Wagon Training in the Wind River Mountains

PART 1

I’ve never thought of myself as a historic re-enactor.  No Renaissance Faires with green tights or boobs bulging out of blouses ever entered my mind.  No visits to civil war battlefields dressed in a caring nurse outfit were on my list of things to do.

But in the back of my mind I have always known that in the 19th Century some of my ancestors came West in wagons.  (Most came later in trains, but they don’t count in this story.)  So I decided to replicate that wagon train experience for a few days.  It was an impulsive decision on a trip to Bozeman, Montana to visit friends.  My original plan had been to go white water rafting on the Snake River outside of Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

If my grandmother’s grandparents could walk for weeks and weeks into the unknown wilderness, I thought, I could walk for a few days.  Or ride on the wagons if I got tired.   Little did I know what was ahead.

I contacted a wagon train outfitter in the Wind River Mountains outside of Jackson Hole, only to learn that the train had left without me.  The woman who answered the phone told me the week-long adventure was already underway.  Then she added that one staff member was driving up to bring supplies to the wagon train the next day.  I could go with him.  And did I have a sleeping bag?  I didn’t, but the outfitter could supply one and a tent for my use.

 A little after 6 the next morning the taciturn driver in a baseball cap and I took off in a beaten-up pickup truck.  It rattled its way along ever rougher roads winding ever upwards until, around 9 a.m., we came upon the wagons, horses, guides and my fellow time travelers.  They were just breaking camp.  Many were mounted on horses.

Within minutes I was assigned a horse to ride.  A horse?  Holy Smokes!  I had not been on a horse since one very brief experience when I was 8 years old.  What happened to riding or walking beside a wagon just like great-great-grandma Mary Ann?

I shortly learned some important facts: 

1) Riding in the wagons (there were two of them plus a supply/chuck wagon, if I remember correctly) was for wimps.

2) The outfitter had a herd of horses which had been kept up in the mountains for some time and these horses were scheduled to be brought back down to the outfitter’s corral. 

3) Our jobs, as paying guests on this adventure, were to ride on as many horses as possible while the outfitter’s cowboy guides herded the rest.    No discounts were given for this additional guest responsibility.

As I later learned most of my fellow re-enactors wanted to ride horses anyway.  Fact 1 applied to almost all of them: no wimps in the bunch. 

So into the saddle I went, adrenalin rushing, my heart racing.  The horse, which I was told was quite docile skittered around a little bit, then fell into line behind the other horses heading out of camp. 

The wagons rolled off along a narrow paved road and we horsemen and horsewomen set out on a trail across a gorgeous green meadow filled with grass about two feet tall.  We were to rendezvous with the wagons at noon.

More tomorrow…