Westward Bound: A Week on the Oregon Trail : Surprises abound as author retraces the 2,170-mile route taken by American pioneers 150 years earlier.

The grass-covered slope of Windlass Hill rises from the empty vastness of the Nebraska prairie, still branded by the tracks carved as the pioneers inched their covered wagons down the incline. The ruts are so deep they have survived a century and a half of wind, rain and snow. This hill was among the first of countless obstacles that challenged the thousands of pioneers headed west on the 2,170-mile Oregon Trail.

Happily, much of the majestic landscape through which the now-legendary wagon trains once passed also has survived, little changed by the years. This, I think, was the biggest surprise in a week-long drive I made in early May tracing the route of the famed trail from its beginning at Independence, Mo., to its terminus at little Oregon City in the Willamette River Valley of Oregon.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the first major wagon train to make the long and difficult journey in quest of a new life at the end of the trail. Many Americans are expected to follow in those footsteps this summer.

I grew up in a Nebraska farm town on the trail, and the rich lore of these pioneers--the wagons ringed around the campfire at night--has intrigued me over the years. I was more than eager to get on the road.

To cover the route in a week, I spent many long hours behind the wheel, but I found the drive constantly exhilarating. The ever-changing scenery--from rolling green prairie, to high sun-baked desert country, to misty snow-clad mountains--reached the spectacular often enough to keep my spirits soaring.

And every mile was full of the romance of the Old West. I saw a buffalo or two, shopped for Native American souvenirs at a Shoshone/Bannock reservation, toured Pony Express stations and cavalry forts, spotted cowboys on horseback rounding up a herd, examined at least a dozen old prairie schooners, soaked in an outdoor hot spring, ate lunch in a ghost town saloon and braked for tumbleweeds tumbling across the highway.

But it was the old Oregon Trail itself, guiding my way, that absorbed most of my attention. Much of the trail has disappeared beneath pavement or the plow, but many easily accessible segments--with the ruts still quite visible--have been preserved in local, state and federal parklands along the way. The National Park Service has identified the official route, and in 1978 Congress designated it a National Historic Trail. No road precisely follows the path, but each of the six states along the way (Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho and Oregon) distributes a free guide to the highways and back roads that most closely approximate the original route.

The story of the Oregon Trail is told at more rest stops, historic sites and roadside markers than I had the time or, really, the inclination to take in--although I figure I must have pulled off the highway at least 50 times for anywhere from a couple of minutes to an hour or more to learn about yet another exciting episode in the tale. But there are three important Oregon Trail museums along the way that do the best job of summing up, and I found the hour or more spent in each very rewarding.

The National Frontier Trails Center in Independence explores the factors that persuaded so many pioneers to embark on the arduous journey, and the National End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center in Oregon City nicely details the relatively pleasant welcome they got on arrival five months later in Oregon. I considered the two facilities the unofficial start and end of my drive.

In eastern Oregon, the imaginative new Oregon Trail Interpretive Center, stunningly perched atop Flagstaff Hill near Baker City, re-creates wagon train life with life-size tableaux of a day on the trail and night around the campfire. Birds chirp, oxen bellow, a wagon master shouts orders and a mother cries at the grave of a child to be left in the solitude of the empty prairie.

And yet, for all my interest in the historical aspects, I was repeatedly drawn to the everyday scenes of today along the trail. In spring, the pastures were full of newborn calves romping alongside their mothers. More ominous, from their point of view anyway, were the massive feed lots fencing literally hundreds of beef cattle ready for market. Outside Kearney, Neb., the penned animals so thoroughly blanketed one hill that it seemed to quiver like Jell-O as they shuffled about. I could smell them from a mile away. What a stink!

To my eye, the grain elevators soaring above almost every small town on the prairie resembled castles in Spain under the shimmering sun. And then there were the people I met and talked with along the way, who added yet another dimension to my journey.

In eastern Kansas near Manhattan, affable Charles Tessendorf ambled out of a pasture near a historic wagon train crossing at Red Vermillion River to tell me he had watched travelers pass by 50 years ago during the 100th anniversary of the Oregon Trail and he looked forward to this year’s parade. In Oregon City, Erica Calkins showed me a historical pioneer garden she and other volunteers were planting to welcome Oregon Trail travelers this summer. They were eager to do it, she said, because of their love of the trail and its history.

I set out on the first of May, as the pioneers did, when the prairie grass was green and tall enough to feed a wagon train’s livestock. Moving at a rate of 15 to 20 miles a day, they hoped to reach Oregon in about five months. If all went well, they would cross the Great Plains before the summer sun shriveled the grass, and they would descend from the high mountains of Oregon before winter snows began to fall.

At a rate of about 360 miles a day, I rapidly outpaced them, catching up with the last snow flurries of this season in Wyoming, Idaho and Oregon. In a sense, my trip was too early, because I did not experience the heat and the dust that tormented the pioneers over so many miles.

An estimated 300,000 to 340,000 men, women and children and 75,000 wagons traveled at least part of the Oregon Trail in its heyday from the early 1840s to the late 1860s, when railroads began to ease the hardship of the transcontinental trip. A great many of the pioneers branched south from Wyoming for California, lured after 1849 by the prospects of gold. Perhaps as many as 10% of the people who attempted the Oregon Trail died along the way, mostly from wagon and firearm accidents, drownings and outbreaks of cholera. Deaths from Indian attack were relatively few, despite the myths portrayed in Hollywood Westerns. I flew into Kansas City on a Saturday morning, picked up a rental car at the airport and turned onto Interstate 435 for the 45-minute drive south to Independence. It was the busiest route I would travel until I pulled into Portland the following Friday evening.

I found Independence Square, the historic heart of the city, blocked off for a street festival. In a way, the bustle re-created the excitement the pioneers must have experienced as they gathered by the hundreds and thousands before the start of their trek.

Modern-day Oregon Trail travelers can stock up on guidebooks and maps at the National Frontier Trails Center, located in a partially reconstructed 19th-Century mill building south of Independence Square. The museum details the city’s role as a major outfitter for wagon trains--in the 1840s, it boasted as many as 26 blacksmith shops to handle the demand--and it displays many items such as huge cooking pots and tiny candleholders discarded along the trail when the going got rough.

As I headed out west, I crossed briefly into Kansas for a look at the little brick town of Gardner, where the Santa Fe and Oregon trails out of Independence parted ways. In no time I was in rolling farm country, my route roughly paralleling the Kansas River. In the first weeks of their adventure, the pioneers enjoyed the blessings of good grass, easy terrain and sufficient water. It gave them time to toughen up for the hardships ahead.

In a new car, my hardships were nonexistent. Rather, I luxuriated in the absence of traffic. It can actually be fun to drive, I concluded, when yours is the only car on the road for miles at a time. I sailed along, drinking in the expansive views of the green countryside and a bright blue sky.

About 20 miles east of Manhattan, a small road sign directed me onto the first of many detours during the week down unpaved rural roads. This one led to the pleasant site of an early river crossing, shaded today by one of the largest elm trees in America. It also marks one of the trail’s great tragedies. On the opposite bank, I followed a short trail leading to a small cemetery sheltering the graves of as many as 50 pioneers from a single wagon train who died within a week in 1849 during an outbreak of cholera.

After a night in Manhattan, I crossed into Nebraska, the state that has done the best job so far of marking the Oregon Trail within its borders. Frequent signs labeled “Oregon Trail Auto Tour Route” pointed the way from one end of Nebraska to the other, and I never got lost relying on them. The trail is also prominently detailed on the official state road map.

I always feel a curious sense of freedom and relief from urban cares when I roam Nebraska’s winding open roads. That I can catch Mozart or Mahler symphonies on Nebraska Public Radio almost anywhere in the state adds to the pleasure.

My first stop, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, was Rock Creek Station State Historical Park near the little farm community of Fairbury. Once, briefly, the site of a Pony Express station, the 390-acre park preserves the deep ruts of the Oregon Trail as it crossed a small creek wiggling among several prairie hilltops. A three-mile nature trail meanders through the sort of tall grass prairie that the pioneers saw as they passed this way. In spring, the grass was mixed with wildflowers, particularly a purple species that popped up everywhere. On a Sunday morning, I had the park to myself except for a couple from Columbus, Ohio, who were beginning an Oregon Trail drive of their own in their motorhome, today’s version of the prairie schooner.

The wagon trains followed the rivers for water, and my drive took me along southeastern Nebraska’s Little Blue River north to the Platte River, the brunt of jokes--”a mile wide and an inch deep”--but a life support line that eased the pioneers’ path through dry stretches of western Nebraska deep into Wyoming. The Oregon Trail joined the Platte at Ft. Kearney, the first fort built to protect travelers along the Oregon Trail.

Not much remains of the fort except a reconstructed stockade and, more interestingly, a sod house used as a blacksmith shop. Dried weeds decorate its sides and foot-high grass grows from its roof. Down the road a mile, visitors can get a good look at the Platte--or even go wading in it--at Ft. Kearney State Recreation Area, where a long pedestrian bridge crosses from one bank to another. Even during spring runoff, the river was so shallow I could see the bottom.

After a night at the nearby farm town of Kearney, where I grew up splashing in the Platte, I got an early start on my longest day’s drive, 12 hours and 460 miles to Casper, Wyo. As the miles rolled over, the empty roads got emptier and the countryside drier and more rugged. East of Scotts Bluff, the official tour route skirts Chimney Rock, a 470-foot spire that was one of the most celebrated natural landmarks along the trail. A few miles beyond is Scotts Bluff, another important landmark. Like the pioneers, I climbed to the top of the red sandstone mountain for the view, although my way up was eased by a 1.6-mile switchback trail. At the foot of Scotts Bluff, another half-mile trail follows wagon train ruts through Mitchell Pass, a narrow passage between the rocks.

My final stop for the day was Ft. Laramie, a very well-preserved fort that also once protected the Oregon Trail. Many of its original buildings--including “Old Bedlam,” the bachelor officers quarters--are still standing alongside the Laramie River.

Outside the adjacent town of the same name, I spotted one of the funniest signs I’ve seen anywhere, but I don’t know whether it’s true or not. “Welcome to Fort Laramie,” it read, “home of 250 good people and six soreheads.” I met only some of the friendly ones. Just west of town, I caught my first glimpse of the snowy Rocky Mountains in the distance.

From Casper, the Oregon Trail crosses through some of the bleakest land in America. Miles of sagebrush flatlands suddenly are broken by deep gulches or strange rock formations. And in the distance, as a scenic backdrop, rise snow-tipped mountains, among them the spectacular Wind River Range near Lander. After tedious days of desert sameness, a giant hunk of rock such as Independence Rock captivated the pioneers, and many of them inscribed their names on it. I scrambled easily to the top and discovered that a number of them had preceded me. Getting back down the steep rock was much trickier, and I wondered if any of the pioneers had tumbled and broken an arm or their neck. Less than 100 miles west is 7,550-foot-high South Pass, marking the Continental Divide and the easiest route west across the Rocky Mountains. The climb is so gradual that many pioneers reportedly never realized they had hurdled the Rockies until they were well on the other side. Near the pass are a couple of old mining towns--South Pass City, now a state historic site, and Atlantic City, virtually a ghost town, where I dropped in at the rustic Atlantic City Mercantile for lunch. Rain was falling and snow threatened, but the old saloon welcomed me with a warming fire blazing in a cast-iron stove. A set of huge oxen horns, hanging above the bar, seemed an appropriate decoration.

I spent the fourth night on the road in Evanston, Wyo., near old Ft. Bridger, where mountain man Jim Bridger built a trading post in 1842 on Black’s Fork of the Green River. A reconstructed version is now a state historic site. When I awoke, I discovered an inch of snow on my car and flakes falling heavily. Unfortunately, they hid my view of Fossil Butte, a national parkland to the north that I had hoped to explore. As exhibits in the visitor center explained, the high rock face is a major source of fossil finds, and an interesting trail leads to a historic dig. But I couldn’t see a thing and left disappointed.

Snow did not keep me away from southern Idaho’s Lava Hot Springs, a state-operated complex of four large natural hot springs pools scattered in a lovely rock grotto setting and surrounded by mountain peaks. The pools range in temperature from 104 to 110 degrees, and the advice I got at the check-in counter was to progress gradually from the coolest to the warmest, which I did. I floated on my back, watching the flakes melt on my tummy. Oh, how I wanted to linger, soaking the miles out of my muscles, but like the pioneers I was pressed for time.

Outside Pocatello, I caught my first glimpse of the Snake River, which the trail follows into Oregon. For much of the rest of my drive, I would travel on I-84, which parallels and sometimes traces the Oregon Trail all the way to Portland. The empty roads were all behind me now, but the scenery brightened by the hour.

First, though, I took a short detour north to Ft. Hall, another old trading post on what is now the 544,000-acre Ft. Hall Indian Reservation, home to 3,500 members of the Shoshone and Bannock Indian tribes. I wanted a look at some of the elaborate and colorful beadwork for which the tribes are noted. Crafts items are sold in a shop near the reservation’s high-stakes bingo hall.

I spent the night at Twin Falls, perched on a cliff overlooking the deep Snake River Gorge. For breakfast the next morning at Diamond Jack’s Restaurant, the menu promised a “Sodbuster Combo,” melted Cheddar cheese and a fried egg atop hash-browned potatoes. It was neither the first nor the last meal I ate with a name associated with the Oregon Trail.

Detouring from I-84, I followed U.S. 30 west past Thousand Springs, a series of impressive waterfalls cascading into the Snake from the bluff on the far side of the river, and Three Island Crossing, where I again walked wagon ruts cut by pioneers who had successfully forded the Snake at this point. At Upper Salmon Falls, a river wetlands, I thought I had stumbled onto a busy urban street. Honking geese, quacking ducks and chirping birds filled the air with their din.

Crossing the Snake, I headed into Oregon, climbing through high red hills draped in the green cloak of spring to Baker City and the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center, which opened last year. Perhaps I had become too much enthralled by the stories of struggle and determination in my week on the road, but I was soon set straight. “Don’t glamorize them,” read an introductory exhibit. “While heroic, they were an imperfect people--intolerant, prone to violence, exploitive and sometimes ill-tempered.” It must be true, since these are Oregon folks talking about their ancestors. Nevertheless, the museum concedes, their journey was “an epic of human endurance.”

The pioneers trekked to Oregon for a better life. A traveler on the Oregon Trail today might welcome Oregon for its spectacular scenery. Out of Pendleton, my route took me on a magnificent ride along the south bank of the great Columbia River to The Dalles, where a hydroelectric dam now stretches across the river. Here the pioneers faced a hard choice--float their wagons downstream on rafts through the rugged Cascade Mountains to the Willamette River Valley and risk overturning, or make the trip around 11,235-foot Mount Hood on a steep and perilous trail called the Barlow Road.

Unlike the pioneers, I opted for both routes because each is too gorgeously scenic to miss.

On Friday, my seventh day on the trail, I traced the river route, although by highway, not raft. For about 80 miles from The Dalles to Portland, I-84 races alongside the river through what is known as the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area.

At two places, I exited the interstate to take the even more stunning Columbia River Scenic Highway. It alternately climbs to high vistas overlooking the river or drops to the foot of bluffs, where a series of magnificent waterfalls tumbles into the Columbia. On Saturday, I doubled back to trace the Barlow Road over the Cascades, stopping at Laurel Hill for my last and steepest hike alongside Oregon Trail wagon ruts.

Finally, I slipped into little Oregon City on the Willamette River, something of an anticlimax for me--after so much grand scenery--but presumably not for the pioneers. They surely were heartened by the end of their long trek, and I was pleased simply to touch the stone at Abernathy Green marking the end of the trail.

GUIDEBOOK

A Modern Journey on the Oregon Trail

Getting there: My drive along the Oregon Trail covered 2,575 miles, between Independence, Mo., and Oregon City, Ore. The cheapest way to duplicate the route, of course, would be to drive your own car.

I flew to Kansas City, Mo., and home from Portland, Ore. From Los Angeles, USAir offers daily nonstop service to Kansas City; America West, Southwest and Delta fly there direct. Best current one-way fares are on Southwest for $100, America West for $179. From Portland, United, Alaska and Delta offer nonstop service to LAX. One-way fare, with 14-day advance purchase, is $130.

Renting a car: Finding a reasonably priced rental out of Kansas City, offering both unlimited mileage and drop-off in Portland, is difficult. I turned the task over to a travel agent, who booked an eight-day corporate rate through Avis that came to a total of $480.83 with tax and a small refueling charge. I spent $88.33 on gas.

Where to stay: I plotted a seven-day drive--although I recommend taking longer--that would require driving an average of about 360 miles a day. I scheduled overnight stops at towns roughly separated by this distance. West of central Nebraska, towns with lodging facilities often are many miles apart, so make reservations in advance for a summer trip. Be aware that many towns marked on state maps offer no lodging, meals or fuel service.

Camping facilities are fairly plentiful along the Oregon Trail in state and federal parklands, forests and other preserves. Contact each state for details.

Special Oregon Trail 150th anniversary events:

Overland trek: Most of the Oregon Trail states are sponsoring wagon train treks this summer. If you want to join a wagon train for a day, a week or longer, watch the prairie schooners pass by or snap photos, contact state tourism offices for a current schedule.

The Official Oregon Trail Sesquicentennial Wagon Train was to leave the Idaho-Wyoming border yesterday on a 73-day, 1,000-mile journey to Oregon City. For information, contact Metropolitan Events, 208 NW Couch St., Portland, Ore. 97209, (503) 223-3299. Wagonmaster Morris Carter, who departed Independence on May 2 with a train of five wagons, expects to reach Oregon in early October. Contact Historic Trails Expeditions, P.O. Box 428, Mills, Wyo. 82644, (307) 266-4868.

Snake River crossing: The pioneers who forded the river are memorialized in an annual re-enactment. This year’s celebration, Aug. 12-14, is one of the big events in Idaho this year. For information: Three Island Crossing State Park, P.O. Box 609, Glenns Ferry, Idaho, (208) 366-2394.

Overland by bus: A series of 11-day motor-coach tours, tracing the Oregon Trail from Independence to Portland, has been put together by an organization called S.C.R.A.M. Tours, or Senior Citizens Roaming Around the Map. Remaining available departures are Sept. 2, 16 and 30, and Oct. 14. Tour price is about $800 per person, double occupancy, and includes air fare from Los Angeles to Independence, 10 nights’ lodging and three meals. For information: Senior Citizens Roaming Around the Map, P.O. Box 1602, Pendleton, Ore. 97801, (800) 247-2060.

For more information: Contact each state tourism office for a highway map, a description of the Oregon Trail route through the state and a list of important trail sites:

* Missouri Division of Tourism, P.O. Box 1055, Jefferson City, Mo. 65102, (800) 877-1234.

* Kansas Division of Travel and Tourism, 400 S.W. 8th St., 5th Floor, Topeka, Kan. 66603-3712, (800) 252-6727.

* Nebraska Division of Travel and Tourism, 700 S. 16th St., P.O. Box 94666, Lincoln, Neb. 68509, (800) 228-4307.

* Wyoming Division of Tourism, I-25 at College Drive, Cheyenne, Wyo. 82002, (800) 225-5996.

* Idaho Division of Tourism Development, 700 W. State St., Statehouse Mail, Boise, Ida. 83720-2700, (800) 635-7820.

* Oregon Tourism Division, 775 Summer St. N.E., Salem, Ore. 97310, (800) 547-7842.