Continued Starr Family Journey to Oregon

 This post will continue the reminiscences of Elizabeth Starr Turner about her 1847 journey to Oregon.

Elizabeth, her parents Samuel and Talitha Starr, and the families of relatives Ransom Belknap and L. D. Gilbert had started out from Iowa in April.

“At one place in the journey we took what they called a big cut-off, going through the mountains were there had been no previous traveling and settling.  Some men had gone through a blazed the trail, and they thought we would gain quite a long time by going that way, if we could get through.”

It seems that this group elected to follow the Applegate Trail. Instead of following the Snake River across southern Idaho, crossing into Oregon, traveling north the heading west along the Columbia, the Applegate trail went south and then west across Nevada.  The trail crossed the northeast corner of California, crossed the Cascades in Southeast Oregon and then turned north following a path similar to that of I-5 from Ashland.

Elizabeth continues, “...the way was very, very bad.  At one place one of the wagons skidded clear about down a hill and left the team standing up the hill and the wagon down hill. At another place one of uncles' wagons tipped over....

“When we came to the Umpqua River, which was a very deep rapid stream, we had to hire the Indians to carry us across which they did by lashing two canoes together.  Then they would swim the oxen across and run the wagons down into two canoes, two wheels in each canoe side by side and so carry the wagons across in that manner. 

Native American canoe,
probably from Northern California

 “There were two wagons across, and then my father drove his wagon down in, lifted the wagon down in the canoes and started across and when he got over, he hitched the team to the wagon to draw it up the bank, but in some way it became unfastened ad ran back and split one of the canoes.  This made the Indians very angry, and they refused to bring any more wagons across.

“There were but six in the train at this time, as other members of the train had decided to go different places in California, and we were the only six wagons going to Oregon at that time. Thus we were left at night with three wagons on each side of the North Umpqua River. The Indians threatened to cut us off and massacre us that night, but they did not.  In the morning, they had become better reconciled: my father having paid them well..., they carried the others over, and they went straight before us.” 

“We had to go through the Umpqua Canyon.  I do not know whether that was a part of this cutoff, but I know there was no road down through it. They had to drive the teams a good deal of the way right down the bed of the stream. It was like any other mountain stream, full of rocks and sand and very, very difficult to drive along.  Part of the way they could get out on the bank. Whenever they could, of course, they drove along the side of the stream; but most of the way, as any of you that have seen the Umpqua Canyon know, it is too narrow for a road....Those women and children waded, and the women carried the babies who were not able to walk.  My mother carried my little brother who was two years old and led me down to that long rugged road- or lack of a road-- waded the stream where she couldn't get room to walk along the side.  It was a very hard and laborious undertaking for her as my second little brother was born two weeks after we arrived at our destination in the Willamette Valley. The reason the women and children walked was because the road was so dangerous they feared the wagons would upset in the stream so they had to walk to be safe.”  A reminder:  Elizabeth was only six years old at this time.

“We had been more than six months on the way, and we were getting very, very hungry for something green as we hadn't had any fresh vegetables since leaving St. Joe in Missouri.  One day as we were driving along after we had got down to Willamette Valley, having crossed over from the east to the west side, going down between the river and the Coast Range Mountains, my father picked up some turnip peelings.  I suppose we had passed a farm, though I don't remember anything about the farm. There were very few in all Oregon at that time, in 1847.

“He pared them both inside and out and then offered me a piece...it was as nice a morsel as anything I have ever tasted before or since. We had had no fruit except dried apples only once or twice as we came through the mountains when we had got a mess of blackberries....

“About the fifteenth of November we arrived...at what is now Corvallis...but at the time there were no houses even. But...Colonel John Stewart...one of the very earliest settlers...directed us to a placed where his son, who was unmarried, had a cabin built and where he had stored some wheat...My uncle Ransom and my father rented that cabin for the winter, and there they were able to buy a great plenty of turnips so we began to have something fresh to eat.

“There my little brother was born and one of my cousins, - my uncle's wife also having a little baby daughter two weeks after my baby brother was born.

“In the spring..., my Uncle Ransom Belknap and my mother's cousin, Orin Belknap, and her brother-in-law, L. B. Gilbert, and my father, Samuel Fletcher Starr, went out land viewing and finally selected, each of them, a section of land, 640 acres, in what is now known as the Belknap Section.”  This is the area north and west of Monroe.

Ransom Belknap's Classical Revival house, built in 1854.

 
By Martha Fraundorf, Volunteer for Benton County Historical Society, Philomath, Oregon