Ah! The pioneers! Those sturdy individualists (though they traveled en mass), representing the American spirit which constantly seeks that which is beyond the horizon, greener pastures, freedom from old troubles.
Of course, they slaughtered the once gigantic herds of bison nearly to extinction. They also wildly overreacted to every story of supposedly hostile indigenous people who, in fact, were already in decline because of diseases like cholera that earlier migrants brought with them from the east.
We European Americans have a love-hate relationship with our history. We both romanticize and revile our ancestors, celebrating their hardy bravery while meekly apologizing for their excesses.
As a Nebraskan, I literally grew up on the Oregon Trail, the route taken by American migrants from Missouri to Oregon before planes, highways, or railroads. I was reared on stories about travelers so exhausted by months of boring, flat land that they happily greeted the silhouettes of geographically unique Chimney Rock, Jail House and Court House Rocks. The sculptures of earth climaxed at Scotts Bluff, considered the gateway to the Rocky Mountains and the origin of the name of my home town, Scottsbluff.
What prompts this reminiscing about the place of my roots?
I'm reading a really great book: The Oregon Trail, by Rinker Buck, who with his brother, spent a summer in a covered wagon, tracing as closely as possible, the Oregon Trail. Both in their 60's, the men relived the dangers of flooding, wind, fatigue, and wagon accidents suffered by those migrants of yore. They also encountered modern hazards such as highways, barbed wire fences, cattle guards, and obnoxious tourists in obscenely huge motor homes who frightened the mules as they zoomed up along side to take pictures out the window as they passed.
The Buck boys also enjoyed the hospitality of modern ranchers, farmers, and communities who provided food, corrals for the mules to rest in, and facilities to service and repair the wagon.
I highly recommend this book. Buck is enchanted by the west but writes realistically without sentimentalism. This is not a child's book about the Oregon Trail. Buck makes free use of the "F" word, for example.
It's no small matter to me that he speaks highly of Western Nebraska. I loved reading about the comfortable pair of shoes purchased at the Scottsbluff WalMart. I can picture exactly the museum in Gering where he lost an entire afternoon caught up in history displays.
There is one fact which still jars me in spite of all my OT study through the years.
When I visited the Oregon state capitol in Salem, I was stunned to see many paintings and murals depicting, yes, the Oregon Trail. There were even some scenes of Nebraska.
The fact is, in all my childhood immersion into Oregon Trail history, countless field trips to pioneer Rebecca Winter's grave and the visitor's center at Scotts Bluff National Monument, it never once occurred to me that Nebraska wasn't the end point of the Oregon Trail. When I was a kid, the myth was that the pioneers set out from the east for a better life and (naturally) settled in Nebraska. The story always ended there. I was in my 20s before I realized that the Oregon Trail was called the Oregon Trail because it went all the way to Oregon. It's a little like living in Colorado and being surprised to learn that other states have beautiful mountains too. Oregon, for instance.
I'm not exactly disillusioned, but I had to come to the grips with the fact that a lot of those people settled in Nebraska because they were just too tired to go on. It took a couple of generations for my parents to finally reach Oregon on vacation, in their motor home.
