Oregon or Bust

We've been trying find a way to sum up the exceedingly good-natured town of Montpelier, Idaho. We could say that Butch Cassidy once robbed the local bank here, and they put up a plaque for him. That gets near to the point, but the story that ends this post may better explain it better.

Montpelier is a renamed town. Originally, it was Clover Creek, best known in American history as the halfway point of the Oregon Trail. This trail was a highway of Conestoga wagons, especially during the early 1850s, when the US government offered 320 acres to any married couple who would settle in the Willamette Valley. There, you could, according to government propaganda, fish with a bucket and grow pumpkins as big as barns. Thousands of people took them up on it. And you think our government lies to us today.

Nowadays, there is a curious museum there, the National Oregon-California Trail Center. It recreates the entire experience of the Oregon Trail through a group of actor-volunteers, who guide you from Missouri to Clover Creek. You are picked up by a "wagonmaster" who takes you to a gunsmith, a general store—all in remarkable condition--and then loads you in a bumpy Conastoga that takes you to Idaho. There, a blacksmith and his wife greet you. And no matter what you say, the actors never break character.

"Have you seen any animals," the blacksmith's wife asks as soon as you're settled on a stump.

In our case, there was some silence, then an English woman in our party raised her hand. "We saw some caribou," she said.

The caribou, incidentally, is an animal that never leaves Canada without having been shot and stuffed beforehand.

"Must have been a powerful adventurous caribou," says the blacksmith.

Montpelier is a farming town mostly; it's hard to know how it can produce enough un-self-conscious people to man such a museum. In any case, their efforts are infectious, because by the time we reached the end of the tour, they gathered us all around and asked us to raise our fists and shout "Oregon or Bust!" I'm afraid we might have.