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 his niche traveling across the country, stopping in Wyoming each year to showcase his rich bass voice, play guitar and teach his audiences.

He specializes in singing and talking about the mass movement West along America’s historic trails, many of which run through Wyoming. Sometimes it’s cowboys driving a herd. And sometimes he reaches into his shanty bag to talk about maritime history.

“When I go onstage as a folksinger, I really think I’m an actor in a way,” Cramer said. “I channel that story and tell it as if it’s my own. I want to walk in and you’re visiting a guy on the California Trail. This is my story, this is what’s happening.”

Cramer was recently at the Historic Trails Interpretive Center in Casper to talk about the songs sung on the trails of Oregon and California, and the songs popular with soldiers sent west in the mid- to late 1800s.

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

“I like Wyoming and I spend a lot of the summer traveling through Wyoming,” Cramer said.

The artist, who studied history in college, now lives on a ranch in eastern Washington State. His love of history and music has led to 24 albums and the opportunity 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 many others.

Trail songs

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

“During the Oregon Trail migration, they (the emigrants) were family groups that went to Oregon as a family to build their ranch 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 roaring herd of bachelors who went to California because they heard about the gold and they were going to get the gold and then come back rich men to Virginia or Tennessee or wherever.”

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

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

There would be at least 180 nights of campfires to sit around and enjoy yourself.

“And what they usually did was they knew old popular songs, old tunes, the fiddlers and the banjo players. But they made 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 they were playing it around the campfire, and at some point somebody said, ‘Let’s tell our own story to an old melody — and that’s what happened.'”

Song Transformation

One of the most popular songs on the Oregon Trail was transformed from the East Coast song “Shenandoah” into “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 will have to cross the Missouri to begin their journey,” he said.

The song has never been authentically copyrighted, and there have been many versions of the song recorded by different artists. Cramer said the song is probably his favorite of the 1,500 songs he knows because his father 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 mother’s side who had a great voice and oh man, she knew a thousand songs. There were always, always songs being sung in my house when I was a kid.”

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

While living in Denver in 1993, he was invited by friends who were in a Civil War reenactment band to a Fourth of July performance at Fort Laramie.

“It was a wild time,” he said. “They closed the wagons in there on the parade ground at Fort Laramie and the wind whipped up and knocked over two or three of the wagons and tore the canvas covers off a bunch of the others and ladies in hoop skirts were fighting to keep their skirts up against the wind.”

It led to annual invitations to return. His collection of traditional and folk LPs, cassettes and CDs offers 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, Oregon, Elko, Nevada and Casper, Cramer began to be invited to share his historical knowledge and songs.

During his performance on the California Trail, Cramer told a group of about 20 people at Casper’s Trails Center that Stephen Foster’s melody “O Susannah” changed to “O California” with lyrics from the gold rush. He sang “Cripple Creek” as another example of a mining song that may have been sung in the camps.

Soldiers’ songs

As for the soldiers in the West, Cramer said their experiences were likely similar to those he himself had during his career in the U.S. Army: lots of boredom and quiet, followed by moments of pure chaos when they had to engage an enemy.

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

One boisterous battle song, and a favorite of General George Armstrong Custer, was “Garryowen.” Since many of the soldiers on the frontier were Irish, so were the songs.

Cramer said the Irish melody “The Girl I Left Behind Me” was very popular, as was “Annie Laurie,” an 18th century Scottish love song. It was the favorite song of Libby Custer, the general’s wife.

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

Cramer brought two guitars to his stop in Casper. One was a modern Martin in a style and size that would be similar to those on the route. He also brought along for the first time an 1870s parlor guitar, purchased at a guitar shop in New York.

“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 1870s parlor guitar, made of Brazilian rosewood on the back and it has ivory tuners.”

Owner JWT Tuttle apparently gave the guitar to his wife. A small calendar and diary for women were left in the guitar’s case — so called because it was built to resemble a coffin.

“It was sent to a Mr. JWT Tuttle on Rockway Avenue in Brooklyn, N.Y. So I thought to myself, that’s a lot of initials. This guy must think he’s important — maybe he is. So I looked up JWT Tuttle and he had the patents on a machine called the velocipede,” Cramer said.

The velocipede is a large-wheeled bicycle used in the 1890s and early 19th century.

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

Dale Killingbeck can be reached at [email protected].