Montpelier, ID

Montpelier Center Revives Oregon Trail

More than a century ago, travel-tested and weary pioneers were relieved to reach Clover Creek, on the edge of Montpelier in southeastern Idaho—the halfway mark of their arduous, six-month, 2,000-mile journey across a young and relatively unsettled American West. Back then, rest was welcomed in a lush meadow rimmed by forested mountains.

Oregon Trail travelers still flock to idyllic Clover Creek, but today that translates to riding on Highway 30—a paved version of the legendary trail. Last year, about 15,000 people from around the world came to Montpelier (pop. 2,785) to tour the new three-story Oregon/California Trail Center beside the highway.

In 1999, after 13 years of planning, local residents opened the living history center to preserve and share their pioneer heritage. In summer they dress like early settlers and lead hour-long tours that simulate trail life, complete with jarring wagon ride and a campout.

“What impresses people the most is how many didn’t make it,” says Tom VanDeren, a high school English teacher, who portrays a wagon master. “There were 17 graves per mile, about one every 80 yards on the trail.”

Pioneers died from what was then a routine hit list of afflictions and conditions—from cholera, smallpox, and dysentery to accidental gunshots and even childbirth.

The center presents an array of commerce common to the era, including a historic gun shop, a mercantile exchange, and an 1860s-style theater. The Rails and Trails Museum, an art gallery, and a gift shop also occupy the premises. This summer, a computer lab will open. By autumn 2002, a $250,000 American Indian display will be introduced on the second floor.

It has taken years to build the center with many donations and grants, but residents refused to get discouraged, says Allen Harrison, the center’s board chairman.

“I’ve worked on it since its inception,” he says. “It’s one of those things that was so exciting. Once you start getting involved in the trail, you can’t stop working toward your goals. The Oregon Trail Rendezvous Pageant really drove us. We wanted something permanent to come out of it.”

The annual pageant is performed at Big Hill, five miles south of town on a treacherously steep section of the trail where wagon ruts still are clearly visible today. With a cast of up to 250 locals, horses, and wagons, the pageant colorfully tells of the pioneers’ ordeals.

An initial $1.2 million commitment in federal transportation enhancement funds helped organizers build the $5 million nonprofit center, which should be complete by 2004. Last year, the National Transportation Enhancements Clearinghouse selected the center as one of 10 projects nationwide that exemplify ways communities can benefit from transportation funds.

The center isn’t the only way Montpelier residents keep local history alive and entertaining. Every year, a segment of Main Street is barricaded to re-enact the Aug. 13, 1896, robbery of the Bank of Montpelier by Butch Cassidy, Elza Lay, and Bob Meeks.

For centuries, the Bear Lake Valley, named in 1819 by trapper Donald McKenzie for its black bears, has been a gathering place for Indians, trappers, and cowboys, and in modern times, railroaders and ranchers. Foreseeing the valley’s potential, Mormon patriarch Brigham Young sent colonists to farm the area in 1863 and named the settlement Montpelier, after his birthplace in Vermont.

Farming, recreation, and tourism are mainstays of the area’s economy, and within a 20-minute drive of Montpelier lie several attractions.

Caribbean-blue Bear Lake is home to fish species found nowhere else in the world, including the Bonneville Cisco, a tasty prolific whitefish. The fish evolved in the seven-mile-wide, 20-mile-long lake and were prevented from migrating by ancient geological upheavals. Local legend tells of a serpentine monster that navigates Bear Lake and periodically surfaces.

But it’s the Oregon Trail and its lore that continue to draw people to Montpelier. One fourth-grader on a field trip quipped that he couldn’t wait to return to the center because “it’s funner than recess.”

Dianna Troyer is a freelance writer from Pocatello, Idaho.

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