MILTON-FREEWATER, Ore. — Holding what looked like a hopeless tangle of leather straps and metal buckles, Olivia Wigley went to work.
With practiced motions, the 16-year-old began draping the assembly over the tall back of a mule, one of two she had just led into place in front of a wagon.
“Nothing’s got to be twisted,” she explained. “Nothing over the top of where it’s supposed to be.”
Presently, what had looked like some kind of complex puzzle resolved into what it actually is, a mule harness. Under the watchful eye of her mentor, Bill Vixie, Wigley soon had both animals hitched up and ready to go to work.
Climbing into the driver’s seat, Wigley took up the reins, made a loud “smooching” noise (the “go” signal for the team) and with a rattle and creak familiar to any 19th century traveler, set off for another practice session at being a teenage mule driver.
It wouldn’t be just practice for long. Under the gaze of a movie camera, Wigley would morph this month into a pioneer on the Oregon Trail, hitching up and driving the family wagon when the menfolk are felled by illness or injury.
“She’ll be one of our primary teamsters,” said Candy Moulton, writer and producer for “In Pursuit of a Dream.” Produced by the Oregon-California Trail Association and Boston Productions Company, “it’s the story of women and youths on the Oregon Trail and what they went through.” Vixie, who will be supplying two teams of horses and mules for the production, came into the picture through his brother, David Vixie, an OCTA board member and teacher. It was through this connection Vixie learned that, with only a few weeks to go before the start of filming, the first candidate for the role had dropped out and producers were scrambling for a replacement.
Vixie mentioned the dilemma to his sister, a hairdresser who has Olivia and her mother, Lori Wigley, for customers.
“She said, ‘I know just the girl you’re looking for,”’ Vixie said, and not long afterward Olivia found herself signed for an acting job.
“I was jumping up and down and screaming,” Wigley said when she was told she had the job. “I wanted to do this so badly.”
One problem, however, was she had only about two weeks to learn the now-archaic skills of how to hitch up and drive a Conestoga wagon.
“So now we’ve been on a crash course so she can drive the team,” Vixie said.
Wigley, however, hasn’t been fazed by the task.
“It’s been really cool. I’ve never worked with mules,” she said as she and her mom brushed down the animals, named Bert and Ernie, before a recent practice.
Although new to wagons, Wigley said she’s had prior experience riding animals. “We have horses at home, and when I was younger I used to barrel race,” she said.
That background was a strong factor in her being chosen to fill the vacancy, Moulton said.
Along with the physical skills, a good mule-driver also has to be a bit of an animal psychologist, Wigley said.
“I had to learn their personalities and how to get along with them,” she said about Bert and Ernie. “Then I had to learn to harness them.”
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