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Thursday, July 1, 2021
GO! magazine — A&E in Northeast Oregon
‘P IONEER S ONG ’ TELLS STORY OF THE O REGON T RAIL
By Lisa Britton
‘Pioneer Song’
Go! Magazine
BAKER CITY — Great Bear
Folk Theatre is returning to Baker
City for the third year in a row —
one of the few performing acts that
had a stage in 2020.
“Last year we were able to get
it in before everybody shut down,”
said Lori Hansen.
Lori and her husband, Omar,
along with their daughter, Isabel,
will be performing “Pioneer Song”
July 3 and 4 in Baker City.
During those two days, their
show can be seen at the National
Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive
Center at 10:30 a.m., 12:30 p.m.
and 2:30 p.m.
On the evening of July 3, they
will move to Geiser-Pollman Park
in Baker City. That performance
starts at 5 p.m.
All shows are free and open to
the community.
“Pioneer Song” is a shorter ver-
sion of a full-length musical Omar
wrote in 1998 when he was a pro-
fessor at Ricks College in Eastern
Idaho.
“They said, ‘We need a play,’” he
said.
The story he told, in musical
form, was about one woman’s expe-
rience on the Oregon Trail.
“All the characters are based on
• July 3 and 4 at the National
Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive
Center,10:30 a.m., 12:30 p.m.,
2:30 p.m.
• July 3 at Geiser-Pollman
Park, 5 p.m.
Great Bear Folk Theatre/Contributed Photo
Lori, Isabel, and Omar Hansen perform “Pioneer Song” July 3 and 4 at several locations in Baker City.
diaries of women who crossed the
Oregon Trail,” Omar said.
The play is set in the mid-1800s
and follows Ruth Maramin who
joins a wagon company along with
her three daughters.
The Oregon Trail experience,
Lori said, was different for men and
women.
“The men counted and tracked
the miles. The women counted the
graves,” she said.
Omar researched his play by
traveling the Oregon Trail himself.
“It was an amazing chance to see
the different geography they went
through,” he said. “We marked
the trail and studied the diaries. I
wanted to write the reality of what
happened.”
The diaries, he said, give modern
readers a glimpse at the trials and
triumphs the pioneers faced on the
journey of more than 2,000 miles.
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“You get this amazing sense of
what happened on the trail,” he
said. “Women really did depend
on each other for keeping their
life somewhat normal. The joy of
researching and writing gave me
so many insights to the culture of
women in the 19th century.”
The premise of the play is how,
over the course of the trail, the
main character Ruth loses all three
of her daughters in different ways.
He shortened the full-length
version, which the trio will perform
this weekend in Baker City,
“We condensed it to a three-
person, 55-minute version,” he said.
Their daughter, Isabel, is the
main singer of the production.
They’ve mostly performed “Pio-
neer Song” in locations close to the
Oregon Trail route.
Great Bear Folk Theatre has
other plays in its collection. To
learn more, visit www.greatbear-
folktheatre.com.