Reliving history in the present

The Oregon Trail:
A new American journey
by Rinker Buck



 
Just let me get this off my chest--some misbegotten idiot put "Part Laura Ingalls Wilder, part Jack Kerouac, ..." on the front cover. Stupid. Misleading. Wrong!

The only way this book is like Little House on the Prairie is that they both have a covered wagon on the cover. The person who wrote that bullsh*t needs to go back to pre-school and relearn the lesson "One of these things is not like the other."  Try these:

    1. The Incredible Journey
    2. The AristoCats
    3. Milo and Otis
    4. This book

In case you need more convincing, let me remind you. Little House on the Prairie is a kid's book based on the author's memories of her family's brief stay on a homestead in Kansas in the 1880s. This book is:

We stopped in the shade slightly uphill of the creek and sat for a long while, speechless, drinking from our canteens. I was still shaking several minutes later.

From our uphill position II looked back and saw our fresh wagon tracks on the trail. There were spots where I could see that we hadn't had more than a foot of clearance. We were that close to falling sidways into the gorge.

"Nick, you told me that the trail got wider. But look at that spot, where the cliff juts out. We were almost over the edge."

"Okay, so I was lyin. Big fucking deal. I knew I could thread us through that needle and get us down here alive. Besides, if I was wrong?"

"What?"

"We'd be dead. We wouldn't give a shit."

The Oregon Trail is a blend of history, memoir, and real-life edge-of-chair screaming adventure. Rinker Buck and his brother go out to meet America at its best, finding rancher after rancher who opens up his corral and watering trough to the misbegotten mule team of Jake the Strong, Beck the Skittish,and Bute the Dissembler. They met only a few complete assholes on the way, and had the ultimate revenge of memorializing the people's idiotic actions on paper, where readers could laugh at the stupidity for years uncountable.

This book was so good that I was actually glad to have a headcold while reading it--having to go to bed early made the story last longer!

A learned a whole lot about the trail and the history thereof, but especially this: when my husband and I went out to the wagon ruts at Dodge City but failed to see them, it  didn't matter one whit.  There never was a single set of "wagon ruts," just as there never was a single "trail." The westward migration was peopled by strong, hardy, and free-willed individuals who didn't need to follow blindly in another's tracks. The slope of open country we visited, just north of the Platte, was definitely crossed by wheels. A lot of them. Most of their tracks were invisible as soon as the next rain fell.

We couldn't see them, but they were there. Just like the river, the sky, the grasses and birds. Let's keep 'em around, okay?

And also, keep 'em away from private landowners who want to "own" history and the Mormon Church who wants to rewrite it. Just saying.