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Wagons Ho! MT
CWT, 1989
Photographer Unknown
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When Patrick and I set off, we were, between us: farrier,
author, actor, editor, sailor, storyteller, packer, philosopher,
commercial fisherman, drywall contractor, whitewater rafting
guide, teamster, cowboy, teacher, canoeist, seakayaker,
gourmet camp cook, wrangler, rambler, roughneck, and entrepreneur.
Now for a new type of adventure. Wagons ho! Yessiree! In
the 1850s, the wagons rolling west typically were built
without drivers' seats. Everyone walked. Or sometimes rode
a wheel horse (the team hitched closest to the wagon). If
a person came up sick, a pallet was fashioned in among the
stores of food and household belongs packed in the wagon
bed. Because our covered wagon was heavy and jammed to the
scuppers, one of us always walked, to spare the horses.
Our team, Pancho and Lefty, were draft horses in top condition,
but they were working to their limits “pulling our
wagonload of camp bedding, pots and pans, food boxes, coolers,
Coleman stove and lantern, a trunkful of clothes (petticoats,
high-button shoes, bonnets, and such), horse tack, grain,
battery post-and-wire paddock, a box of my books and our
maps and notebooks, large tarps and tipi poles to create
sheltered work areas, a mountain bike for laundry and grocery
runs into towns, a shovel, an ax, an anvil, a forge, Patrick's
shoeing tools, propane tanks, and a weighty assortment of
steel bar-stock for turning horseshoes.” (Barefoot
Hearted, Introduction) |
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Through the Horses' Ears WY
CWT, 1990 |
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“In
spring, we again took to the trail: some paved, some dirt,
some merely grass-grown wheel ruts. The Wyoming Centennial
Wagon Train [a hundred wagons and, on some days, as many
as six hundred outriders]—Casper to Cody over the course
of a month—was our last leg and the most trying. Early
American settlers in coming west had wound alongside rivers
when they could, bottomland that today is mostly fenced
and given over to irrigated field crops. Our sometimes five-mile-long
entourage—flags and horses and wagons and support trucks—was
routed instead across windswept cactus barrens.
“Beneath the big desert sun, our days unfolded in a
macaronic version of the Wild West. There were runaways,
fistfights, and failing money supplies—much like a
hundred fifty years ago. Wagons bogged down and turned over
in mud holes and sand pits. Wheels broke. Horses took sick.
A blond grit sifted into food containers and bedding and
underwear. Every evening about dinnertime, a semi truck
steamed into camp stacked high with hay for the stock: saddle
horses, packhorses, draft horses, mules, burros. The train's
water supply also arrived by truck. Two fat-bellied tankers
made the rounds from circle to circle, one filling the fourteen
stock tanks, the other the wagon barrels and canteens.
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On the hottest candy-sticky days and when the supply of
people's drinking water was judged to be in surplus, the
tanker driver mercifully held the big hose for large gatherings
of us standing around sudsing our sweat-itchy scalps and
dust-laden hair. Out of a second semi, a mobile grocery
store operated. You could purchase the overpriced food conveniently
offered at its back door, or do as we did and con tourists
agog over visiting an authentic-looking wagon train into
taking away a list of desired fresh vegetables, milk, and
eggs, and delivering them to the next camp. Each afternoon
about two o'clock, after the day's stint of hauling up steep
sagebrush grades and filing though sandstone canyons, invariably
we topped some rise and through the horses' ears I would
glimpse across a sun-bleached landscape a little town of
white buildings. It was the same town every day. Thirty-eight
portable outhouses trucked in for the night's camp.”
(from Barefoot Hearted)
*Unless otherwise noted, photographs
on this Website were taken by Kathleen Meyer. CWT stands
for Centennial Wagon Train. |
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Camped at Heart Butte, Wyoming
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View from the Wagon Seat, Madison
Range, Montana |
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Follow below links
to more photos
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Wind-swept
Cactus Barrens,
WY CWT |
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