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November 2006
Life on the Trail
Dear Friends,
A few years ago, Donna and I had the opportunity to visit Chimney Rock and to stay in the local community, Bayard, that was established in the shadow of this great American landmark. While on this trip, we took a three-hour horse-drawn wagon ride to the base of Chimney Rock.
It was great seeing the landmark up close, but the ride on the wagon, pulled by the horse team of "Chip" and "Sally", was the real treat. Bumping along in the wagon, we were told by Murph, our wagonmaster, that most emigrants traversing the Oregon, California and Morman trails in the mid-1800’s, didn’t ride in the wagons. They kept all of their worldly belongings and enough foodstuffs for six months in the wagon. So most of the families actually walked the 2000-mile trek.
Another treat while we were on that ride was seeing up close, actual wagon ruts of the Oregon Trail. To think about the hundreds of thousands of emigrants that made the journey West using that road 150 years earlier, is pretty humbling.
Grand Island historian, Dale Clark, visited with students about the Oregon Trail at a program at St. Rose School a couple of weeks ago during a Nebraska Humanities Council program. Our daughter enjoyed the program, but the thing she recalled to us with dismay, was the fact that Oregon Trail families had to burn dried buffalo dung for their supper campfires, because there wasn’t wood available on the Plains.
Lauren knows what a cow chip looks like, so she didn’t need to touch the buffalo chip Clark passed around the crowd of students to know what they looked like. But that particularly earthy story in Clark’s presentation brought home the idea to students that these families had hardships along the way, and that they truly believed in their journey and were determined to carry it through.
When Donna and I were in Bayard, we were treated to be able to visit local historian, Gordon Howard, who founded the Oregon Trail Wagon Train and has done history programs across the Great Plains for years. Howard told us that the Oregon Trail families were tough. But he said the real "independent thinkers and entrepenuers" didn’t go on to Oregon, California or Salt Lake City. They stayed in Nebraska and started farms on the prairie or built shops to market wares to those traveling West.
According to Howard, the folks who stayed in Nebraska didn’t see it as a "Great American Desert", as explorer Stephen Long wrote, or as a place to get through on your way to someplace else, as the emigrants saw it or as modern day I-80 travelers might see it. The farmers and shopkeepers who stayed, saw it as a place they could call home. In my mind, that says something, too, for our ancestors who settled around here.
W.K. Kellogg Foundation
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