#143： Crossing the Oregon Trail in the 21st Century With Rinker Buck
Episode Stats
Summary
Rinker Buck was one of the first people to cross the Oregon Trail in nothing but a covered wagon in over 100 years and he did it with his brother. In this episode, we discuss some of the details about this very unique aspect of american history, including how Rinker had to relearn some lost skills that we ve lost as a culture, things like how to handle mules and repair a wagon, and what he learned about being a man while on this four month journey across the trail.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast well if you are
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an american you know about the oregon trail learned about it in in elementary school in
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middle school or you probably learned about it playing the video game of the 1980s oregon trail
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right where your family always dies of dysentery well uh it was a big moment in american history
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one of the largest mass migrations in human history but a lot of people don't know that much
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about it well my guest today decided you know what i'm gonna cross the oregon trail in a covered
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wagon so i can learn more about this part of american history his name is rinker buck he's an
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author journalist and now one of the first people to cross the oregon trail in nothing but a
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covered wagon in over 100 years and he did it he made it all the way to oregon along with his brother
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and today on the podcast we're going to discuss his book the oregon trail a new american journey
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we discuss some of the details about this very unique aspect of american history we talk about
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the things that rinker had to relearn these lost skills that we've lost as a culture things like
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how to handle mules how to repair a wagon he had to learn this on the fly in order to make this trip
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a success and then we also talk about what he learned about being a man uh while on this over
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four month journey across the oregon trail if you love history you're gonna get a kick out of this
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podcast rinker is uh is a character he's really funny and he knows his history uh so without further
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ado rinker buck the oregon trail rinker buck welcome to the show hey it's great to be here
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all right so your book is the oregon trail a new american journey and it is part memoir part history
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book and it's basically it's your travel log of you and your brother in a covered wagon pulled by mules
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and you guys do the oregon trail uh first off this is great like what inspired you to do this and
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why did you think that was even a possibility well um what happened was i became i've always written a
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lot about history and i'm kind of i'm one of these people that uh i couldn't decide what i wanted to do
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with my life be a writer or be a historian so i've kind of done both and um i happen to be out
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working on a assignment as a journalist in kansas and uh i ran across the stretch of the trail
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and i walked it there's a lot of original ruts left of the 2100 mile trail um about half of the
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original ruts are still there and the rest is just a two-lane blacktop that you can follow very easily
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and it's really still the oregon trail because it functions for those communities the same way but
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at any rate i became fascinated by the trail after walking the ruts and stopping at a couple sites
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and the reason was is that um i don't really like the way we teach history in this country and
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you know we never explain to kids we tell them the guy george washington was but
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we don't include the information that he was the richest guy in america and he had he had a lot of
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motivation to uh separate from the british crown so it amazed me when i got into trail history
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that so many of the myths uh and romance and fantasy from hollywood and so forth about the trail years
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and about the opening of the west were just plain inaccurate so for instance women played a really
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critical role in uh opening up the trail because there was a big cultural prejudice about uh women
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crossing the trail it's considered dangerous and uh one particular woman their sister whitman who i write
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about a lot really opened up the trail um the indians were friendly at first uh until we started
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slaughtering the buffalo in such numbers that they realized the uh end was near unless they became hostile
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um religion played a much greater role in driving people to the trail uh than anyone would ever tell you
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in a history book because historians tend to want to gloss over the fact that america was a very
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uncomfortable society a very bitter society in the 19th century there were huge religious battles over
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nonsensical doctrinal points in every small town and people got sick of it and they just they just
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decided i'm going to move somewhere where i got a little bit more religious elbow room and a lot of the
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uh a lot of the wagon trains were actually formed by a group of baptists a group of lutherans and so forth
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and it's hilarious to read the accounts because they get to a camping point oh we better go another
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mile i don't want to i don't want to park for the night near those methodists you know so um and and
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the uh outfitters uh were this classic american scammers they they overloaded they forced the pioneers to
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overload the wagons knowing full well that the pioneers would dump it off somewhere along the way and
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then they the outfitters could come along and pick it back up and bring it back to independence
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or saint joe and uh resale to the next group of suckers yeah the trail fascinated excuse me i was
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saying that yeah like someone like people would pack pianos yeah yeah yeah and and right they did
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pack pianos and you could literally uh by the 1850s you could literally navigate all the way to
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california or oregon along uh the oregon trail the first 1 000 miles of the california trail is the oregon
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trail and uh just navigate your way just by the debris field and that's literally true so um
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that fascinated me and i wanted to uh write a book about the real trail instead of the myth that was
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passed down to us as school children and then i came across in one of my history books a uh a statement
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that the last documented crossing of the trail had occurred uh in 1909 and i said to myself well
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why that's a much better book if the trail hasn't been crossed in over 100 years uh why don't i just
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buy a team of mules and a covered wagon and go and what happened was i had grown up on a horse farm
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where my dad was a was a wagon fan here he was a horse and buggy guy and we'd actually gone on a
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covered wagon trip as kids just between our farm in new jersey and pennsylvania much more modest adventure
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uh but you know how childhood memories are and everything it just it just enabled me it just
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empowered me to feel that i could do it and so it was pretty simple i bought a team of mules and a
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old restored wagon and everything and we left with my brother who's a much better horseman than i am
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and it probably stopped being simple the day we left so it simply formed the idea yeah and we'll get
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into that and i'm i thought as i was reading this book i learned so much about the oregon trail and
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i'll admit like i do before i read the book i really didn't know much about the oregon trail and i think
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that's very common too and i think it's odd because like you say in the book it's one of the it's one of
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the world's largest land migrations right that's ever happened in the history um and it shaped the
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country but we don't know much about it like why does the oregon trail get overlooked in american
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history oh i think what happens is um we sanitize a lot of uh history uh there's a guy named tim low
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and there's a really excellent book called lies my teacher's to them and he talks about this process as
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uh heroification in order to heroify someone um and pass down a version of myth that um school
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school boards across the books have you have to sort of present the side of that person
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uh that's acceptable uh to the american public and to the kind of people who buy textbooks so the oregon
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trail i think kind of got lost out um because the curriculum is that there's so many other uh
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important periods they have to deal with but also the historians really didn't want to deal with what
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really happened on the trail religious squabbling huge on battles literally between the mormons and the
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um non-mormon christians um a huge amount of scamming by the uh uh by the outfitters you know very
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dishonest business practices like you know we'd see today or ralph nader would ran on about uh the
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pioneers knew they were uh drinking bad water that was causing dysentery um and also gave them cholera
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and killed them um and there was actually enough medicine around enough science around to begin to
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understand why that was so but they continued to drink the bad water because it was all they had
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things like that and i i think maybe the trail was just too complex too violent too difficult
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uh all the things that i describe in my books you know yeah that's on what what history history book
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writers want to pass on is it's something that's simple you know myth that's simple they don't want
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questions at the end they want to answer everything and in fact history is a enigma sometimes they're not
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answers yeah so sometimes it's much more complex and much more nuanced um so this is great so if someone
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hasn't done this in over a hundred years i imagine there were skills that you had to acquire uh relearn
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or revive in order to make this happen what sort of things did you have to teach yourself in order to
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make this uh trip possible there were all sorts of things the art of um wagon making and the art of
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driving mules has been lost i mean there's a reason it hasn't been crossed in 100 years
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because nobody's been driving around in wagons for 100 years so little things like no one could
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tell us even all the armish you know and people who use horses all the time no one could tell us uh
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how often we'd have to reshoe the horses the mules and we actually reshoed them uh five times my
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my uh reshoeing bill my blacksmith bill was uh twenty five hundred dollars when the trip ended
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wow um so we just had to leave um with that uncertainty and not know and it turns out about
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250 miles of continuous travel uh which which is only two or three weeks um and you better reshoe
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again we had a really good wagon restore in kansas the guy did a really great job getting our wagon
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together and designing or i designed and he built for me something called the trail pup which was a
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two-wheel commissary cart that we towed behind the main covered wagon so that we wouldn't have to have
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any motorized support we could just carry all our provisions with us and a lot of work but he had no
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idea in fact in the 19th century um you know i later studied up on it but in the 19th century
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they always had an old shoe or an old piece of saddle or something on their wooden brake shoes
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uh so that the wooden brake shoe the oak brake shoe hitting the iron tire rim wouldn't wear through
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and uh you know our wagon guy said he's and we said well we think we're going to need brake linings
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at least those brakes those wooden brakes will last you all the way to oregon well they didn't last
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just 100 miles so we had to find some thresher belt um the amish were absolutely convinced that we
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would hook our our three meals up we've hooked up three breast with something called a jockey stick
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which you you just have two horse lines and uh and then you connect the third meal just with a stick
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between bits which is how the amish do it in their fields and and that was totally wrong 100% wrong
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about three days after about three days on the trip as soon as we got out of sight of the amish you know
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we uh we called a harness maker in uh new hampshire and said hey can you ship us three three horse lines
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you know to this following address we'll be there in a week or something and it changed the trip
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dramatically so things like that i mean learning that uh i mean there were stretches in wyoming where
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it's 50 miles between the rivers and we had to carry all our water we would have to go 50 miles in a
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single day to get to water and everyone said there's no way you can get 50 miles in a single
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day you can't do it you're going to have to have motorized support and we said well we're not going
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to have motorized support and you know i learned to navigate across the desert straight across the
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desert using certain landmarks and hawks and where the hawks were because the hawks were always near where
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the prairie dogs are and the prairie dogs are always near the river cultures things like that
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and we we had several days where we did 42 50 miles because we had to get the water by the end
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of the day we couldn't wake up without water in the morning to have enough water for our mules
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um there were trails there's a lot of places the trails pretty well marked across the country but
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they don't always mark it at an intersection so you come to a y in a road and uh the actual trail
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marker is another mile or two down over the covered wagon that's that's an hour's trip and it's really
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hard to turn them around to go back because the guys who marked the trail do them with pickup trucks
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and atvs and that kind of thing so i had to learn to uh dead wrecking and land navigate uh it was a
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mistake we should have brought a horse along so that i could ride ahead and scout trail i ended up
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scouting about 700 miles of trail on foot this is something i never you know it's i i walked a third
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of the trail just to figure out where we were you know and i guess the last thing i would say is uh
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see the pioneers had covered wagon trains for a reason you have 50 wagons 100 wagons and you have
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all that labor you got all those men you got all the kids you get to a steep place like california hill
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uh or rocky ridge really dangerous places for wagon in uh went to nebraska the other's in wyoming
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and uh you know the pioneers unload the wagons the kids and the young teenage girls and everything
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carry all the bed stands and roll the barrels of pork and everything up the hill now you have a
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light wagon you double team you put two or three teams on a single wagon and pull up a light wagon
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and you've got all that labor to do it stupid rinker the dumbest jackass in the world he goes
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he goes oh i'll figure that out when i get to california hill and it was really brutal getting
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up those places because we didn't have a covered wagon train to help us i also figured out after we
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got to the top of california hill which is above the platte river in the rules lebraska that i could
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very easily have gotten about a thousand pounds off that wag uh leaving some hay behind because
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there was plenty of hay up on top i could get rid of my water because you know water weighs
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eight pounds a gallon you know i could have gotten rid of about seven or eight hundred pounds of water
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uh left our feed behind everything because i knew there were ranches up on top of the plateau
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where i would be able to replenish that stuff or i could have gone back the next day with a pickup
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bar to pick up truck or something gotten all my hay and stuff but um like a jack yeah so i just
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let my brother talk me into hey we can get up there and then we got we got up to the first level you
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know and it's holy we're not gonna whoa no but somehow we struggled with and we made it so there
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were just tons of things that you couldn't learn before you left you just had to teach yourself along
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the way and the uh the theme of the journey really for us was and i talk about this in the book is
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you got to learn to live with uncertainty and if the art of horsemanship and traveling by covered
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wagon hasn't been done in a hundred years there's all kinds of really important things like you know
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brake pads um that you got to teach yourself along the way yeah i love that theme of uncertainty because i
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think it's it's something that uh us in our 21st century uh society and culture where anything we
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want we can get at a push of a button literally right um we have so much certainty our lives and i feel
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like uh our pioneer forebears like they really learned how to manage or live with uncertainty
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yeah and many of them had moved their farms three or four times but by the time he was 21 abraham lincoln
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had lived on five different farms and um and his experience was by no means unusual so people lived
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with uncertainty again you know you'd stake out a claim you'd ranch it you'd do whatever you had to
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and five or six years later economic conditions had changed and you know you had to do something else
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so people learned to live with uncertainty and i kind of feel sorry for our culture today
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especially the millennials and the young kids because the whole system has been
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geared up and distorted to give them certainty you know well this is my major in college and i have to
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do two internships do two student internships which is basically a form of a culture of corporate
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slavery you know like unpaid internships and so they do that and then that means i can get a job at google
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it's not google it'll be some other entrepreneurial startup out in silicon valley blah blah blah and
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the whole life it's everything's done oh i know exactly what i'm going to be doing you know
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and uh to me that's that's a terrible way to live you know go off and take some adventure where you're
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not certain of the outcome you gotta you gotta figure out the outcome so our whole culture is based on
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knowing the outcome predicting the outcome and uh what i learned on the covered wagon trip is
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there is no outcome the outcome is the journey itself you know yeah and uh you're not certain
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i mean i left i you know my agent said to me he said hey look if your wheels break halfway through
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nebraska there's still probably a book here you know and and i knew that was true and i left i had
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no idea whether we'd make they didn't know how we were going to cross the rivers uh all kinds of
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things and uh and you know we had huge stretches of land across the private ranches turned out the
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ranches were great and couldn't wait to see us and stuff like that and um it's just a new uncertainty
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every day yeah and i guess what can break is that spirit yeah and i guess it makes you uh more resilient
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when things don't go the way you planned right and you just bounce back all right well i can't do
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anything about it we'll go to plan b now yeah yeah and sometimes there isn't a plan b you just
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figure out plan b as you go along like we came to this place called dempsey ridge it was 8 300 feet
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and uh a mile and a half we had to drop down to uh 6 000 feet along the bear river in idaho
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it was sort of a big crossing of the rockies and uh it was hugely dangerous there's a 300 foot cliff
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on the left side of this very narrow trail we had to follow it's it's miraculous that we got down
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there without getting killed we could easily have been killed because nobody knew that was another
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big thing of the trip nobody knows nobody can tell us we even stopped at the blm office view of land
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management office um nearby before we took on dempsey ridge and and they go well you know it's our land
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it's it is government land but we haven't been up there in a while and i'm not quite sure what
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you're gonna find you know and um so you just learn to live with uncertainty and but the big thing for
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me is go ahead and make a decision and move forward you can always reverse that decision tomorrow
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every decision is is reversible and we tend to live nowadays via you've got to sit down and put
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everything down on a piece of paper and do a spreadsheet on it and everything advantages
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versus disadvantages so forth and you got to make the right decision well no you don't have to make
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the right decision we had a ball we spent four months crossing the organ trail i made i probably
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made a bad decision every day and we got there yeah and i'm sure that that's i mean i'm sure a lot
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of the original uh settlers they probably wouldn't even have left if they tried to make sure micromanage
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every aspect of the of their trip they just probably wouldn't even left because like it's
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just too daunting i can't do that yeah yeah and and we distort that in history because we sort of
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depict the pioneers oregon or bus which by the way they didn't even have that on their wagons but um
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what would happen actually was amazing when you get to places like parting of the ways where the trail
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would split for going to california down to nevada and utah and or going to oregon up to idaho
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northwest and it was amazing how many people actually made their decision all right let's go
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to california right there that morning you know they didn't leave knowing what they were doing
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imagine you got your whole family on board you know and so there were about five or six different
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places along the trail where people go well you know all right let's go to let's go to california
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we weren't planning on that but let's do it you know um so these people that we that we worship as
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our our myth creators are are kind of uh icons we give to them attributes that they didn't really have
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yeah and we we sort of i mean i think in the process you take away something i think it's
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actually kind of admirable or makes it more relatable because i could totally see myself
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doing that like okay this is my original plan i don't want to do that anymore i'm going to go this
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way uh makes it much more relatable so here's a question i have so when people talk here's kind
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of the myth of the oregon trail it's not just one trail right like there's multiple oregon trails
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he talked a little bit about that sure it's a collection of trails and again it's the way
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history is taught they they got to simplify everything there was a single oregon jail
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i guess because they they feel that kids need certainty they need to know exactly what it was
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and even if it wasn't that instead of giving kids complexity so what happened was in in the buffalo
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days you know the buffalo cross and the buffalo found this crossing uh on this along the sweet
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water river called south pass the continental divide there and it's just this very gradual climb
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up and climb down there's no big v it's not like what you traditionally think of as a pass and the
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wildlife knew for millennia that that was a way to get across the rockies to find other feeding
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grounds the indians followed the shoshone the sioux so forth followed the buffalo across and they
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always knew about top pass and um in about 18 or two 1804 that that period when the a little later
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maybe uh when the historians were uh pioneering the fur routes the uh fur trappers you and going
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through the rockies they learned about it from the indians the covered wagon uh wagon masters learned
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about the south the route to south pass along the platte river and the sweetwater river from the fur
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trappers so there was this continuity along the way but once they got to south pass well first of all
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before south pass in nebraska people were on the north side of the river the south side of the river
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15 or 20 miles could separate them there were all kinds of shortcuts once they got to wyoming
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then once they got through south pass which pretty much everybody took the same route between there
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and the idaho line um so central wyoming to idaho the trail was 150 miles wide there was the lander
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cutoff which the federal government built there was the sudlet cutoff there was the kinney cutoff there
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was the salt creek cutoff and then there were the main ruts that ran down to fourth grazier in the old
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rendezvous country which was the fur trapper route and then you get into um idaho and so forth and
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there were tons and tons of cutoffs because if the indians were uh not very hospitable during one year
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or another they might go on the south side uh of the snake river and so forth so there's 40 major cutoffs
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we took a lot of we took the sublet cutoff um a flood uh at a place called willow creek blocked us from
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going we couldn't cross willow creek so we had to take the seminal cutoff uh which i knew was there
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but isn't really marked nowadays but i i managed to find it and the whole thing was the oregon trail
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was a collection of trails it's a collection of cutoffs most of the cutoffs the seminal cutoff the
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sublet cutoff the lander road were more traveled were more heavily traveled after they were placed
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than the original oregon trail west themselves so i explained all of that in the book and it was
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actually one of the biggest revelations for me because i thought too oh just one trail yeah no
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it's it's an associated terrain it's a broad avenue to the west that the pioneers filed to new futures
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in either the pacific northwest or california okay so one of the uh the main characters in the book it's
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you and your brother we'll talk about your brother in a bit because he's a he's a character yeah but
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the other ones that i i grew to love were the mules um right and it's funny because like you used mules
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and i'm accustomed to seeing these you know picturesque pictures of uh paintings of uh covered
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wagons being pulled by oxen and if you know i'm a child of the 80s i played oregon trail you use oxen in
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the video game so why mules okay so oxen were uh probably uh slightly more some historians would
00:26:10.740
say maybe about a 60 percent more common uh draft animal than uh than mules horses were eliminated and
00:26:17.780
it and that's why you know all these stupid john wayne with these wagon train and all you know they
00:26:22.100
have these beautifully matched belgian or percher on horses there's no way you would use a horse uh and
00:26:28.260
i explain all that in the book because they just don't have the stamina and they've got about a
00:26:32.500
thousand extra pounds of weight that the mules don't have um the oxen were more common uh but only
00:26:39.780
by maybe a slight fraction um and the reason i didn't want to use the oxen is is you got to walk along
00:26:46.900
beside them and crack the pull whip and everything and um you know i know i know equines i don't know
00:26:53.860
i'd never traveled with mules before but i figured i could learn to drive mules but uh you know i
00:26:59.700
couldn't imagine old rinkers standing there you know harnessing yoking up sally the ox you know
00:27:08.980
and talking her into it um the other reason that mules were preferred by people who could afford them
00:27:14.420
the oxen were cheaper but mules were preferred because they're a lot faster mule travel that uh
00:27:19.220
uh uh you you spend most of the day at a pretty what they call a fast walk and that's about four
00:27:25.220
miles 4.5 miles an hour um you can do 25 30 miles a day pretty easily uh actually move at about 2.5
00:27:34.260
miles an hour and it's just very ponderous and slow they're very strong very reliable but but uh
00:27:39.780
ponderous and slow so um and there's a whole chapter in the book i probably shouldn't waste the time here but
00:27:46.820
there's a whole chapter in the book about how the mule developed and how it was really the mule
00:27:52.660
that um that made america the mule created america and it's a very unique story about how they got here
00:27:59.300
and how we were finally able to learn to breed them and so forth yeah i thought that was one of the most
00:28:03.620
interesting parts of the book because i because people keep you know being in the south people
00:28:07.620
typically think of the mule sort of like this like hick thing right yeah uh it's what right but like like
00:28:13.140
most of the mules in america right am i correct like they came from george washington's
00:28:16.660
original stock right right um after the american revolution um america was finally able to
00:28:26.580
begin importing these things called the mammoth jacks which is what you breed to a female horse
00:28:31.780
to get a big draft meal and uh we did not have as a country we did not have access to the mammoth
00:28:38.420
jacks prior to the american revolution because the two countries that controlled that breed which was
00:28:45.540
um spain and france uh wouldn't wouldn't allow the trade of those mammoth jacks wouldn't allow any to
00:28:52.020
come to the country because they were of course engaged in not only a war but a trade war with
00:28:58.180
britain and they were going to help the british colonies as soon as the revolution was over and
00:29:03.140
george washington was now a global hero for having trumped the enemies of spain and france
00:29:11.380
the um the royal stables of both countries essentially just sent us as many mammoth jacks
00:29:17.620
as we wanted and then they sent them to george washington and he's the guy that got the mule
00:29:22.580
started and they weren't a southern animal either even though they all started down there um if you go
00:29:28.820
back and look at the canal era which was this glorious wonderful era in american history up north
00:29:34.740
everywhere else we actually had more canals up north than there were anywhere else in the country
00:29:40.900
all the old pictures you see all the old mythologies all the old you know eerie canal song and stuff that
00:29:46.260
kids used to learn in school um show mules in the in the north pulling the canal boats so so mules were
00:29:52.260
everywhere yeah and like they're still used today and you mentioned in the military still has like a mule
00:29:58.900
team that they take them out to afghanistan to yeah
00:30:04.980
the military actually has um two separate locations uh for um mules at this point one in alabama
00:30:14.500
and one in uh in california and they keep up uh riding mules packing with etc because there's
00:30:20.660
you could always get a crisis unlike we had in afghanistan where you've got to get supplies in there
00:30:27.060
and uh you can't drop them in whatever and uh in fact some of our earliest attacks on the taliban
00:30:33.300
we're uh we're done uh with with the aid of mule packs so the american military still maintains them
00:30:40.340
and they've actually come back and vote they're a very fashionable animal now uh people are breeding
00:30:45.300
really fancy tennis walking mules and all this kind of stuff again i get into that in the book and it's
00:30:50.900
pretty fascinating yeah it is really i would make it made me want to get a mule
00:30:53.620
yeah yeah um so yeah and they um what was your what was your typical day like i mean were there
00:31:03.620
some days like were they all was one of those things like days just sort of bled into days or
00:31:07.140
were there was every day pretty much something like you woke up and like something could happen today
00:31:12.660
that could just completely throw this trip off i think the um i think the days were uh felicitous
00:31:20.100
blend of uh monotony and then and then uh something beautiful or very funny would happen
00:31:26.740
uh we would get up we would wake up um i slept in the covered wagon and my brother slept in a federal
00:31:33.700
on the desert floor we uh we we made 79 camps on the trip i'd say about half of them were at original
00:31:41.060
pioneer encampments places like plum creek and rock creek station and independence rock all the
00:31:47.140
places the pioneers camped uh it turns out the reasons that i explained in the book uh pretty
00:31:53.380
much to become state public parks and uh so but they're very beautiful places and oftentimes very very
00:32:02.180
remote places that the oregon trail country is still gorgeously undeveloped most of it and uh you can
00:32:10.020
wake up in the morning and see the same things that the pioneers did so we get up uh around uh 5 36 i
00:32:18.660
actually woke up earlier and i would uh make some breakfast for my brother and i feed the mules then
00:32:25.140
we'd harness it takes about half an hour 45 minutes to harness and hitch the wagon and then uh we would
00:32:31.780
often go we found it by early in the trip we found it by 5 30 or 6 in the evening
00:32:40.020
we'd done our allotted 25 miles for the day but we became kind of mile obsessed we just wanted to
00:32:45.780
make sure we were making enough progress so uh between 6 and 9 is actually a beautiful time to
00:32:52.980
travel with mules because in the evening because it's cool and so we do another 10 miles in the evening
00:33:00.260
and so that would get us into camp pretty much maybe an hour before sunset maybe sometimes at sunset
00:33:05.620
and then uh you're pretty exhausted you're tired from sitting on a wagon seat uh being in the sunlight
00:33:12.980
there in nebraska uh we'll walk through the west there's always about a 35 sometimes even a 40 mile
00:33:19.940
an hour wind on your face um which is something the pioneers battle quite a bit and uh you just tired
00:33:27.700
tired tired tired exhausted exhausted so we make up a dinner of hormel chili no beans that's basically
00:33:35.140
that's what we subsisted on for four months and then uh i i i collapsed into my bed with my boots on
00:33:43.620
literally i never did the dishes at night i was in the morning i was too exhausted um so there was a
00:33:50.740
monotony of it to that except you know once a week we stopped for a couple days give the meals a rest but
00:33:56.740
then in the middle of the day you'd come on some spectacular place like california hill or
00:34:04.580
uh description rock or we had this three-day adventure where we had to get through uh
00:34:10.580
something called the south hills of eastern wyoming where the trail isn't marked the trail
00:34:15.460
there but it's never marked yeah it's been all country and so i had to get up every morning and
00:34:21.380
climb to the top of the nearest peak and figure out what was my compass course to stay on the plat river
00:34:28.660
and that sort of stuff so it was a combination of monotony and just absolute fun thrilling stuff
00:34:35.380
you know a lot of nights we get to a ranch and people we're we're making you a steak dinner you
00:34:40.580
know get yourself all settled and come on into the house you know so combination of monotony beauty and
00:34:46.900
spark that's awesome um so your brother went along with you and originally when you were going to do
00:34:52.420
this trip you weren't planning on bringing your brother along um but he come to find out he served
00:34:58.660
it he's like an asset like he was like he made the trip possible and i love he's just really funny can
00:35:03.220
you tell us about your brother and what skills he brought to your trip to make it possible yeah well
00:35:09.540
anybody who complains anybody who complains about their family and you know filial relationships or
00:35:15.060
sibling relationships they ought to read this book because it's the kind of thing it's like
00:35:20.340
you don't you don't know what it's what it's like to have it bad so my brother and i grew up we were um
00:35:26.500
on this horse farm in new jersey we were a big family 11 kids so that and i was at the top and he was more
00:35:33.300
in the middle and what happens in families like that is big families is but different siblings have
00:35:40.660
completely different growing up experiences because the parents are at a completely different point
00:35:46.100
uh say with the older kids and with the younger kids so uh in my family nick was the guy that turned
00:35:52.900
out there's a couple others too but nick was one of the ones that turned out uh you know i went to
00:35:57.220
college and considered myself sort of a refined person and you know you come to my house and i have
00:36:02.340
antiques you go into nick's house if it's if it's an antique it's really an antique and uh he he's
00:36:09.700
basically uh sort of a defiantly you know assertively blue collar guy and uh he builds houses and fixes up
00:36:18.580
barns and stuff like that for people um but he's also extraordinarily a joy at a wagon mechanics he's
00:36:26.660
one of the few people i've ever heard of he made a living for 10 years a very good living
00:36:31.140
uh driving uh a place at a new hampshire ski resort to cart people around and then during the
00:36:39.540
summer he was a fisherman in alaska he worked in the alaska fishery so he has this brilliant
00:36:45.060
mechanical background and new driving experience and everything um but the big personality difference
00:36:51.780
between us is he just considers you know anybody who's wasted their life to the extent of getting a
00:36:57.860
college education it's just they're inherently stupid you know like he was talking to a friend
00:37:04.020
of his once i heard overheard it because he has a loud voice and his friend was saying well i don't
00:37:08.900
know i met your brother he seems like a nice guy you know it's obvious that he reads a lot of books and
00:37:15.860
nick said to him uh oh no it's much worse than that much worse he writes books you know so
00:37:23.220
so uh so uh we're basically incompatible very different people you know and a lot of the
00:37:32.180
book was about and yes it's true without him i wouldn't have been able to make it because he
00:37:36.660
could fix things you know wheels would break parts of the wagon would break the mules would run away all
00:37:41.380
this stuff and uh fix them and handle the mules and stuff a lot better than than i could but there's
00:37:48.420
a clear division of labor uh but the the point is that we had to conquer our personality differences
00:37:55.540
i had to learn to just ignore the uh the insults and the behavior and and so forth um and he had to
00:38:02.980
learn to endure you know my uh from his standpoint unimaginable stupidity that results from a college
00:38:13.380
education um and and the book is really about how two siblings who have a lot in common but
00:38:21.700
who have very different personalities conquer those differences uh to make the journey happen
00:38:27.380
yeah yeah i mean and you had to right you had no choice and i'm sure that's why uh you know that
00:38:32.820
happened with the early travelers as well the early pioneers uh it probably was a lot of personality
00:38:38.260
differences but they're like all right got to get over that because we got to make this happen
00:38:41.460
whereas today if you don't like your sibling well you can just go to another state or go to another
00:38:47.780
room if you're still living with your parents yeah it's a good point because uh it's a good point
00:38:54.020
because it's something we don't talk about with the pioneers there was a brutal calculus of personality
00:38:59.380
involved a brutal calculus of personality that made american history what if you get in your civil
00:39:04.900
war union you don't get along with the guys what if you get in on the organ trail and you don't get
00:39:11.060
along with people because so many people were randomly diversely thrown together uh it's
00:39:17.380
coping skills it's coping skills that makes you successful and uh the book the book's about that
00:39:22.580
a lot yeah so i mean what was the end of the trip like um so you you four months was it like did you
00:39:29.700
like since like feel a sense of accomplishment or i can imagine me doing something like that and i
00:39:34.420
would get you know be really excited for the ending then the ending would come and i'd be like
00:39:37.540
well that wasn't sort of anticlimactic i mean what was the the end of the trip like for you
00:39:43.220
the end of the trip was was a great feeling of accomplishment because
00:39:48.980
so many people thought i was crazy to do it and and they said you know you're gonna you don't really
00:39:53.460
know what you're doing you know um yeah you've driven wagons and all that but you just you just
00:39:59.300
know you don't know what you're doing you're not brutal and rugged enough and so forth
00:40:02.980
um and so it was a great feeling of accomplishment that we actually got a team of mules and a covered
00:40:09.780
wagon to oregon despite all the hazards we ran into we haven't talked about the times the wagon broke
00:40:15.540
and things but it was mixed with depression actually because i i wanted to live out on that
00:40:21.380
trail forever i love you know the romance of being um out in these beautiful open plains and rocky
00:40:33.540
mountains of the american west which are really quite unchanged i mean they're just the same beautiful
00:40:39.940
vistas that the pioneers saw and um sorry there's an airplane taking off here
00:40:51.620
sorry no worries people people listening to the podcast who know that i'm also a pilot will find
00:40:57.860
it enjoyable that i happen to be doing this podcast uh at the end of my favorite runway so um
00:41:05.860
so it was mixed with depression because i just didn't want this it was a very miracle beautiful
00:41:11.700
rugged um glorious adventure um so it was mixed with depression but also happiness because i found a really
00:41:20.740
great uh kind of retirement home for the mule someone wanted to take those mules over from us
00:41:25.860
um that was a very good thing that i didn't have to sell them and split up the team and then maybe the
00:41:32.100
last source of depression is and you you probably know this a little bit uh it's uh oh crap now i gotta go
00:41:40.660
home and write this book all right well i mean okay i just had one last one last question before
00:41:47.700
before we go i mean what was this is the art of manliness podcast what was did you learn anything
00:41:53.220
about being a man right uh while going on this trip or were there some was there a lot some life lesson
00:41:59.700
that you took from this trip that you you're carrying with you today
00:42:02.980
day sure uh first of all i think that um i think that my brother and i are really really rugged and
00:42:10.100
uh we we just have this ability to just go on all day and no matter how hot we are and how much sun and
00:42:18.100
wind is affecting us because we grew up on a farm and that sort of thing but i don't talk about that um
00:42:25.300
mostly it was just the combination of being with a brother with whom you sort of share a lot of values
00:42:32.580
and family legacy um made it possible to have the endurance to cross the trail but the second side
00:42:41.140
of it is is that um i think there's um i don't want to say the wrong thing and offend women but
00:42:49.140
i think there's something about the female sensibility that they are more interested in um expressing
00:42:57.780
vulnerability and and not asserting that they know they know the answer and something very important
00:43:06.820
happens to you when you do become vulnerable and you don't know the answer which which really happened
00:43:12.180
a lot on the trail i just well how the hell are we going to get across this river now it's overflowed what
00:43:17.140
am i going to do um and in the sort of back of my mind i remember well there is a cutoff in this
00:43:24.180
area that i might be able to take it fine um but what happens when you express vulnerability
00:43:31.220
and what happens when you adopt an attitude of i don't really know instead of this manly thing
00:43:39.620
is that your mind suddenly opens up to all the possibilities of other things that you could think
00:43:45.940
of or try um in other words whatever that chemical is that flows through your body the opposite
00:43:54.100
of adrenaline say that makes you open to exploring things um actually opens up the intellectual
00:44:02.180
possibilities of what you can achieve in this situation and so i learned that there was a
00:44:08.100
a very manly side uh of course just endurance not worrying about uh taking showers you know it took us
00:44:16.980
29 days to cross wyoming and we only had three showers the whole time um perseverance
00:44:23.700
being able to hold mules back when they're trying to run away at you and stuff but that was only half
00:44:28.420
of it the other half of it was not being arrogant not being masculine not being uh certain and just
00:44:37.540
allowing situations to define themselves and to have a very open inquiring mind so that's probably
00:44:47.380
i'm not saying that's a big change but it was certainly the the big personality split
00:44:54.980
that was reinforced by traveling the oregon trail fantastic well rinker your book is fantastic i'm going
00:45:00.900
to i want all my readers to go out there and get it because it's just a fun fun read and you're
00:45:04.180
going to learn a lot along the way thank you so much for your time it's been a pleasure my guest
00:45:09.540
today was rinker buck he's the author of the book the oregon trail a new american journey you can find
00:45:14.340
that on amazon.com and really if you love history go pick this book up i learned a lot about american
00:45:19.300
history through this book that i didn't know about and it's just a fun fun read i mean i laughed out
00:45:24.500
loud several times while reading this book again oregon trail go check it out
00:45:30.820
well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice
00:45:35.220
make sure to check out the art of manliness website at art of manliness.com
00:45:38.340
and until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay manly