Excerpt from The Oregon Trail by Rinker Buck, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The Oregon Trail
1

I HAD KNOWN LONG BEFORE I rode a covered wagon to Oregon that naïveté was the mother of adventure. I just didn't understand how much of that I really had. Nicholas and I realized before we left Missouri with the mules that we would be the first wagon travelers in more than a century to make an authentic crossing of the Oregon Trail. But that was never the point for us. We pushed mules almost two thousand miles to learn something more important. Even more beautiful than the land that we passed, or the months spent camping on the plains, was learning to live with uncertainty.

The trip was my idea, and I fell into it in my usual barmy way. A few summers ago, while taking an afternoon off from a story I was working on in the Flint Hills of Kansas, I stopped on the road near a stout granite monument that marked a set of wheel ruts disappearing northwest across the plains.

Junction
of
Oregon Trail
with
Overland Trail
60 Rod S-E

Enchanted by the idea that I could step from a modern paved road onto the tracks of the nineteenth-century pioneers—not to mention walk all the way to Oregon—I paused just long enough to grab a water bottle and a brimmed hat from my car and set out along the ruts, heading west. It was a beautiful, breezy day, with sprays of yellow coreopsis blooming above the grasses and meadowlarks bobbing over the hills. The old ruts sloped over several gentle rises, past clumps of cottonwood trees and low shrubs at the watercourses, and handsome timber bridges that crossed two streams. The expansiveness of the landscape was hypnotic and physically exhilarating, and after the first mile I felt as if I were levitating on the plains. The distant hills of Nebraska seemed to draw my vision hundreds of miles away.

A few miles up I stopped to admire the view after climbing a steep rise. The valley below was one of those dreamy western vistas out of an Albert Bierstadt painting—a U-shaped canyon framed on one side by a large stream and on the other by green and brown hills. In the middle, a tidy group of shingled rooftops glowed orange in the sun, surrounded by browsing cattle. I walked down to the stream, where a sign announced that I had reached the old Hollenberg Ranch and Pony Express station along the Oregon Trail.

The restored ranch and Pony Express station are maintained by the Kansas State Historical Society, and at the interpretive center there, built near a modern parking lot, I learned about the place. Gerat Hollenberg was a German immigrant who had first crossed the Oregon Trail during the 1849 California Gold Rush. He made a small fortune in the northern California gold fields, then lost it in a shipwreck off Florida, and was drawn back to Kansas in 1854 by his memories of the beautiful prairie and dreams of founding a business along the busy covered wagon trail he had seen five years before. At the time, marginalized American farmers "westering" for cheap land in the Northwest, religious zealots, and just dreamers in search of adventure were flooding across the Kansas frontier, and in peak years as many as fifty thousand covered wagon immigrants spent the summer crossing the Oregon Trail and its two main tributaries, the California and Mormon trails. Entrepreneurs intent on profiting from this traffic were building a network of "road ranches" along remote stretches of the trail, providing a kind of early log-cabin convenience store for the passing wagons. Hollenberg selected a site along Cottonwood Creek to attract pioneers who needed to water their draft animals and replenish their drinking barrels at the end of their first week crossing the prairie, and apparently he chose well. The trading post and wagon-repair shop he built on the plains—later, his wife added an outdoor kitchen and sold hot meals—were quickly heralded in published trail guides as the last major layover until Fort Kearny in Nebraska, two hundred miles away.

Excerpted from The Oregon Trail by Rinker Buck. Copyright © 2015 by Rinker Buck. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.