Where the Sage Keeps the Story - Part I: Before the Gold, There Was a Road

Where the Sage Keeps the Story

Part I: Before the Gold, There Was a Road

Before there was a lost mine, there was a road.

Or, more accurately, there were wagons trying to make one.

In the summer of 1845, emigrants bound for Oregon left the established trail and followed mountain man Stephen Meek onto a proposed shortcut across what is now eastern Oregon. More than two hundred wagons and roughly twelve hundred people are generally associated with the journey. What was supposed to shorten the road west instead became a difficult passage through unfamiliar country, marked by rough terrain, uncertain water, illness and growing doubt over exactly where the train was being led (Ragen, 2013; McNary, 1934).

Somewhere within that journey, another story eventually took hold.

It became known as the Lost Blue Bucket Mine.

The legend has been told in more than one form. In its familiar versions, children traveling with the emigrants found unusual yellow stones, sometimes described as nuggets, and carried them back to camp in a blue bucket. Only later was their possible value understood. By then the wagons had moved on, leaving behind a place that no one could confidently find again.

Other versions changed with the years. The circumstances of the discovery shifted. Later searches became attached to the story. Accounts of men attempting to relocate the gold entered the tradition, as did stories involving prospectors and sheepherders. Locations proposed for the discovery spread across a remarkable amount of eastern Oregon.

The legend became larger than the moment that supposedly created it.

There is, however, an awkward problem beneath every version of the story.

Before anyone can reasonably ask where the gold was found, there is another question that has to be answered.

Where were the wagons?

A road that was never quite one road

Today, the name Meek Cutoff makes the route sound more settled than the experience itself must have been.

The emigrants were not following a surveyed highway. They were traveling through country largely unfamiliar to them, sometimes following existing paths and sometimes finding a way through the landscape as they went. Wagons broke. Livestock had to be watered and grazed. Mountains and streams dictated direction as much as any intended course west.

The migration was also divided among different companies. Those companies could become separated, and surviving accounts do not always describe precisely the same experience at precisely the same time. Later route reconstructions have therefore had to combine diary mileage, direction, water, terrain and landmarks with the physical geography that survives today (Ragen, 2013).

That makes the old diaries particularly valuable.

Jesse Harritt kept a remarkably detailed record of daily travel. Eli Casey Cooley recorded his own company's progress. James Field left another account. Their descriptions sometimes agree closely and sometimes differ in mileage or detail, exactly what might be expected from people traveling in separate portions of a large migration (Harritt, 1845; Cooley, 1845; Field, 1845).

They left us something more useful than a line drawn across a modern map.

They described the country.

Following what they actually saw

On September 3, Harritt recorded seven miles of travel before camping on what he identified as the South Fork of the Malheur River, where he found grass and willows (Harritt, 1845; McNary, 1934).

The following day he traveled eleven miles and stopped in a deep hollow where numerous springs provided exceptionally good water. There were small willows there as well (Harritt, 1845; McNary, 1934).

Then the country changed.

On September 5, Harritt described a gradual ascent. Pine and cedar appeared on the higher ground. From above, an immense valley came into view to the west. The wagons descended toward it, entered the valley and continued approximately five miles before stopping beside another small, willow-lined stream. Harritt recorded twelve miles for the entire day (Harritt, 1845; McNary, 1934).

The next morning they continued down the valley.

Harritt thought it might be thirty to fifty miles wide from north to south. He described grass broken by patches of sage and mountains carrying pine and cedar. After fourteen miles the company camped beside a small stream flowing south, which he called Crooked River (Harritt, 1845; McNary, 1934).

One day later, after another sixteen miles over level country, they reached the northern margin of a large lake. McNary later identified that lake as Malheur Lake (Harritt, 1845; McNary, 1934).

That sequence gives us something unusually valuable:

river, hollow, springs, ascent, timber, divide, enormous valley, small streams and finally a large lake.

Not one landmark.

A progression.

Another diary describes the same country

Cooley's account provides an important comparison.

On September 4, he recorded crossing what he called the main divide about seven miles from camp. Roughly three miles beyond it, his company reached a valley. He described the road before the valley as broken and rough, with cedar and pine, but once inside the valley the road became considerably better. They continued approximately four miles farther before camping on a small drainage with willows and abundant grass (Cooley, 1845).

His description is not identical to Harritt's, nor should we expect it to be.

But the landscape is strikingly similar.

There is rough higher country. There is cedar and pine. There is a divide. Beyond it lies an enormous, apparently level valley. Once the wagons descend into that open country, travel becomes easier.

James Field adds another piece.

On September 3, Field recorded camping again on the South Fork Malheur after approximately six miles. The following day he estimated about fifteen miles of travel and said the latter portion of the road was rough and rocky. His camp was at the head of a small branch of the South Fork. He also noticed the change in vegetation, describing low cedar and, eventually, taller pines on the hilltops before the descent into the hollow (Field, 1845).

Three accounts do not hand us a modern road map.

But together they give us a landscape that can be tested.

What earlier researchers found

This is not new ground in the historical sense.

Researchers have spent generations attempting to reconstruct the Meek Cutoff. Lawrence A. McNary published a detailed examination of Harritt's diary in the Oregon Historical Quarterly in 1934. He interpreted Harritt's South Fork camp as lying several miles above the entrance of the Middle Fork and placed the later approach to the broad valley on the plateau east of Malheur Lake, which he identified with the Crane Prairie country (McNary, 1934).

Later historians and field researchers reconsidered portions of the route using additional diaries, maps, aerial imagery and physical evidence. Charles S. Hoffman and Bert Webber examined the journey extensively in The Search for Oregon's Lost Blue Bucket Mine. Brooks Geer Ragen and his research team later spent years examining the cutoff on the ground, comparing the surviving journals with wagon traces, terrain and archaeological evidence (Hoffman & Webber, 1992; Ragen, 2013).

Those investigations provide the foundation for anything attempted today.

They also demonstrate something important: in portions of this country, reconstructing the route remains an exercise in evidence rather than certainty.

And that is where this journey begins.

Reading the country again

For Where the Sage Keeps the Story, I am taking a deliberately simple approach.

I am not beginning with a proposed location for the Lost Blue Bucket Mine and trying to find a wagon road that reaches it.

I am beginning with the wagons.

Where the accounts permit it, the journey will be followed in sequence. Mileage will be compared with distance on the ground. Streams will be considered alongside the direction in which the emigrants were traveling. Springs, valleys, climbs, vegetation and changes in terrain will be treated as parts of the same description rather than isolated clues.

Old roads will be considered as well.

Some roads across this country are obvious. Others have nearly disappeared. Some were used by freight wagons and ranches long after 1845. Later roads sometimes followed older natural passages because geography tends to remain stubbornly unimpressed by changes in ownership, names and calendars.

An old wagon road alone proves very little about the Meek Cutoff.

But an old road can answer a different question.

Could wagons have traveled through a particular piece of country in the manner described by the people who were actually there?

That is worth knowing.

There is also a personal reason I want to look at this country carefully.

Years before I began comparing these places with the 1845 accounts, portions of this landscape were already familiar to me. My father worked on one of the ranches in this country, and during that time I had permission to travel the property. I followed many of its roads, walked portions of the streams and explored surrounding country without imagining that, years later, I would return to those memories with pioneer diaries spread across the table.

Some of the roads examined later in this series are roads I have walked myself.

That experience does not establish their age or historical purpose. It does give me something a satellite image cannot: a memory of what the country looks like from the ground.

Ownership in this region has changed over time, and portions of the country discussed in this series are privately owned today. Past access should not be understood as present permission, nor does discussion of a historic road imply public access. Current ownership and permission must be determined before entering private property.

And the gold?

It is still there, at least in the story.

We will return to the children, the bucket and the yellow stones. We will look more closely at the different versions of the discovery, the people who later claimed knowledge of it, the searches that followed and the places eventually associated with the legend.

But not yet.

Because every version of the Lost Blue Bucket story shares one unavoidable limitation.

The gold could only have been found somewhere the emigrants could reach.

So before following prospectors, recollections and nearly two centuries of speculation, we are going to follow something quieter.

A river.

A hollow filled with springs.

A rough climb through cedar and pine.

A divide.

And somewhere beyond it, a valley so broad that an emigrant standing above it in 1845 struggled to judge where it ended.

For nearly two centuries, people have tried to find the place described by the legend.

This time, we are beginning one step earlier.

First, we are going to try to find the country they described.

Sources:

Harritt, Jesse. Overland Diary, 1845; reproduced and discussed in Lawrence A. McNary, “Route of Meek Cut-Off, 1845,” Oregon Historical Quarterly, Vol. 35, 1934.

Cooley, Eli Casey. Diary of Eli Casey Cooley, 1845.

Field, James. Diary of James Field, 1845.

McNary, Lawrence A. “Route of Meek Cut-Off, 1845.” Oregon Historical Quarterly, Vol. 35, 1934.

Hoffman, Charles S., and Bert Webber. The Search for Oregon's Lost Blue Bucket Mine: The Stephen Meek Wagon Train of 1845: An Oregon Documentary. Webb Research Group, 1992.

Ragen, Brooks Geer. The Meek Cutoff: Tracing the Oregon Trail's Lost Wagon Train of 1845. University of Washington Press, 2013.

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Original concept, writing, and design by M. Hayward.