Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail

Rinker Buck is no stranger to flying by the seat of his pants—literally. In the summer of 1966, at age 15, Buck and his older brother Kern, 17, flew their father's restored Piper Cub from New Jersey to California, making them the youngest aviators to cross the continent. In 2011, Buck, now in his 60s, enlisted his younger brother Nick to help him make another trip, this time on land. The two brothers rode the Oregon Trail from St. Joseph, Mo., to Baker City, Ore., in the first mule-drawn covered wagon to traverse the route in more than a century. Rinker Buck recounts the alternately harrowing and exhilarating trek in The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey (Simon & Schuster, 464 pages, $28).

The book is an unremitting delight, interweaving three overarching narratives like the crisscrossing wheel ruts of the trail itself. Troubled memories of Buck's father—a onetime stunt pilot and flight instructor who became publisher of Look magazine and a prominent anti-Vietnam War activist—are interrupted by present-day crises on the trail: mules frightened to cross a modern bridge, an overturned supply cart, a shattered wagon wheel 40 miles from help. Once overcome, these crises lead to digressions on the history of the Great Migration in the 19th century.

Buck writes, for example, that despite their reputation for stubbornness, mules were perfect for drawing wagons along the trail and helped enable the great economic booms of the period. And rather than posing a threat, Native Americans were friendly allies of the pioneers until after the Civil War, when whites decimated the buffalo, spread disease and reneged on treaties—the devastating Sioux Wars of the late 1800s were in part triggered by a dispute over a single dead cow. The history of the Mormon church is also ineluctably tied up in the trail, and the Bucks' encounter with the Latter-day Saints, who have bought huge tracts on the route to turn into a sectarian Disneyland, is a laugh-out-loud masterpiece.

Rinker and Nick—polar opposites who casually trade f-bombs every other sentence, and every other word when they're arguing—enjoyed several advantages 19th-century pioneers did not: government-subsidized corrals and campgrounds in the most anti-government states in the Union, ranchers to haul wagon parts for repairs and shelter the brothers in stormy weather, fast-food franchises and Walmart. But they didn't have the company of the thousands of westering families who once routinely jammed the trail, helping each other ford rivers, push or pull wagons over or around obstacles and, most of all, keep from getting lost. Once a community enterprise, the Oregon Trail has become open country for old men. 

GO: Rinker Buck visits Powell's City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651. 7:30 pm Thursday, July 30. Free.

WWeek 2015