Wednesday, September 2, 2009

They must have been crazy


Ketchum isn't Disneyland and the wagons of Horace Lewis' Ketchum Fast Freight Line, the centerpiece of the Wagon Days Parade on Saturday, are not replicas.

The Big Hitch is the real deal, dating back to the 1880s when the wagons worked the region's dusty and dangerous roads.

Today, they are an invitation to take some time off from the modern world over the Labor Day holiday and to remember the history of the West.

Think of it. When the wagons were Central Idaho's lifeline, there were no televisions, telephones, cell phone cameras, computers, e-mail, fax machines, Internet, Twitter, Facebook, cars, frozen food, café lattes, or airplanes. Just muscle and bone, people and animals, trying to make a living in the mountains by pursuing the riches to be had in lead and silver.

The Big Hitch invites us to let our minds wander back to the time when a newspaper editor looking out on Main Street would have checked the calendar and wondered when he would hear the clatter of iron wheels and know the wagons had safely navigated the treacherous road over Trail Creek Summit. In the back of his mind, he would listen for the faint shuffling of mule hooves on the dirt street.

Guiding the wagons over the summit road was an amazing feat. The road was steep—a 7 percent grade or more, more a goat path than anything recognized as a road today. Once they began, the wagons could travel only one way—there was no room to turn around. On one side of the road was a mountain and on the other, a precipice.

And there, so the photographic evidence tells us, a muleskinner, a brakeman, a long line of mules and the tall wagons trekked back and forth carrying food and mining equipment on the outbound trip and returning packed with silver ore destined for the smelter outside of town.

Anyone who drives a car up the same road today will instantly be convinced that the people who populated this area in the late 1800s were crazy.

The mule teams that pulled the wagons had no steering wheels, just the training of men who knew their lives would depend on the surefooted creatures.

It wasn't like the movies. The wagons didn't bump and fly around corners. They creaked along gingerly, with mules carefully lifting their feet high and stepping sideways over a chain and then back again to get the wobbly wagons around each corner. One misstep and ... .

The sight of the Big Hitch in the parade is remarkable the first time and worth seeing again and again. Wagon Days is a great celebration that brings the past alive again and lets us hold in awe the sturdy optimists who settled the Mountain West.




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