On a couple of occasions in the last month I have suggested that one could do something to change the world for the better. I want now to tell the story of one woman who did her part. My information comes from the Bulletin of the Genealogical Forum of Oregon .
[At the age of 66, Mrs. Tabitha Brown yoked her ox team and joined a caravan of 1846 en route to Oregon. She wrote letters home after her arrival, and they form a major basis for the description of her adventures.]"At Fort Hall three or four trains were decoyed off by a rascally fellow, who came out from the settlements in Oregon. Our sufferings from that time no tongue can tell. We were carried hundreds of miles south of Oregon, lost nearly all our cattle, and passed the Umpqua Mountains, nearly twelve miles through. I rode through in three days at the risk of my life on horseback, having lost my wagon and all that I had was the horse that I sat on. The canyon (Cow Creek) was strewn with dead cattle, broken wagon beds, clothing and everything but provisions, of which the latter we were nearly destitute. Some were in the canyon two or three weeks before they got through; some died from fatigue and starvation, while others ate the flesh of cattle that were lying dead by the wayside."
[She tried to overtake an invalid brother-in-law and finally caught up to him.]
"His senses were gone, covering him up as well as I could with the blankets, I seated myself on the ground behind him, expecting he would be a corpse before morning. Worse than alone in a savage wilderness, without food, without fire, cold and shivering, wolves fighting and howling all around me, dark clouds hid the stars. All was solitary as death. But that same Providence that I had always known was watching over me still."
[On Christmas Day, at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, Mrs. Brown entered the house of a Methodist minister in Salem:]
".....the first house I had set my foot in for nine months. For two or three weeks of my journey down the Willamette (River) I had felt something in the end of my glove finger which I had supposed to be a button. On examination at my new home in Salem I found it to be a six-and-a-quarter-cent piece. This was my whole cash capital to commence business with in Oregon."
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.