25 YEARS AGO

Published 5:00 am Sunday, July 24, 2011

For the week ending July 23, 1986

WAGONS, HO!

Strong men, women and children with dirty sunburned faces stood on an overgrown portion of the Old Santiam Road scanning the trees ahead.

A party from their wagon train that was coming from the opposite direction had been due to meet them about 30 minutes earlier.

Suddenly, the crashing of horses’ hooves on crackling brush could be heard.

“Here come the horses!” someone called. Soon a few people could be seen atop mules and draft horses picking their way down the side of a boulder-strewn ridge.

The arrival of the animals meant that everyone could get to work clearing a half-mile section of the road for the covered wagons that would cross the land the next day.

Two women used a crosscut saw — known to pioneers as a “misery whip” — to cut a log that needed moving into more manageable pieces.

“A working woman is a good woman,” sang out a man passing by with a double-bitted axe in hand. Chuckles greeted the remark.

The scene could have taken place a hundred years ago when pioneers blazed a trail across the country with the help only of a few rough tools and teams of horses.

And that’s how the people participating in the 4-H Wagon Train Breakaway ’86 this week wanted it.

The whole object of a week on the trail is to teach youngsters something about the pioneering spirit and about self-reliance, said Morris Elverud, a 73-year-old John “Duke” Wayne look-a-like who was the head teamster on the trip and was one of about 30 to help clear the trail, originally built more than a century ago.

Elverud was one of those who organized the expedition with the help of Oregon State University. The extension service and 4-H volunteers have planned similar trips every summer for the past five years.

This year’s wagon train included six wagons, 12 draft horses, 30 saddle horses and 100 people, who began the trip July 12 at Graham Corral south of Black Butte, and planned to end it there Saturday after traveling a loop of 90 miles.

The trail took them to Geneva ghost town, Fly Creek, Camp Sherman, Meadow Lake, and the old toll station camp on the Santiam Road.

The hierarchy of the wagon train was similar to those of the trains that crossed the country in the 1800s with a wagonmaster, wrangler teamsters and cook.