Before he died in 1929, South Thurston County pioneer John Rogers James wrote about crossing the Oregon Trail from Racine, Wisconsin, with his family in 1851 and, after a year in Oregon, settling on the Grand Mound Prairie in what today is South Thurston County.
After staying the winter of 1850 in Iowa, the James family, accompanied by Dan Lucas and his wife and children, launched their cross-country journey in early April 1851, primarily on foot with oxen hauling wagonloads of their belongings. They herded stock across the trail as well and joined a wagon train of about 40 families in 26 numbered wagons under the direction of Henry McCartney as train captain.
Along the journey, which ended Sept. 1 in the Willamette Valley, they saw buffalo herds and used dried buffalo chips (dung) to build fires, camped near Fort Laramie and traveled with a young man named William Stone, who had explored the west with Kit Carson.
They passed the landmarks — Courthouse Rock, Chimney Rock, Scotts Bluff, Laramie Peak and Independence Rock — and James noted, “The clear, dry atmosphere, bright starlight nights and the dry roads and generally comfortable camping places were great things for the emigrant.”
Along the route, they met a traveler heading east who carried letters and James said his father paid him 50 cents to mail a letter to his folks in England, which they received. They passed through Devil’s Gate on the Sweetwater River in Wyoming through the Rocky Mountains and over the Continental Divide via the gentle, rolling grass-covered slopes of South Pass. By then, the wagon trains had scattered, with some traveling farther each day and refusing to rest on Sundays. By then, James said, fewer than a dozen still camped together with his family. Their oxen lunged forward when scenting water from the Green River after crossing 52 miles of arid desert.
“To see them, poor things standing in the water up to their knees, their sides swollen out after drinking so much it looked as though they would kill themselves,” James wrote.
They later traveled in present-day Idaho to Soda Springs and then Fort Hall, an old Hudson Bay trading post, where his mother complained about them charging 50 cents for a fine-tooth comb. The group’s cattle were scattered that night, and Old Dave, the James family’s largest oxen, was killed, but another man traveling with a wagon lost his entire team. People provided Robert Poster with a makeshift team so he could continue the journey. They thwarted an ambush along the trail without bloodshed and crossed the Grand Ronde Valley and Blue Mountains in Eastern Oregon. They ate their first salmon after a Mr. Foster shot it in the tail in the Burnt River and traded with friendly natives, giving them flour and bread for edible camas bulbs and dried salmon. They camped near a Cayuse village near present-day Pendleton, Oregon, where James said he’d never seen so many horses in one place.
“Our journey was becoming tedious; day by day constant watching and guard duties every night were wearing on the men folks,” James wrote. Camp duties proved hard on his mother, who had employed servants in England and Wisconsin. They passed discarded pots, pans, kettles, and wagon wheels along with lonely graves along the route.
They spent an uncomfortable night huddled beneath old quilts as strong winds howled through what today is known as the Columbia River Gorge.
“I do not remember a more uncomfortable night,” James wrote, adding, “I found a big body louse crawling on my shirt when I stripped off to go swimming.”
Natives swam the oxen across the Deschutes River, hanging onto their tails to propel them forward.
“Father and Brother Samuel drove the cart into The Dalles with 600 pounds of freight,” James wrote. He said the books and other heavy items would be floated by flatboat down the river to Portland, while “we drove across the country to the entrance to Barlow Gate in the Cascade Mountains.”
They floundered in mud at the foot of Mount Hood, enjoyed salal berries after a native told them they were safe to eat, and struggled to find pasture for their cattle.
James turned 11 on Sept. 1, 1851, days before they settled at Milwaukie, a sawmill town in the Willamette Valley’s heavily timbered Clackamas County. They settled a claim, planted 10 fruit trees, and built a log cabin where they stayed for the winter. But in June 1852, James’ father and brother William explored the Puget Sound area north of the Columbia River and decided to settle on Grand Mound Prairie.
So that’s what they did. They returned to Clackamas for the family and three of the boys drove their cattle north, crossing the Willamette River at Oregon City. At St. Helens, they ferried the cattle across the Columbia River. They waited at John R. Jackson’s north of present-day Toledo for the rest of the family to arrive. After unloading the wagons with their belongings from the flat-bottomed boat at Cowlitz Landing, they traveled to Jackson’s house “where we were welcomed as though we were relations newly arrived,” James wrote.
“Mr. Jackson had a well-equipped farm with plenty of all kinds of farm products and stock,” James wrote. “We occupied the first cabin Mr. Jackson had built some years before as he had built a more pretentious cabin, which was afterward christened as the first courthouse in the Territory of Washington.”
Then they loaded up their goods and traveled north to Joseph Borst’s place near present-day Fort Borst Park in Centralia, where they stayed Oct. 12, 1852, for their last camp after leaving Racine two years earlier.
Next week I’ll share more about John Rogers James’s recollections of the early days on the Grand Mound Prairie and construction of Fort Henness, which sat across from the entrance to the Grand Mound Cemetery.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
