On the Back Roads (22 page)

“When I'm alone in the store, surrounded by things of the Carter family, I think about them. It is a warm feeling to still be a part of it, even a hundred years later.” At age twenty, Amber Aimone is a fort docent. The docents all wear period clothes and carry the title of “living historians.” Her presence gives personal credibility to an important period of Fort Bridger's existence. Judge Carter was her great-uncle.

On the way back to the campground, I stopped at Urie Crossroads for a buffalo burger. The only other customer in the restaurant was a local lady who knew about buffalo.

“Oh, buffalo meat is leaner,” she said. “That's why they say it is better for you than beef. I suspect tourists try it just because it's different. You're a tourist, right? You're eating it.”

“Well, I'm eating it, but mostly because I'm hungry.”

“So?” She paused, “What do you think?

“I think once it's in a hamburger bun and covered with ketchup, I can't tell the difference.”

“The difference is, it costs more.”

She lives near Fort Bridger, not far from Amber Aimone. “There's a lot of Aimones on the old county road where I live. So many, in fact, they are going to name the road after them. It was not an simple decision,” she explained. “They came out from the county office and counted the Aimones and the Taylors who also live along there. It took two days, with long coffee breaks. I watched them. They found more Aimones than Taylors, I guess. Naming a road by counting noses. That's got to be the most stupid way to spend county money.”

“What if they had named it for you?”

“Oh, that's different. Money well spent!” she laughed.

F
our months ago, I sat at a lone campsite in the desert with an inspiring lady named Emmy. Spring flowers had made that southern California desert into a mosaic of yellow and blue. Color was everywhere that day. Talking mostly about her travels, Emmy asked me if I had seen the ruts left by the wagons on the Oregon Trail. I told her that I had not. “You will,” Emmy assured me. “The roads you travel will lead you right to them.”

Emmy was right.

“Indelible records,” they call them up here, the tracks that steel-rimmed wagon wheels made 150 years ago. They show themselves as ruts and shallow swales in the grasslands of the prairie and the open desert, which is scattered with the same sagebrush and greasewood that has grown here for centuries. To the east, in mounds of sandstone around Guernsey, Wyoming, they are cut so deep in solid rock they defy logic. Obviously not created by nature, I could believe them being chipped out with a jackhammer and maybe a little dynamite. But wagon wheels? Even a million of them? It seems impossible.

Having left Lyman this morning, I headed eastbound on Highway 28 out of Farson. The highway roughly parallels the Oregon Trail as far as South Pass, a distance of forty miles.

The Oregon Trail enters Wyoming from Nebraska eighty miles north of Cheyenne and follows the Platte River west as far as it goes across the state. Southwest of Casper, it picks up the Sweetwater River and tracks it to the Continental Divide at South Pass. Then it heads southwest toward Utah, but turns north just short of the state line at Fort Bridger and goes on into Idaho.

Actually, it is three trails in one through here: the Oregon, Mormon, and California Trails. Whatever an emigrant's destination west of the Rockies—except for the far Southwest—there was only one way over those mountains. That was South Pass, with its easy gradients for wagons. This wide saddle across the Continental Divide made this massive migration possible. Were it not for the thousands of Americans who crossed through South Pass in the mid-1800s, the United States would very likely have a different shape today.

This was an epic migration. Half a million people walked this trail.
Walked
is certainly the word. Little kids, pregnant women, everybody. Some did it barefoot. Although most of them traveled in small groups of family and friends, the entire trail was a rolling community during the summer days between 1847 and 1855.

By 1850, with the California gold rush at its peak, the trail became one long train of wagons and livestock that moved all day. A checkpoint traffic counter probably would have seen 50,000 wagons during a thirty-day period. Diaries of those who made the trek from the Missouri River to what is now Oregon tell of a string of wagons as far as they could see. The trail was easy to follow. No wagon master was needed. You just had to keep from eating the dust of the guy ahead.

I left the highway east of the Continent al Divide, dropping into a little valley and a long-abandoned mining town called South Pass City. The original town is well preserved and operated by the state as a historic site.

Ironically, thousands stampeded right by here, inflamed with Cali forma gold fever in the wake of the gold strike at Sutters Mill in 1848. Little did they know that gold would be discovered right here in 1867, creating boomtowns like South Pass City. The guys who discovered this gold were a bunch of disappointed prospectors re turning home empty-handed from California.

But I was not here to talk gold. Luckily, I ran into Candy Moulton, a really neat lady who has lived all her forty-something years in Encampment, Wyoming. Candy is a fine journalist and a true Wyoming historian. She was here alone, taking pictures. Candy knows more about the Oregon Trail than most of us know about the streets we live on. She has written books about it and has crossed much of it over the past five years on vintage wagon trains.

“I don't do it as the pioneers did,” Candy said. “For the most part, I ride in the wagon. They walked. I wear Wranglers and occasionally a skirt. Pioneer women always wore dresses that tangled and snagged in the brush along the trail. Yet I have been fortunate to see the land exactly as they saw it.”

Candy and I found a shaded bench in front of the restored South Pass Hotel. We sat where the stagecoach once stopped. The hotel was built in 1868, long after the Oregon Trail was displaced by the railroad.

The smell of brewing coffee drifted our way from inside the wooden building.

“They really go for realism here.”

Candy laughed. “You think it's just for effect, some aroma-making machine created by Hollywood?”

Actually, a group of ladies was setting up inside to sell homemade pies, to raise money to restore at the site. The pies were ready, but not the coffee, I discovered.

Candy continued: “Sometimes it's necessary to mentally erase highways, roads, and power lines. But at other times, and particularly in sections of central and western Wyoming, that's not necessary. The covered wagon bumps over a landscape little changed, where the only road is the trail its elf.
Those are the places where the true trail experience happens, where the threads of the frontier have not unraveled.

“The greatest thrills are when something happens on the trail which might have happened exactly the same way, and in the same place 150 years ago. Like a wagon tipping over halfway up a steep hill, sleeping in a tent in the rain and feeling the water seep through your sleeping bag, slapping mosquitoes, dodging a rattlesnake, fighting wind, taking care of blisters on your feet, or waking up to find the temperature so low, the water is frozen in the bucket. That's all part of it.”

A couple of pie shoppers asked us for directions. We sent them inside the hotel.

“Enough of this busy city life,” Candy said, “let's go.” We hopped in her blue Subaru Outback and headed for South Pass. There we would find the actual Oregon Trail and the geographic marvel that made it possible.

At South Pass, the terrain was as gentle as a prairie. It was hard to believe that we were at 7,550 feet, standing at the pinnacle, the backbone of the North American continent.

The trail is obvious here. Equally obvious is how it was made. It is not a straight line, as Candy or I would create it, driving a vehicle across the land. The oxen pulling the wagons followed paths of least resistance. They stepped around things, not over them. Consequently, the trail is crooked, with no consistency as it wanders from side to side. We drove on it for a ways, long enough for me to appreciate that those who walked it had the right idea.

On the way back to South Pass City, I asked Candy about Indian attacks along the trail. She said that most emigrants never saw an Indian. Time and geography were their enemies, not Indians.

“When I hear or read about how the trail changed the West by pushing Indians from their lands, I am reminded that change is a part of life,” Candy reflected. “The very tribes that were displaced by the trail had earlier displaced other tribes. Even today, that continues.

“When they protest grazing or timber sales, today's environmental activists are affecting people whose fathers and
grandfathers claimed this territory and pioneered the West. The ranchers of recent generations are being moved off the land just as surely as the Indians of the mid-1850s were. In both cases, the movement was and is unfair and life-changing. It happened, or is happening, because someone believes he is right, which by a darn sight doesn't make it so.”

W
ho would have thought the whims of fashion—men's fashion at that—played a major role in the opening of the American West? That's what they say in Pinedale. Up here, high in the Wyoming Rockies at the headwaters of the Green River, they also say, “No more!” The West has opened far enough.

In the mid-1820s, mountain men wandered the outer and upper reaches of the West. Here, the less adventuresome drew the line. Only the skilled survivors went up these mountains. Or, more correctly, only they came down. Mountain Men were a loose band of trappers and fur traders. Here they sought to fill the world's insatiable appetite for beaver pelts. Among the boulevard dandies of New York, Paris, and London and smartly uniformed armies, the beaver hat ruled supreme. Bold loners of the frontier, mountain men preceded the missionaries, the cattlemen, the wagon masters, and the settlers. Not only did they open much of the Rocky Mountain West, they also planted American's firm claim to it. Eventually, a nation followed their solitary pathways to the western sea.

Still they come, almost two centuries later. They travel on dual-lane highways that are marked where to camp, sleep, eat, re fuel, and where to turn back in a winter snowstorm. Their reasons for coming are as plentiful as their numbers. With them come dreamed-of opportunities and nightmarish challenges for a small town like Pinedale.

“When we started the store in 1947, our customers were ranchers, our friends. Now they are tourists that pass through with the summer. That's OK, I guess, but where are we going from here?” Caryn Murdock Bing runs the Cowboy Shop. It smells of leather and stocks everything for the working and nonworking cowboy, plus anything wearable called Western.

She taught school in Wyoming for forty-three years. Her first school—one room, grades one through eight—was the one she loved the most. It was made of logs. “The kids and I scrubbed the wood floor. In the winter, which was most of the year, the kids would break a hole in the ice to get the water, then haul it up from the river.”

Like others I met in Pinedale, population 1,200, Caryn loves her hometown. Rolling ranch land to the south changes dramatically at the town limits. From here north is the rugged Bridger-Teton National Forest, the second largest in the United States outside Alaska. Some of its glacial lakes have granite bottoms deeper than 600 feet. Fifteen miles from town is Gannett Peak. At 13,804 feet, it's the highest in Wyoming.

At an elevation of 7,175 feet, Pinedale's winter days are hard and short and extend for eight months. Yet summers are gorgeous. Those summers, combined with extraordinary natural beauty, draw millions of people every year to Wyoming, the nation's ninth largest state but the least populated. It's the home of Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks, both a few hours' drive from here.

Pinedale's dilemma is as old as progress. How does a small town stay small when outsiders and newcomers want more from it? It's not like they don't have the money to pay for it. They do. Some here think too much.

“For a while here, if a rancher mumbled something about selling his spread, the next day he had an offer on it from California or somewhere. What private land there is around here, I think, is passing into fewer and fewer hands,” a clerk in the Coast to Coast Hardware told me. “And many don't live here but a few months of the year. Then they want a resident hunting license and get mad because I can't sell them one.”

Jill Straley runs a neat bookstore on Main Street. She explains it this way: “Absentee owners don't give back to the community. They might shop here, but there is more to being part of a place than buying groceries and renting videos.”

I walked across the town's grassy park to Pine Creek. Four boys were tot ally focused on what swims in it. What may or may not be happening elsewhere in Pinedale, or on the planet for that matter, was of no interest or concern to them. This was summer. In six weeks, it will be gone. Two were fishing with worms on hooks and two with sticks with forks attached.

“Got to be careful spearing bullheads,” one of the fork-fishermen said. He stood ankle-deep in rushing water that would complement a Sparkletts Water commercial. “If ya spear your foot, that hurts.”

“Ever happen?” I asked.

“No, but my brother poked his toe. Said it hurt so much he his lost the fish.”

I have always thought of Wyoming as a man's country, but women have a big influence here. Wyoming was the first state to give women the right to vote. It was also the first to elect a woman as governor. The mayor of Pinedale is a woman, as are two of the four people on the city council.