Posted: 2/22/07
A look at life through wagon journey
By Joel Stottrup
Name - Lee Crafton.
Also known as - Lee The Horselogger.
Age - 46.
Travel itinerary - East Glacier, Mont. to New York, and later to southern Gulf Coast and Alaska.
Date started journey - Aug. 9, 2006.
Mode of transportation - covered wagon pulled by a pair of Suffolk Punch draft horses named Max and Tom.
Average speed - 3.5 mph.
Financing - relying on the goodness of people along the way.
Goal - to meet and spend time with childhood sweetheart in New York and later travel the same way to the other target destinations.
Target completion date for above travels - 2010
Traveling companions - two Great Pyrenees dogs, Katie and Kerr-Mutt
So goes an outline made from information gathered from a soul named Lee Crafton during a rest stop on his journey east on Highway 95 last Friday morning.
Crafton has traveled before across parts of the United States in years past, and even in Europe but now his trip is somewhat delayed.
Crafton, was, after all, on schedule to make his next 18 miles to North Branch by evening and there were so many other questions to ask of this guy. A question or two could easily get overlooked.
Crafton was sitting in the Conoco convenience store at the intersection of Highways 95 and 47 Friday morning as he talked. His covered wagon, about the length of a tent trailer, but with a platform on back to carry hay, was less than a mile away at the Wolcyn tree farm.
Crafton just needed a place to relax for now and get some more orange juice to replace that which has frozen overnight in his wagon. He also said that he likes conversation.
The Wolcyns had let Crafton stay there for the night, a night that had come at the end of a long succession of below-normal cold days. Before he left the Wolcyns, a family member handed him some food for the road and a monetary donation.
Friday morning, though it was still a winter-like day, was finally more mild, enough so that Crafton was joyful he could remove the heavy parka someone had given him in Rice near St. Cloud. Now he was wearing his lighter coat. The heavy overcoat, though it had served him well against the cold, he said, was bulky.
All kinds of things can happen when wearing a bulky coat, he continued, saying a person can stumble and fall down next to the horses, making them nervous.
Reassessing his life
Crafton is on a journey that he said was driven by a reassessing of his life. That came after the news he got in a doctor's office in Flathead Valley, Mont., in August 2005.
A person reassesses things, he said, "when you're given those words, "You have cancer.'"
He said he was "extremely sick," with bloody noses, extreme headaches," and thinking, "it was just a matter of time he would lose all his strength."
But then he decided, that it was better to "do different things with your life."
He decided, with his finances being one reason, to fight his cancer with holistic medicine.
Crafton said he has now beaten the cancer. Asked if he meant remission, he repeated that he has beaten it, that he no longer has cancer. Herbs was a part of achieving that, he said.
People create their lifestyle through choices, such as in their diet and doing stressful things, he went on.
Part of his reassessment, he continued, was looking at his livelihood.
He says he had been working at a ranch for "free" for most of 27 years and wasn't going to do that anymore.
A lesson learned is to "never work for family without a contract," he advised.
Another factor that made him change what he was doing, he said, was that he wanted to travel to see his childhood sweetheart. Crafton, who grew up in upstate New York, said she contacted him on Dec. 31, 2005.
Although Crafton said his trip is "level" without ups and downs, he has had what some would call challenges.
He fell sick while traveling through the Gilman area in east central Minnesota not too long ago and put up at one place for nearly a week to recuperate.
He also said he hardly gets an hour's worth of sleep in a night. He explained that while he is lying in the wagon at night, the horses, tethered to the wagon, rock it.
He admits feeling sometimes in a kind of meditative state while, half tired, sitting on the wagon seat, listening to the horses' hooves on the road, and feeling the wagon's movements.
That is until something unnerving comes along. That hasn't happened much, he said, referring to the traffic.
Also, most all the law enforcement officers he has come across during the trip have been good to him, he said. The exception, he explained, was a 30-year-old deputy in a SWAT uniform.
"You don't want to run a siren behind a team of horses," Crafton said.
The deputy was upset because "I was in the traffic lane," Crafton said, but there was nowhere else to go because it was a bridge.
The horselogger's rewards
Crafton, whose occupational history includes logging with horses, said that through traveling at such a slow speed, he is meeting people he would never otherwise meet.
"It's a matter of listening," he said about getting things out of the experience of traveling this way. "Everyone has a story. Everyone has a dream. You just have to find out what it is."
He said he is thankful he has found food, shelter and water, and he had something to say about materialism.
"People enslave themselves with material possessions," he said. People can also have "emotional entrapment" and can believe that the way they are living is the way it has to be.
"Sometimes you have to shrug your shoulders and see what happens and do something [to change things]," Crafton added.
Crafton said he walked away from a doctorate program he was working on in comparative religions in the early 1980s at Northwestern College in Illinois and went to work at his father's ranch in Montana. That's when he began logging, with the use of horses.
His plans after his 2010, target time to complete his trip by horse-drawn wagon?
"I don't know if I'll be alive," he said. "Who knows? I'm sure something will show itself."
People have asked Crafton if he plans to write a book about his journey. He said that writing for him is like "pulling teeth," and that he feels writing "alters reality."
But when he was asked if written things haven't inspired and helped people, he agreed, but added that writings have also harmed people.
For now, he is just getting a lot out of his trip, he indicated.
"People are good all over," he said about his contacts so far. There were only two that he wasn't sure of, two who came up to where he was camped once, but once he got to know them, they were all right, he said.
"I have met some amazing people on this trip," he said. "If I had money, I wouldn't have met them. Being broke, people like to help and become part of your trip."
Some people were worried he would be harmed traveling across the reservations, he said. But, Crafton, who travelled from Montana and across North Dakota to come down through Minnesota, spoke highly of his encounters with the tribes.
Crafton says he started his trip with $75 and spent that in a week. After that, he said, he has survived by people donating to him.
Many have been following his journey by logging onto his web site www.lee-the-horselogger.com.
A posting by Crafton on his web site, says that he began his "true learning in real education" through experiencing "poverty, backbreaking labor, working horses, running sawmills, caring for the ranch in Montana, living without electricity, running water, or a vehicle half the time."
Crafton calls the cancer diagnosis in the summer of 2005 a "gift," because it made him change his life.
Now, because he is relying on the goodness of others to assist him on his way, he is calling his journey "an exploration of faith."
Princeton Union-Eagle
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Princeton, MN 55371
Telephone: 763-389-1222
Fax: 763-389-1728