Starr Family on the Oregon Trail

Elizabeth Jane Starr Turner was born September 24, 1841 in Iowa.  Her reminiscences are among the first-hand accounts of life in early Oregon that are part of the Benton County Historical Society's collection.

Elizabeth's parents were Samuel F. Starr and Talitha Belknap Starr who married on November 11, 1840 and moved to Iowa shortly thereafter.

Samuel and Talitha Starr, 1855

Elizabeth recollects, “In 1847, my father and mother and family and one of her sisters and her family (her husband's name was L. D. Gilbert) and one of her brothers named Ransom Belknap and his family crossed the plains to Oregon to take advantage of the land donation law which gave each married man settler three hundred forty acres and each married woman settler three hundred forty acres....They left Iowa in April. There was a large company in the train, but as they traveled along, those of our family who desired not to travel on Sunday, found that they would be obliged to unless they parted company with some of the others, so the train was divided and those who desired to rest one day in seven elected Colonel William Chapman as captain of the train....

“We passed great herds of buffalo, and at one time a herd of buffalo in running past the train started the oxen to run away, and they ran for several miles. One wagon losing off one of the front wheels, the oxen dragged the wagon in that condition for a long ways....

“When we came to the Platte River, there was no ferry.  The water was very deep for fording, so they lifted the wagon beds and put blocks under the beds just as high as the standard would hold the beds on, and the two of the men stood, one on each side of each yoke of oxen as they crossed, keeping them as nearly straight across as they could.

“The oxen swam part of the way and part of the way they could touch the bottom until finally they all got across, but for three yoke of oxen it took six men to take a wagon across the river.

“As we drove along the Platte, we had many terrific thunder storms, and in one of these thunder storms a little boy who was in one of the wagons was struck by lightning and was killed, the lightning running along the chain between the oxen and right through the wagon.

“I had often played with this little boy, and it seemed a sad thing to leave him by the side of the road and go on day after day, knowing that he was all alone in all that wide desolate space.”

Death of a child and burial along the trail was not unique to the Starr wagon train.  One object on display in the Corvallis Museum's Benton County exhibit is this pair of shoes which belonged to Landy Barnard.   He also died on the Oregon Trail.  His death occurred died near the Kansas-Nebraska border either from cholera or from being run over by a wagon.  It may have been both as cholera can lead to altered consciousness in children.

Guilford Barnard made these shoes for his son
Landy Barnard (February 2, 1850 - May 17, 1852)

Elizabeth continues with her recollections. “One night before we knew we were in a hostile Indian country, they shot and killed a great many of our oxen so that we were unable to proceed only as we hitched the cows up to the wagons in the place of the oxen team, and we could not then draw the wagons with so much load, so that a great many things were sacrificed, throwing them away in order to lighten our load.

“I remember going the morning after they shot, out among the wagons of the camp and seeing one lady sitting in her wagon throwing beautiful china plates out on the wagon tongue to smash them; and every other china article that she could break, she broke.

“My uncle took my mother's great kettle out and broke it with the ax, having to hit it three times before he could break it.  And a walnut table that she cared very much about, was chopped up, as they said the Indians would have meat of our oxen but they couldn't have our kettles to cook it in not our tables to eat it from.”

Elizabeth's recollections of her the journey to Oregon will continue in the next post.

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