Wooden odometer measured pioneers' cross-country treks

LA GRANDE, Ore. — In the long trek toward their promised land, the pioneers who came to Oregon in covered wagons may have attached wooden odometers to their rear wheels to measure their daily progress.

Now, Edwin Lampkins, a 79-year-old woodcarver from Imbler, in eastern Oregon, has built three copies of the "roadameters," using plans mapped out by Norman Wright, 78, of Provo, Utah, a retired associate professor of computer science at Brigham Young University.

The use of frontier-era odometers never really has been studied, said Wright, who got interested in them in 1976 after seeing one of the rare devices that supposedly had been used on an 1847 Mormon wagon train to the Great Salt Lake.

"You had to know where you could get water and where you could get food," he said. "The best you could do on a really good day was 12 miles with oxen; you had to know so you could plan it."

The devices also allowed pioneers to mark the graves of loved ones who died along the trail, Lampkins said.

Wright has been collecting pioneer-era odometers from across the West for more than 20 years and is writing a book on them. He said the pioneer-era odometers were connected to a rear wheel of a covered wagon by a wooden spindle fitted with six small spokes joined to an 18-inch-long wooden "worm gear" or shaft.

The heavy rear wheel of a typical 10-foot-long, 4-foot-wide covered wagon made 360 revolutions per mile, and the slower-turning gears of the odometer automatically kept track of up to 10 miles at a time, said Wright. The devices were enclosed in a box to keep them dry during rainy weather, and the odometers were removed during river crossings.

Someone had to be responsible for recording the end of each 10-mile increment recorded on the odometer, Lampkins said.

But that was far easier than the earlier method of tying a ribbon to a spoke and assigning someone to count individual revolutions of the wheel during the course of the five-month, 2,000-mile trek from Independence, Mo., to Oregon, California or Utah, he said.

Wright says he came across a historical account that specifically mentions an odometer on a covered wagon owned by Iowa nurseryman Henderson Lewelling, who brought 700 fruit trees to Oregon in 1847.

An entry in a journal kept by Harmon, who built an odometer for the Mormon wagon train that year, noted on July 10, 1847, that his company of immigrants "altogether bought about $100 worth of goods of Mr. H. Quelling, a Quaker. He had a roadameter on one of his wagons."

And writer Charles Hoffman of Bend, Ore., noted in the introduction to his 1992 book, "Oregon's Lost Blue Bucket Mine, The Stephen Meek Wagon Train of 1845," that one of his resources was the diary of pioneer Jesse Harritt, which had "recorded daily mileage by use of a counting device on a wagon wheel similar to present-day odometers on automobiles."

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark did not use odometers on their 1804-06 expedition to the Pacific coast and back, Wright said. "They gave estimates that are not always accurate."