The Last Empty Places (26 page)

T
he first one to stumble out was Martin Blanding.

He was found in mid-October 1853,
¹
by a thirteen-year-old boy, Dave Mathews, who’d been out herding cattle near Disappointment Butte, in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, when he spotted a smoldering campfire. Dave Mathews discovered Martin Blanding lying on the ground beside the fire, so weak he could barely move to acknowledge Mathews. He’d clumsily jammed a stick in the earth suspended over the fire on which he’d skewered a hunk of “slunk colt.” He’d hacked it from the hindquarters of a foal that had just been born from the mare he’d been riding. Blanding, barely able to lift the gun, had killed the foal the evening before.

Mathews told Blanding that there was a house nearby. Blanding “cried for joy” and, when they arrived at the dwelling, stuffed food into his mouth so fast that the hosts forced him to stop before he became ill.

He managed to get out his story. A party of 250 wagons had taken a shortcut on the Oregon Trail. They’d left the main trail weeks earlier near Fort Boise. The “Cut-Off” led them across the huge, empty spaces of modern-day southeastern Oregon. They’d become disoriented amid the great untracked valleys, the mountain ranges, the deserts, the alkaline lakes. They couldn’t find water. They’d run out of food except some flour and the stringy flesh of near-dead cows. After weeks of wandering, they’d discarded bedsteads, buckets, starving cows, and even left their wagons behind. The party fragmented. Finally Blanding and another man struck westward to seek help.

The rest of them are all still out there
, the starving Blanding told his hosts. Out there in the wild empty spaces. The women, the children, the babies. A whole train of them, 250 wagons and more than a thousand people. Running out of food. Winter closing in. Lost.

I
HEADED TOWARD SOUTHEAST
O
REGON
at the end of May. It was a good time of year to visit, I’d heard, when birds migrated through
desert-ringed marshlands and the mountain grasses still kept their spring green. I bade goodbye to my family, climbed into my battered, twenty-year-old Isuzu Trooper at our home in Missoula, Montana—the rig had a rugged undercarriage and powerful four-wheel drive that I anticipated I might need—caught the entrance ramp to Interstate 90 four blocks from our house, and drove west into the Bitterroot Mountains.

It was hot—very hot for late May—in the mid-nineties down in the valleys. Yet high on the peaks of the Bitterroots the deep, melting snows lingering from a long winter glistened temptingly against a cobalt sky. On days like this, I love to drive with all the windows down, hot breeze blasting through the unair-conditioned car, sun burning my bare forearm resting on the open window.

Interstate 90 spilled me from the minty Bitterroots onto the dry, rolling, beige wheatlands of eastern Washington. Trying to make time on the four-lane roads while they lasted, I sheared south on Highway 395, crossing a sweeping bend of the Columbia River at Pasco and Kennewick. The river swirled with muddy snowmelt running off ten thousand mountains and now shoving against the massive pilings of the highway bridge. The little creek that gurgled past our front door in Missoula several hundred miles upstream, in the mountains, ended up here.

Across the Columbia, I entered Oregon. For much of the country, Oregon conjures mossy rainforests and Pacific waves crashing on rocky headlands. That version of Oregon certainly exists—on the
west
side of the Cascades. The mountain range creates a wall separating the two climates and two halves of Oregon. Wet air masses sweep in from the Pacific, climb up that wall, cool in temperature, pour down the rain that “cascades” back to the Pacific in salmon-filled streams. That air has been squeezed dry by the time it makes it over the range and reaches eastern Oregon. That half of the state has a desertlike, semiarid climate. The two halves are like black and white—or rather, emerald green and dusty beige.

Rumbling west, the Oregon Trail pioneers hungered for those green and fertile lands on the
west
side of the Cascades—especially the famously lush Willamette Valley, the final destination sought by many of the wagon trains. But to reach it, they had to get past high, dry eastern Oregon. The safest, and by far most common, route was simply to
skirt northward around it in a long detour that followed the Snake and Columbia rivers until the Columbia—and the wagon trains—reached the moist side of the Cascades. This kept the emigrants along good, sweet water the whole way.

But the
shortest
route to the Willamette aimed straight across the high deserts of southeastern Oregon. Over their two-thousand-mile journey from Independence, Missouri, to the Willamette Valley, which took four to six months, the pilots of the prairie-schooner caravans constantly looked for “Cut-Offs”—shortcuts—that potentially could save many days of grinding travel. Most of these cutoffs they discovered did, in fact, save miles and time. But the one across southeast Oregon proved, over several attempts, to be an unmitigated disaster. As I read the old diary accounts by emigrants who survived it, I came to think of southeastern Oregon as the Bermuda Triangle of wagon trains.

The southeast was the last part of Oregon to get settled, and even now, it’s not “settled” in the common sense of the term. This is ranch country
—big
ranches. A small ranch here covers 25,000 acres. The large ones encompass holdings beyond anything that we consider conventional “ownership” of land. They are their own territories, sovereignties of open spaces.

You can still get lost here, and people do, willingly and not. They get lost in a different way of life, a different rhythm, a different sense of boundaries and space. Once you’ve been there, it’s easy to see why it attracted those who wished to live a life of adventure, those who did things their own way, and those whose preferred, by their own sense of necessity, or the sheer thrill of it, to live outside the conventional boundaries of the law.

Some of the Old West still lives here today, bumping with increasing force into the “New West.” Or maybe it’s vice versa. As ever, it centers on who controls—and how to treat—the land. Maybe that Old West was never more than a mirage. In our mythology it implies the ultimate freedom to do whatever you wanted. Maybe it was true in the West—as long as you possessed the land. But possessing the land—these vast acreages—was never easy and always temporary.

As one of America’s first naturalists to move west, John Muir understood this. He intimately grasped the importance of controlling the land. Having spent his youth clearing his family’s farm in the wilderness of Wisconsin, he was attuned to the motives of those who coveted
land for profit and to the benefits of keeping land in the domain of the public. You could argue that Muir, starting in the 1870s when he came to Yosemite, represented the first crusader for a New West. He traveled through much of the West, including Oregon and the Nevada basin country near my destination. To this day, Muir’s voice remains one of the most powerful to advocate wilderness and empty spaces.

A
T
P
ENDLETON
, H
IGHWAY
395
SHRANK
to two lanes and climbed out of the Columbia River Valley up a long draw. In a narrow valley among grassy hills, I glided through the tiny burg of Pilot Rock, where a large basalt cliff hefted above a clump of houses and cottonwood trees. The cliff had served as a navigation point for pilots guiding their wagon trains along the main stem of the Oregon Trail, the route that followed the Columbia and skirted around the high deserts of southeastern Oregon. As I drove out of Pilot Rock, I scanned the pastures along the road for traces of wagon ruts—still existing in places along the Oregon Trail—but saw none.

It was early evening now. The sunlight mellowed to a deep gold. The temperature cooled and I brought my bare arm in, rolled up the window partway. The swerving road climbed another long grassy draw, still farther from the broad Columbia. Western meadowlarks trilled. I passed almost no other cars. I’d left the Interstate system, with its nodal interchanges that serve as our own landmarks, our own Pilot Rocks—these places we regard as safe ports of familiarity and sustenance and shelter with their Denny’s and McDonald’s and Burger Kings, their Texacos and Citgos, their Starbucks and Wal-Marts, their Hampton Inns and Motel 6s and Super 8s. I felt a thrill to leave that easy, familiar world and strike out into the realm of twisting roads and small dots of towns, with evening approaching, unsure where I’d stay the night.

The road climbed over a small, forested mountain range still holding on to a few dirty patches of winter’s old snow. A historical marker at the summit called it “Battle Mountain,” where the last significant fight against Indians in the Pacific Northwest occurred on July 8, 1878. They were, predictably, protesting against white encroachment.

They lost.

From the 4,200-foot summit of Battle Mountain, I descended into a broad valley, rimmed by distant wooded hills like a far-off shoreline
and specked, as if they were islands on the sea, by stands of ponderosa pines and patches of wet green meadow. There were virtually no houses. I sensed that this resembled the landscape the way it looked before white settlers arrived here. I sensed I was now entering the big country. It excited me the way all new and big country excites me with the desire almost literally to reach out and embrace it.

I swung down the canyon of surging Camas Creek, rose over another summit, down across another broad valley, climbed another summit, down across another valley, crossing the fingers of the Blue Mountains and forks of the John Day River, as if I were an ant running over a set of knuckles. Still I headed south on Highway 395. Finally, well after dark, after a fat yellow full moon rose over piney mountain ridges, I pulled into the small town of John Day. I found a motel and—with the town’s restaurants darkened at 10 p.m.—gratefully ate a takeout burger in my room and drank a beer.

T
ALL, CHEERFUL
—and perhaps mentally unstable—John Day was a forty-year-old Virginian and crack rifle shot
²
who, in 1811, joined the “Overland Party” that John Jacob Astor of New York City sent across the West to found a fur-trading empire on the Pacific Coast.

Astor had emigrated from Germany in the 1780s and, virtually upon stepping off the boat from Europe and with the advice of a fellow passenger, started a New York City fur shop. He then expanded into the Great Lakes fur trade, as well as New York real estate, and grew very wealthy. With the acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase and Lewis and Clark’s exploration to the Pacific in 1804–06, the ever-shrewd Astor saw the opportunity to massively expand his Great Lakes fur-trading business all the way to the West Coast, and beyond. This ambitious—even audacious—plan involved trading New York manufactured goods with the West Coast Indians for furs, trading the American furs in China for porcelain, and trading the Chinese porcelains back in New York for good money.