Saturday, February 4th, 2012
Facebook / Twitter / Tumblr / Podcast

1846 / Oregon Trail

Rough Crossing

Tags:
,
,
,
,
,

Oh! that I could be present with you and Margaret and relate in the hearing of your children the numerous vicissitudes and dangers I have encountered by land and sea since I parted with you in Brimfield. It would fill a volume of many pages. But I will give a few items from the time I left Missouri in April of 1846 for Oregon. I expected all three of my children to accompany me, but Manthano was detained by sickness and his wife was unwilling to leave her parents. I provided for myself a good ox-wagon team, a good supply of what was requisite for the comfort of myself, Captain Brown, and my driver, Uncle John, and crossed the plains on horseback. Orus Brown, with his wife and eight children, and Virgil Pringle, Pherne’s husband, with five children, fitted out their separate families and joined a train of forty or more for Oregon, in high expectation of gaining the wished-for land of promise.

The novelty of our journey, with little exception, was pleasing and prosperous until after we passed Fort Hall. Then we were within eight hundred miles of Oregon City—if we had kept on the old road down the Columbia River—but three or four trains of emigrants were decoyed off by a rascally fellow who came out from the settlement in Oregon, assuring us that he had found a near cutoff, that if we would follow him, we would be in the settlement long before those who had gone down the Columbia. The idea of shortening a long journey caused us to yield to his advice. Our sufferings from that time no tongue can tell. He said he would clear the road before us, so that we should have no trouble in rolling our wagons after him. But he robbed us of what he could by lying, and left us to the depredations of Indians and wild beasts, and to starvation. But God was with us. We had sixty miles of desert without grass or water, mountains to climb, cattle giving out, wagons breaking, emigrants sick and dying, hostile Indians to guard against by night and day, to keep from being killed or having our horses and cattle arrowed or stolen. We were carried hundreds of miles south of Oregon into Utah Territory and California, fell in with the Clammette and Rogue River Indians, lost nearly all our cattle, and passed through the Umpqua Mountains.

Our family was the first that started through the canyon, so we got through the mud and rocks much better than those that came after. Out of hundreds of wagons, only one came through without breaking. The canyon was strewn with dead cattle, broken wagons, beds, clothing, and everything but provisions, of which latter we were nearly destitute. Some people were in the canyon two or three weeks before they could get through. Some died without any warning, from fatigue and starvation. Others ate the flesh of cattle that were lying dead by the wayside.

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
Bookmark and Share
Love this? Subscribe to Lapham's Quarterly today.

Get one free trial issue of Lapham's Quarterly!

  • Fill out this order form.
  • If you like the magazine, get the rest of the year for just $49 (4 issues in all).
  • If not, simply write cancel on the bill, return it, and owe nothing.
Please enter a first name.
Please enter a last name.
Please enter an address.
Please enter a city.
Please select a state.
Please enter a valid
zip code.
Please select a country.

Canadian subscribers add $10; All other international subscribers add $40.

Post a Comment

Note: Several minutes will pass while the system is processing and posting your comment. Do not resubmit during this time or your comment will post multiple times.

Published In
Travel
About the Text

Tabitha Brown, from a letter. A former schoolteacher, the sixty-five-year-old widow left Missouri with her children and grandchildren in April 1846. Brown settled in Oregon, where she helped to found Pacific University. She died at the age of seventy-eight in 1858.

Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name.
Alice Meynell, 1899
Visual Aids
Family Planning Adoption, fertility, contraception, and infanticide around the world and throughout time
Art, Photography, & Illustrations View a selection of art from our latest issue.
Charts & Graphs All of our charts and graphs, pulled from the pages of Lapham’s Quarterly.
Events & News
September 15 / Open the seventh seal! The Fall issue of Lapham's Quarterly, "The Future," will hit newsstands on September 15. More
Reader Survey Take the LQ reader survey! Your two cents will help us keep making history ... Take Survey
Apropos

In Stir

No. 44

Subscribe
Current Issue Family Winter 2012
Blogs

Content on this page requires a newer version of Adobe Flash Player.

Get Adobe Flash player

Audio & Video
LQ Podcast:
Peter Ackroyd
Author and translator Peter Ackroyd talks with Aidan Flax-Clark about his new retelling of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur and discusses a little bit about his most recent book of London history, London Under.
Eponym
Lewis H. Lapham is Editor of Lapham's Quarterly. He also serves as editor emeritus and national correspondent for Harper's magazine.
Recent Issues