July 5 - Drive along the Oregon Trail to Pendleton, Oregon

It was hard to leave folks this nice, but they did have to go back to work and the Pacific was calling so we hooked up the trailer, said our good-byes, and were driving on I-84 through Boise by about 9:30, which was pretty good given how late we had been up the previous night! The drive west and north through Idaho was surprisingly flat; it followed the great basin and then the river valleys of the Snake and some of its tributaries. I could only occasionally view the brown tops of mountains in the distance, and irrigation was the rule for growing crops on any bit of arable land in the area. As the Snake flows northward it becomes the border between Idaho and Oregon, and when we finally crossed over into Oregon we stopped at the Welcome Center. The center included a very nice open-air display with plaques about the Oregon Trail, and we learned that we had been following it for our entire route across Idaho along the Snake River! In fact, I-84 continued to follow roughly the course of the old Oregon Trail for much of its way through Oregon, which was our intended route.

As we drove on I used the official Oregon highway map to check on how the Oregon Trail was following our course, and occasionally I thought I could get a glimpse of the old track off to one side, but I was never really certain. In eastern Oregon, the landscape gradually changed from the American Desert of the Snake River basin to tree covered mountains. As we came over one pass we saw a big bunch of forest clad mountains in the distance. The slopes looked bluish in the haze and we had read that these were in fact the Blue Mountains that were a landmark for the immigrants on the last stretch of the Oregon Trail.

While following the route of the Oregon Trail on the map, I saw a Point of Interest smack dab on it called the "Oregon Trail Interpretive Center". It was located just a few miles outside of Baker City, Oregon, and we decided to see what that was like. After lunch, refueling, and a change of drivers in Baker City, I drove the rig up a two lane highway to a hilltop about 5 miles east of I-84 where we found the center. It was a rather plain looking complex of buildings on top of a small mountain (or large hill, depending on your criterion for such things).

Inside the buildings, the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center turned out to be a very nice museum constructed by the Bureau of Land Management, who apparently had custody of the land in this segment of the old trail. The museum had several very large, well-done exhibits on the Oregon trail. The very first display was a life-sized tableau of a a couple of wagons actually traversing the trail, complete with artificial (I think) Buffalo chips, stuffed (wax?) horses and oxen, and even a rattlesnake poised to strike. The immigrants were depicted by quite lifelike wax figures with recorded voices that seemed to be triggered by some kind of proximity sensor, which was frustrating because I would typically walk by hearing nothing. Then the voice would unexpectedly start up when I was ten feet further down the display so I'd have to hurry back to listen in on what was being said. Still, it was very interesting and surprisingly lifelike.

The exhibit area of the museum included a serpentine path through the remainder of the building laid out as a timeline that a typical immigrant family would take from leaving Missouri to arriving in the coastal areas of Oregon. It was similar to the approach used to illustrate the journey of Lewis and Clark in the National Forest interpretive center in Great Falls, Montana, and equally well done. The Oregon Trail museum even had one room dedicated to the Lewis and Clark journey, but clearly the main emphasis was on telling the story of the immigrants, the Native Americans and mountain men who had preceded them, and how it all turned out. The nutshell biography of the mountain man Jim Bridger intrigued me because I had always thought of mountain men as rough hewn, ill-socialized wanderers who were skilled at hunting and trapping but semi-literate at best. Not only did Jim Bridger build and operate the Fort Bridger trading post successfully for many years, but he also enjoyed reading Shakespeare! There went another of my stereotypes down in flames.

The stories of the immigrants were for me, at least, riveting tales of enduring almost unimaginable hardship for 2,000 miles along a rough frontier track while being beset by a harsh and unforgiving climate, devastating diseases, and occasionally hostile Indians. The quotes from some of the journals were often quite vivid and gave unforgettable glimpses into the hardships as well as occasional joys of their lives on the trail. The men did most of the animal care, driving, and wagon repair but that makes sense to me as many of those jobs require sheer strength and men are typically stronger than women. Women were typically dedicating their time to cooking, child care, and other household tasks. The children were considered as little adults and expected to help with any chores they could. Folks had fun where they could, and journals told of instruments like the fiddle and flute being used for entertainment.

Blacks also were part of this immigrant stream, but they were the only segment to encounter official discrimination, as far as I could find out. The Oregon legislature in 1844 passed an act excluding blacks from that part of the territory, so one particular black immigrant named George Washington Bush had to move up across the Columbia into what is now Washington State. How would you feel to be thrown out of a country you had walked 2,000 miles to get to just because of your skin color? I expect I would have been rather angry, to say the least. It was not a proud moment in Oregon's history in my view, and it reminded me of Ruth talking about racial discrimination during her days on a homestead in the mountains of Montana somewhere near Helena before WW I, as I recall. She said that blacks were required to use the back doors of the businesses to enter and leave whereas the white folks would use the front door to the street. I had never found direct confirmation or disconfirmation of her statement, but it began to look like more and more likely that her memories were accurate.

The segment on "Trail Justice" told the story of a man who had murdered another man in a fit of pique. He was a young man, and he broke down and admitted the deed, so there was no question of guilt, but how do you administer justice in the middle of nowhere on the trail? As it turned out, the men of the wagon train got together, decided that he should be executed, and formed a firing squad of 6. Using three rifles loaded with bullets and three with blanks, they shot him the next day and buried him next to his victim. The sad part was that he was, according to the journalist, liked by all the members of the wagon train except the man whom he killed. I couldn't help but wonder, in my bleeding heart liberal kind of way, if keeping him alive and requiring restitution to the victim's family and relatives would not have been a better solution. But I can well imagine that the men of the party were worried about him losing control again and murdering yet another member of the group.

From their journal entries it is clear that the immigrants all expected the trip to be a one-way journey to the west, and it is hard to think of that type of finality in our modern world. They were simply never going to see the family or friends they left behind ever again, and that must have been exquisitely painful for many of them. The only thing that I could think of that would be close to that experience in our time is if we someday establish a human colony on Mars; I expect time, distance, and the physical changes in the body that would occur in that environment would all conspire to make any return to Earth extremely unlikely or impossible. But even so in the modern world we have dependable mail, voice, and image transmission for keeping in touch that these settlers did not.

At 1 p.m. we attended a special live performance by a period re-enactor, "Dr. Balthasar", who became a mid 1800s traveling medicine show, complete with his own patent nostrums. When he shifted into his character, this gentleman turned away from the audience for a brief moment, donned a somewhat battered top hat, and then turned back and began his rapid fire patter. He entertained the audience quite well before leading them into the sales pitch for his medicine. It was as entertaining as all get out. When we talked to him later, he said that he had been given advice by an old medicine show practitioner to "Talk fast, never explain anything, and always get in the last word!" The last part reminded me of Ted's father, a lifelong salesman, who used the tactic when a potential client would disagree with him of saying "Yes, but..." and coming back with some kind of a counterpoint to at least keep the dialog going. These people were, as our demonstrator emphasized, superb salesmen using the time honored tactics of ingration with the customer ("I'm your friend, and I'm here to help you.") as well as guilt manipulations and so forth to make a sale.

After Dr. Balthasar's spiel we finished the time line for the Oregon Trail experiences and I reluctantly pried myself away from the museum. We had been there about 4 hours, and I never even had time to see the Lewis and Clark exhibit room or the 1-hour movie that they showed in the theater! I can certainly recommend the center to anyone driving this way who has the slightest interest in the Oregon Trail phase of American History.

As it was getting late, we drove on to Emigrant Springs State Park and campground near Pendleton, Oregon. I initially tried to back our trailer into a campsite on the inner ring, but they were all angled in such a way that I would have had to back the trailer around a hairpin curve to get into one! I have never seen a campground designed like that, and we briefly considered driving the wrong way down the one way loop road to get into an inner campsite. I actually saw a guy trying to back his trailer into one of those sites and back his trailer sideways over a tree in the process, but when the campground host starting yelling he pulled forward and trucked right on out of there before the park ranger arrived. As luck would have it, we finally found site A 6 on the outer ring that I did manage to back into, so that's where we stayed for the next two nights.

Of course, sleeping with tractor trailers rumbling by about 100 feet away turned out to be rather difficult, and that was how far the Interstate was from our campsite, which might have also explained why it was still open when we arrived late in the day. We turned on the air conditioner not so much because it was too hot, but rather to be able to close the windows and have a masking noise to shut out the sounds of the semis. I had hoped for a let up of the cacophony in the middle of the night, but they came by steadily all night long. Whenever Monika or I awoke we would have to try to mentally tune out the semi symphony before we were able to go back to sleep. In consequence we did not, as you might imagine, get a very good night's sleep!