The Unsung Heroes of the West

With the taste of gold in the air, thousands of men went wild-goose-ing for bright and shiny dreams. One freighter (a truck-driver, basically, long-distance wagon-eer) remembered working the Bozeman Trail back then, when it was broad as a four-lane highway. He wasn't panning or picking, just hauling freight, tons of it. It's 1854. Just loads of traffic.

They'd pick up the goods at Fort Union, on the Missouri, roll those wagons up into North Dakota, aim west toward Helena and Ft. Benton and eventually Virginia City. People needed stuff, tons and tons of it, for both moving and staying. Before the railroad had tracks, hauling freight by wagon was big business, really big business. There was a time his boss got himself a contract to haul far more stuff--two outfits, sixty wagons--than he'd had horsepower to accomplish.

Wasn't horsepower he had either--was ox-power. 

Now when it comes to oxen, I'm an idiot. I had no idea that an ox was simply a bull who'd lost his hardware. I honestly considered oxen--I didn't grow up with them--a whole different species; somewhere in the Kansas sandhills maybe, there must have been huge oxen ranches, Mommys and Daddys and the kids frolicking in the meadow beside the barn. Oxen!--took hundreds, even thousands to run the plains.

An oxen ranch? Total idiocy. 

They're just bulls is all, just bulls without the drama. Hundreds of thousands of oxen. Just so happens I live in an Iowa county heavy-laden with cattle, 385 thousand to be exact, and I've never seen an ox. Never.

Seems to me that too many images we hold of the way west were set in place by TV Westerns, where horses--fiery and spirited--led all those wagon trains. I mean, imagine yourself in Independence, MO, or even Sioux City in the 1850s, looking over outfits for the big drive west. In one corner, six handsome, broad-backed horses with full manes. In another corner, six bloated oxen, looking, well, bovine, muscle-bound as the lifters in your gym who've spent way too much time there. Hardly moving--you got to check for a pulse.

 

Historians claim 1/2 to 3/4 of the thousands of "overlanders" on their way west in the 1850s used a team of oxen. That big wagon train I mentioned ended up ninety wagons long, each powered by six yokes of oxen, plus an extra thirty head walking along, four-legged spare tires. Do the math, but it seems to me that this outfit alone left for the goldfields with 1100 oxen. And look as I might, I couldn't find you one today.

And more. That whole outfit ran behind another train forty wagons long, which really adds up--in total, 130 wagons, 150 men, 1600 oxen, and a whole lot of fertilizer.

Oxen?--meh. They just don't turn the crank much, and there had to be hundreds of thousands of the big, sweethearts, amiable as kittens.

 

They're freighters that could well have made house pets. The Oregon Trail ran full of oxen--they were far easier to manage than horses, and they didn't attract a crowd. The warriors along the Trail never hit the warpath for a team of oxen. Slower maybe, sure, but sweeter, and they don't attract a crowd. 

And then there's this. On the trail, the families they pulled along grew to be buddies. The kids fell in love with their oxen, the way cat people fall in love with their calicos, and when all that ox-power ran out of gas, some families would pull over, locate some remote outback with lush grass, and just hole up a couple of days, maybe a week, nursing their big boy buddies. Spend a bit of a holiday maybe. 

But if the health of those big guys didn't improve, they'd simply have to be abandoned, which, as you can imagine, did not happen without abundant tears. Sometimes--go ahead and grab the Kleenex--those abandoned oxen would do their best to follow the family until, alas, they could go no farther and started bawling out their death songs.

Oxen are not some exotic breed; they're just doctored bulls. They were big and they were slow but they were workable. They hauled thousands of people west before the railroad. They were, as lots of people call them, the unsung heroes of the west.