Jon Horton - Eventually, everyone wants to move west
Eventually, everyone wants to move west
It seems. I was reminded of that when I drove to eastern Oregon last month to do a job. To get there from Jackson you go west over the Snake River Range to Idaho and when you get to Fort Hall turn right onto the old Oregon Trail. From there you more or less follow the course of the Snake to where it dumps into the Columbia River, then you follow that one to the Pacific. Easy as pie, nowadays
My family came west in 1847 but instead of turning toward Fort Hall at Bridgers Fort, Wyoming they went over into Utah. From there they made their way back into Wyoming in the 1870s and settled. My Great-great grandfather was a polygamist with eleven wives and 48 children so Wyoming was a wise choice once polygamy was prosecuted in Utah. The family thrived here, so much so that Grandpa left 262 (you read right, thats two hundred and sixty-two) grandchildren to tend the fields and man the mills he created. Hell, Im related to just about everyone out here, including Rulon Gardner the wrestling hero of the Sydney Olympics a second cousin. If you want to know more about our Grandpa you can go to West Jordan, Utah (a southwest suburb of Salt Lake City) and visit one of his grist mills, now a restaurant called "Archies". A pioneer village has been set up behind it, including a museum that tells most of the familys history. If youre headed for Las Vegas or California or somewhere else on the coast, drop in to have a sandwich and buy a quilt or a hand-carved thingamajiggy that turns in the wind when a kid holds it out the back window of the car.
But we have our own particular (and peculiar) history while the folks who kept creaking along to the northwest have theirs. I was reminded of that as I followed the interstate across Idaho and into Oregon. A lot has been written about the settling of Oregon. Most of that history, though, describes western Oregon where all is green and it rains much of the time. Eastern Oregon is a whole other kettle of fish...or, rather, scab rock and bitterbrush. Looks a lot like southern Wyoming. Tough country.
This is where I usually dive off onto one of my tangents, so bear with me as I digress onto the subject of -- injuns. One of the myths of the way west, via Hollywood, was that the Sioux and the other plains Indians were the ones always spread across the whole Wyoming skyline while the grizzled wagonmasters stare slit-eyed and the timorous emigrants wail in terror. In fact, about 80% of the attacks on wagon trains were carried out by the Shoshonean people, mostly the Shoshones and the Bannocks. The stud monk among those marauders was a guy named Chief Pocatello. Yup, as in the city of Pocatello, Idaho.
Short version: The Blackfeet, the Crow, and the Teton Sioux were the tribes who mostly made the mountain men miserable. Their territories were the mountains where the beaver streams ran and the trappers pursued them. The plains tribes were the ones who kicked sand in the face of the U.S. Army when they began to break treaties. Hollywood dressed their extras in Sioux trappings because the properties departments had made up those costumes and they needed to reuse them, no matter where the story was set. Lastly, it was the Shoshonean people who made life miserable for the emigrants because they had the largest territory of all the Indian nations and the several branches of the Overland, California, Mormon, and Oregon trails crisscrossed their homeland. Where was that homeland? All the present states of Nevada and Utah, the southern half of Idaho, and the western halves of Colorado and Wyoming! Get out the map, draw a line around that chunk of country and youll see that the Shoshoneans owned, by far, the biggest chunk of the continent of any of the tribes. Including the mighty Sioux nations.
The Eastern Shoshones held the line in Wyoming against the Blackfeet, the Sioux, the Crow, the Northern Arapaho and the Northern Cheyenne. The northern Shoshones, also known as the Lemhi, were the salmon eaters who guarded the northwest country. Their first cousins the Utes owned western Colorado and the Great Basin of Nevada and Utah was home to several Shoshonean peoples. Now, if you superimpose the emigration routes over that country you will see they lie like sutured wounds on a piece of land as large as the whole of Europe.
In the 1860s a superintendent of Indian affairs, after touring western Utah and central Nevada, reported that the cattle of the emigrants had eaten all the native seed grasses of the Shoshones who had lived in that country had gathered for thousands of years. He lamented that they had become so poor that they were reduced to sneaking into the corrals of the stagecoach stations at night, to steal the horse manure and wash it for the undigested seeds it held. I wont go into any more of the atrocities they suffered, mostly because some bleeding heart Liberal will seize on it as an excuse to wring their dainty little hands and raise that nerve-rending screech that makes ones ass work buttonholes. Suffice to say that the Shoshones had reason enough to visit hell on the bunches of whites squeaking their insensible way across the country as if they already owned it. If you want to get a little history lesson, stop by the historical monument just west of Pocatello, Idaho and read about the place called "Massacre Rocks". I usually do, and it always makes my heart glad when I take the time. You see, the stretch of the Oregon Trail from Fort Bridger to present-day eastern Oregon and on the California Trail from Fort Bridger to the Sierra Nevada and south to Arizona saw more white blood spilled than any other part of the way west about a gallon for every tea cup the injuns got out of them before crossing the Utah and Idaho lines.
Massacre Rocks is very near the banks of the Snake River and, as I said before, the Oregon Trail pretty much follows the course of that big river and here I go again: If you look at a map and follow the course of the Columbia and Snake rivers you will see that it heads up just a little west of Yellowstone Park. Take a red marker and highlight it. Now imagine that the North American continent is a piece of sheet metal and you are going to push it west over an acetylene torch, cutting a jagged line through the metal that mimics the course of those rivers. Once you have stopped pushing the metal, imagine that flame being situated under present Yellowstone, causing the local groundwater to steam and shoot up into the air, pushing the bottom of Yellowstone Lake up as quickly as a humans finger nails grow! Thats exactly what has happened over the last few million years. The continent has been pushed over a fixed hot spot for all that time and it is still moving inexorably in that same direction. Given enough time, the whole continent will be cut in two.
One of the facts of the Oregon Trail is that it passes over some of the toughest country on the continent. The fires of Yellowstone left melted rock along its path in the form of massive lava and basalt beds that cover a hundred thousand square miles or so. Eastern Oregon is still a place famous for its rigorous people. Rednecks one and all. They dropped off on the small creeks and rivers to dig gold and raise cattle while the rest kept going to the gentle rainy country of the coast to raise dairy cows and kids. As one of the passers-through was famously heard to say as they passed through the scab lands and bitter brush of eastern Oregon: A man couldnt raise a decent hardon in this country.
But, in our present history that incision in the earth pretty much represents the course of the Oregon Trail from Fort Hall, Idaho (home of the Western Shoshone and Bannock Indians) to the Pacific Ocean. It was the way west for the folks who eventually settled the Northwest. Too bad Bill Gates ancestors didnt try for Washington via Fort Hall and Massacre Rocks.
Photo credits: Natl Geographic Society; Pat Siegner; Natl Geographic Society; Pat Siegner
-Jon Horton
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