Interrogating the Center
The best way to explain it is to work our way backward. If you look at highways, they followed two-lane roads. Two-lane roads followed dirt roads. Dirt roads followed the white man’s trail. The white man’s trail followed the Indian’s trail. Indians followed the animals. Animals followed water. Animals are the original trailblazers. The white man gets all the credit for ‘discovering’ the trails, but that couldn’t be more inaccurate. They simply followed along well-established routes that had been traveled on for probably hundreds of years. Who knows, maybe thousands.
This is how the man with a mustache, Shaw answered my questions, “How was the Oregon trail created? How did the emigrants decide which way to go?” He works for the Wyoming State Park Service at the National Historic Trails Interpretive Center in Casper Wyoming. The center is situated high on a hill looking down at the city center laid out like a grid. The Casper Mountains are beyond, and the Snake River runs through town. The walkway leading to the center is embedded with quotes from emigrant’s diary entries from the mid 1800’s. The unrelenting wind is the subject of several of the quotes, and the main character of my day so far.
I have visited many interpretive centers before, and all have had a white-centric point-of-view. I was used to seeing indigenous peoples described as “primitive” or “savage,” and white settlers as “pioneers” who were “brave” or “heroic.” I expected to find the same in this center, and was quickly proven wrong. My own prejudices actually almost prevented me going to the center because of an internal dialogue that sounded something like, “Meh, I already know what’s going to be in there. White men rule, and the Indians deserved slaughter, blah, blah, blah.”
I was flat out wrong. This center is devoted to displaying a history of the area that predates the mass migration west by hundreds of years, and how utterly disruptive the move west was for all native tribes, and utterly devastating to buffalo populations. Somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 people migrated west along the Oregon, California and Mormon trails. Roughly 10% died along the journey, and almost all of those deaths were due to disease, undernourishment, and river crossing drowning. There were fights with native peoples, but nowhere near to the extent as the racist stereotype suggests.