundred feet high, the walls being so precipitous that ascent to the top is possible in only two places.</p> <p>Unfortunately, we could not find Fremont's inscription. Of this inscription Fremont writes in his journal of the year 1842: "August 23. Yesterday evening we reached our encampment at Rock Independence, where I took some astronomical observations. Here, not unmindful of the custom of early travelers and explorers in our country, I engraved on this rock of the Far West a symbol of the Christian faith. Among the thickly inscribed names, I made on the hard granite the impression of a large cross. It stands amidst the names of many who have long since found their way to the grave and for whom the huge rock is a giant gravestone."</p> <p>On Independence Day, 1906, we left Independence Rock.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_199" id="Page_199"></SPAN></span> Our noon stop was on Fish Creek, eleven miles away. The next night we camped on the North Platte River. Fifty-four years before, I had left the old stream about fifteen miles below here on my way to the West.</p> <p>Next day, while nooning several miles out from Casper, we heard the whistle of a locomotive. It was the first we had heard for nearly three hundred miles. As soon as lunch was over, I left the wagon and walked to Casper ahead of the team to select a camping ground, secure feed, and get the mail.</p> <p>A special meeting of the Commercial Club of Casper was held that evening, and I laid the matter of building a monument before the members. They resolved to build one, opened the subscription at once, and appointed a committee to carry the work forward. Since then a monument twenty-five feet high has been erected at a cost of fifteen hundred dollars.</p> <p>Glen Rock is a small village, but the ladies there met and resolved they would have "as nice a monument as Casper's." One enthusiastic lady said, "We will inscribe it ourselves, if no stonecutter can be had."</p> <p>At Douglas also an earnest, well-organized effort to erect the monument was well in hand before we drove out of town.</p> <p>As we journeyed on down the Platte, we passed thrifty ranches and thriving little towns. It was haying time, and the mowers were busy cutting alfalfa. The hay was being stacked. Generous ranchers invited us to help ourselves to their garden stuff. All along the way was a spirit of good cheer and hearty welcome.</p> <p>Fort Laramie brings a flood of reminiscences to the western pioneer and his children. This old post, first a trappers' stockade, then in 1849 a soldiers' encampment, stood at the end of the Black Hills and at the edge<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_200" id="Page_200"></SPAN></span> of the Plains. Here the Laramie River and the Platte meet.</p> <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/illus-210.jpg" width-obs="500" height-obs="289" alt="The desert before irrigation." title="" /> <div class="attrib">Brown Bros.</div> <span class="caption">The desert before irrigation.</span></div> <p>The fort was a halfway station on the trail. From the time we crossed the Missouri in May, 1852, until we reached the old fort, no place name was so constantly in the minds of the emigrants as that of Fort Laramie. Here, in '52, we eagerly looked for letters that never came. Perhaps our friends and relatives had not written; perhaps they had written, but the letters were lost or sidetracked somewhere in "the States." As for hearing from home, for that we had to wait patiently until the long journey should end; then a missive might reach us by way of the Isthmus, or maybe by sailing vessel around Cape Horn.</p> <p>There is no vestige of the old traders' camp or the first United States fort left. The new fort&mdash;not a fort, but an encampment&mdash;covers a space of thirty or forty acres, with all sorts of buildings and ruins. One of the old barracks, three hundred feet long, was in good preservation in 1906, being utilized by the owner, Joseph Wilde, for a store, post<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_201" id="Page_201"></SPAN></span> office, hotel, and residence. The guard house with its grim iron door and twenty-inch concrete walls is also fairly well preserved. One frame building of two stories, we were told, was transported by ox team from Kansas City at a cost of one hundred dollars a ton. The old place is crumbling away, slowly disappearing with the memories of the past.</p> <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/illus-211.jpg" width-obs="500" height-obs="290" alt="The desert after irrigation." title="" /> <div class="attrib">Brown Bros.</div> <span class="caption">The desert after irrigation.</span></div> <p>From Fort Laramie onward into western Nebraska we passed through a succession of thriving cities. The Platte has been turned to splendid service through the process of irrigation. Great canals lead its life-giving waters out to the thirsty plains that now "blossom as the rose." Rich fields of grain and hay and beets cover the valley. Great sugar factories, railroads, business blocks, and fine homes tell of the prosperity that has leaped out of the parched plains we trailed across.</p> <p>Scott's Bluff, however, is one of the old landmarks that has not changed. It still looms up as of old on the south side of the river about eight hundred feet above the trail.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_202" id="Page_202"></SPAN></span> The origin of the name, Scott's Bluff, is not definitely known. Tradition says: "A trapper named Scott, while returning to the States, was robbed and stripped by the Indians. He crawled to these Bluffs and there famished. His bones were afterwards found and buried." These quoted words were written by a passing emigrant on the spot, June 11, 1852. Another version of the tale is that Scott fell sick and was abandoned by his traveling companions. After having crawled almost forty miles, he finally died near the bluff that bears his name. This occurred prior to 1830.</p> <p>From the bluff we drove as directly as possible to a historic grave, two miles out from the town and on the railroad right of way. In this grave lies a pioneer mother who died August 15, 1852, nearly six weeks after I had passed over the ground. Some thoughtful friend had marked her grave by standing a wagon tire upright in it. But for this, the grave, like thousands and thousands of others, would have passed out of sight and mind.</p> <p>The tire bore this simple inscription: "Rebecca Winters, aged 50 years." The hoofs of stock tramped the sunken grave and trod it into dust, but the arch of the tire remained to defy the strength of thoughtless hands that would have removed it.</p> <p>Finally the railroad surveyors came along. They might have run the track over the lonely grave but for the thoughtfulness of the man who wielded the compass. He changed the line, that the resting place of the pioneer mother should not be disturbed, and the grave was protected and enclosed.</p> <p>The railroad officials did more. They telegraphed word of the finding of this grave to their representative in Salt Lake City. He gave the story to the press; the descendants of the pioneer mother read it, and they provided a monument, lovingly inscribed, to mark the spot.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_203" id="Page_203"></SPAN></span></p> <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/illus-213.jpg" width-obs="500" height-obs="269" alt="Chimney Rock, an old sentinel on the trail in western Nebraska." title="" /> <div class="attrib">United States Geological Survey</div> <span class="caption">Chimney Rock, an old sentinel on the trail in western Nebraska.</span></div> <p>About twenty miles from Scott's Bluff stands old Chimney Rock. It is a curious freak of nature, and a famous landmark on the trail. It covers perhaps twelve acres, and rises coneshaped for two hundred feet to the base of the spire-like rock, the "chimney," that rests upon it and rises a full hundred feet more.</p> <p>A local story runs that an army officer trained a cannon on this spire, shot off about thirty feet from the top, and for this was court-martialed and dishonorably discharged from the army. I could get no definite confirmation of the story, though it was repeated again and again. It seems incredible that an intelligent man would do such an act, and if he did it, he deserved severe punishment.</p> <p>It is saddening to think of the many places where equally stupid things have been done to natural wonders. Coming through Idaho, I had noticed that at Soda Springs the hand of the vandal had been at work. That interesting phenomenon, Steamboat Spring, the wonderment of all of us in 1852, with its intermittent spouting, had been tampered with and had ceased to act.</p> <hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_204" id="Page_204"></SPAN></span></p> <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/illus-214.jpg" width-obs="500" height-obs="323" alt="Going up the steep, rocky sides of Little Canyon." title="" /> <span class="caption">Going up the steep, rocky sides of Little Canyon.</span></div> <h2>CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN</h2> <div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />