Haunted Highway

THE OREGON TRAIL--Federal Writers' Project--Hastings House ($2).

No modern highway follows the historic roads to Oregon all the way. The wagon trains of a century ago ranged over the valleys to get out of ruts and dust; in some places the Oregon Trail was 20 miles wide. But US 30, following the long curves on the north bank of the Platte River across Nebraska, climbing on its oiled roadbed to cross the Laramie Mountains of Wyoming, swinging north past the ghost towns and hot springs of Idaho, most nearly follows the route of the greatest mass migration in U. S. history: almost every mile of its 2,110 covers traces of the covered wagons.

One of the best of the Federal Writers' Project's books, The Oregon Trail describes the highway as it is now (near the crest of the Sherman Range, Wyo., 8,835 ft. up, it warns: "Blizzards frequent in this vicinity, October to April; usually come very suddenly; seek shelter at once."). Its best accomplishment is its picture of the Oregon Trail's magnificent past--a picture communicated by rare photographs of wagon trains, railway construction camps, settlers' cabins, scalped hunters (see cut), as well as by new accounts of the pioneers who moved like a tidal wave across the plains. From Independence, Mo., to Fanny's Bottom, Ore., the Guide points out characteristic scenes of staggering pioneer enterprise, as well as scenes of casual pioneer poetry.

It notes the pine tree growing in granite near Buford, Wyo.--in the early days of the Union Pacific, railroad firemen saw the struggling tree, kept it alive by emptying buckets of water on it as the trains passed. It retells the story of Hugh Glass, angriest man in U. S. history, who got so mad when his companions left him for dead that he chased them through 1,500 miles of wilderness to get even. Mauled by a grizzly, Glass was abandoned in South Dakota, crawled 100 miles to the nearest fort, set out for Montana for revenge before he could walk, survived two Indian attacks, got lost in Wyoming and nine months later caught the men who had left him in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Cooled off by then, he let them go.

Such footnotes on the American temperament seem characteristic rather than unique in The Oregon Trail. As readers follow the footprints of their forbears over the plains they get a warm picture of them--a great people for carving their names on rocks and monuments, as if determined to leave some mark on the face of their enormous country; violent but good-natured, naive but shrewd, poetic without knowing it, unintimidated by distance and too engrossed in their struggles with nature to bear grudges for long. And at the end of the 2,000-mile road they can understand William Clark's elation when he wrote, at the mouth of the Columbia: "Ocian in view! 0! the joy."

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