The Way West

You wonder sometimes how many of them understood how many of them wouldn't make it. Of the 200,000 who left jumping off places like Independence, MO, a tenth never saw Oregon. The trip took five months generally and had to have long periods of utter boredom. And death. Some drank milk from cows who'd eaten poisonous plants. Typhoid got hundreds, so did the Lakota, the Kiowa, the Pawnee, and more. Lots of what happened wasn't pretty.

The tribes and bands who saw all those white folks crawling along like a never-ending caterpillar through their land were slack-jawed at the never-ending stream--and fearful for themselves. Many Native people believed the companies of cavalry who came out to the Plains had arrived to protect Indian land, theirs by treaty. They felt assaulted by the endless wagon trains, were sure the bluecoats had come to protect them from the swarm moving through what they believed, by treaty, was their world.

Nearly 3000 Mormons went west in wagon trains and those famous handcarts their dedicated fathers pulled along the entire route themselves. The Mormon Trail isn't all that far south of here, the Mormon story a significant chapter of Iowa history.  What they did is really inconceivable today.

Last week, in Council Grove, Kansas, I asked a very helpful lady in the Chamber of Commerce office where we could find the tracks of the wagon trains that left Council Grove along the Sante Fe Trail to New Mexico. I'd seen those tracks advertised, on-line somewhere, one of a dozen or so must-sees in a little prairie town so old it was a beehive long before the Civil War.

She kind of rolled her eyes. Well, she said, there's really not much to see because, after all, there were so many wagons leaving all at once that there's no single track or anything, and the grass covers it all up in the summer anyway. She said if I wanted to see them, I could best do it in winter and by airplane. Last week was not winter, believe me. The tracks around Council Grove weren't like places in Nebraska where the wagons left permanent gouges in the rocks, she told us. "Like to swim?" she asked.

It was hot enough to roast chestnuts without a open fire, so we walked across Main and ate fried chicken at a restaurant that has served up grub since Sam Hays, Daniel Boone's grandson, did it first in 1857. The chicken was three stars maybe, but the place was a keeper, longest continuously operating restaurant west of the Mississippi. 

There were so many tracks because there were so many westerners bound for new start in a move that is quintessentially American. On the Sante Fe Trail, after Council Grove, Kansas, there wasn't much at all to speak of, not much but a vision.

Except if you were Native. 

When I was a boy, "the Western" was in its prime. Maybe my own early immersion is why I stay captivated. The very first book I ever bought was about Native American tribes, and I wasn't much of a reader. Get me out there in the open spaces, and I'm still a kid myself, looking for a dream.

There were millions, really, if you count the wagon train Pella residents took out here in 1870, to Orange City, to the far corner of the state, or the five wagons that followed what must have been a well-worn track at the same time to a spot of open country just a few miles north and west, a settlement that became a town named after the county, Sioux Center. Thousands never intended to get to Oregon or New Mexico or California. 

But they were all in covered wagons chocked full of flour and sugar and coffee and household goods, maybe even an pump organ or a fancy clock, something of their own or their heritage. A few of those westerners actually rode. Most of them walked, even to New Mexico or Oregon. Wasn't just a 10K.

It's simply an amazing story in every way--tragedy, comedy, history; but then America is.