Retired Wyoming Army Officer Keeps Historic Overland Trails Music Alive

CASPER — Hank Cramer is a throwback to the days when traveling minstrels entertained and educated, teaching history through song.

The 70-year-old retired U.S. Army officer turned folk musician has found a niche traveling across the country with regular stops in Wyoming each year to share his rich bass voice, play guitar and educate his audiences.

He specializes in singing and talking about the mass movement West along America’s historic trails, many of which cross Wyoming. Other times, it’s cowboys riding herd. Still other times, he reaches into his sea shanty bag to talk about maritime history.

“When I get on stage as a folk singer, I really think in a way I am an actor,” Cramer said. “I am channeling that story and telling it as if it is my own. I want to walk in, and you are visiting with a guy on the California Trail. Here is my story, here is what’s happening.”

Cramer was at the Historic Trails Interpretive Center in Casper recently to talk about the songs of the Oregon and California trails, as well as the songs popular with soldiers deployed to the West during mid-to-late 1800s.

He also was at historic Fort Laramie to sing and celebrate the Fourth of July. The previous weekend he was in Gillette singing cowboy tunes at the Rockpile Museum.

“I like Wyoming, and I spend a good chunk of the summer traveling around Wyoming,” Cramer said.

A history major in college, the performer now is based at a ranch in eastern Washington State. His love of history and music has led to 24 albums and opportunities to perform at the Buffalo Bill Historic Center, the High Desert Museum in Bend, Oregon, the National Maritime Historic Park in San Francisco, the Maritime Museum of British Columbia and the USS Constellation in Baltimore, among others.

Trail Songs

While in Casper, Cramer talked about the differences between the music of the Oregon Trail and the California Trail.

“On the Oregon Trail migration they (the emigrants) were family groups headed to Oregon to homestead land as a family and had no intention of going back East,” Cramer said. “The California Trail had very few women — almost no children on the trail. It was almost a thundering herd of bachelors who were going to California because they heard about the gold and they were going to pick up the gold and then return as rich men to Virginia or Tennessee or whatever.”

Cramer said the songs were different because the people were different. On the California Trail there were rowdy songs about gold mining and very sad songs about going bust.

The Oregon Trail brought a type of revival to folk music through transformation of songs by borrowing an old melody and adding new lyrics. In the civilized East, town bands, orchestras and chamber music were often available for entertainment. On the Oregon Trail there were no bands waiting to entertain. And because the people were moving everything they owned, they brought their musical instruments — typically guitar, banjo, fiddle, and mandolin.

There would be at least 180 nights of campfires to sit around and try and entertain yourselves.

“And typically, what they did, they knew popular old songs, old melodies, the fiddlers and the banjo players. But they make up the words as they went along. “Sweet Betsy From Pike” is probably the best known song of the Oregon Trail emigrants. They wrote it themselves but the melody is very old. It’s an old Irish melody called ‘When I Was Single,’” Cramer said. “But somebody knew that fiddle tune and would play it around the campfire, and at some point somebody said, ‘Well let’s tell our own story to an old melody — and that happens.’”

Song Transformation

One of the most popular songs on the Oregon Trail was transformed from the East Coast song “Shenandoah” to “Across the Wide Missouri.” Cramer said the song kept the original melody and some lyrics but added and changed others.

“Most of them have never seen the Shenandoah and it means nothing to them, but every one of them is going to have to cross the Missouri to start their journey,” he said.

The song has never been authentically copyrighted, and there are many versions of the song recorded by various artists. Cramer said the song is probably his favorite of the 1,500 songs he knows, because his dad sang it.

“I grew up in a household full of music,” he said. “My dad was a really good cowboy singer, and I had an Irish grandmother on my mom’s side who had a wonderful voice and oh man, she knew a thousand songs. There was always, always songs being sung in my house when I was a kid.”

Cramer followed his father, a distinguished Green Beret, who is listed as the first casualty of Vietnam in 1957, into the service. He attained the rank of lieutenant colonel and said he always tried to take his guitar with him on his overseas assignments.

While living in Denver in 1993, friends who were part of a band in a Civil War reenactment group invited him to join them at a Fourth of July gig at Fort Laramie.

“It was a wild time,” he said. “They circled the wagons there at the parade field on Fort Laramie and the wind hit and turned over two or three of the wagons and ripped the canvas covers off a bunch of others and ladies in hoop skirts were fighting to hold their skirts down the wind.”

It led to annual invitations to return. His collection of traditional and folk LPs, cassettes and CDs provide a wealth of material and knowledge. He knows some 1,500 songs by heart. As the BLM built museums to educate the public about the national trails in Baker City, Ore., Elko, Nev., and Casper, Cramer began to get invited to share his historic knowledge and songs.

During his set on the California Trail, Cramer told a gathering of about 20 people at Casper’s trails center that Stephen Foster’s tune “O Susannah” morphed into “O California” with gold rush lyrics. He sang “Cripple Creek” as another example of a mining song that might have been sung in the camps.

Soldier Songs

As for the soldiers in the West, Cramer said their experiences were probably similar to those he experienced in his U.S. Army career, a lot of boredom and downtime followed by moments of sheer chaos when engaging an enemy.

“When I look into the songs that they sang, they didn’t sing a lot of Army songs like ‘we’re going to go out and defeat the enemy, we are going to shoot up all those Indians.’ They sang songs about the girl they left behind. That’s who they sang about,” he said.

The one rowdy fighting song, also Gen. George Armstrong Custer’s favorite, was “Garryowen.” Since many soldiers on the frontier were Irish, the songs tended to be as well.

Cramer said the Irish tune “The Girl I Left Behind Me” was very popular, as was “Annie Laurie,” a Scottish love song all the way back from the 1700s. It was favorite song of Libby Custer, the general’s wife.

Another popular soldier song was “Aura Lea” an 1860s love song whose melody was used in Elvis Presley’s 1956 hit “Love Me Tender.”

Cramer brought two guitars to his stop in Casper. One a modern Martin in a style and size that would be similar to those used on the trail. He also brought for the first time on the road an 1870s parlor guitar that he purchased from a New York guitar shop.

“It was built in the 1870s by a builder in Boston, Massachusetts but we don’t know the name,” Cramer said. “This is a typical parlor guitar from the 1870s made from Brazilian rosewood in the back and it’s got ivory tuner pegs.”

The owner J.W.T. Tuttle apparently gave the guitar to his wife. A small calendar and diary for women remained in the guitar’s coffin case — so named because it was built to resemble a coffin.

“It was shipped to Mr. J.W.T. Tuttle on Rockway Avenue in Brooklyn, N.Y. So, I thought to myself that’s a lot of initials. The guy must think he is important — maybe he is. So I looked up J.W.T. Tuttle and he held the patents on a machine called the velocipede,” Cramer said.

The velocipede is the big wheel bicycle used in the 1890s and into the turn of the century.

Cramer used the 150-year-old instrument to play the three-centuries-old tune the “Water is Wide,” which he said may have been about the Thames or Shannon rivers, but appropriate for the miners on the California Trail because the song talks about a woman who is on the other side of the water.

Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.