Tabitha Brown & the Applegate Trail — 1846, the Southern Route

Summary

Tabitha Moffatt Brown was sixty-six years old in 1846 — a widow of a Massachusetts clergyman, born in Brimfield in 1780 — when she set out from Missouri for Oregon with her grown son Orus Brown, her daughter Pherne and son-in-law Virgil Pringle and their children, and her aged brother-in-law, the sea captain John Brown, who was past seventy. What began as an ordinary family migration turned into one of the most harrowing crossings of the entire overland era when much of the party was persuaded to leave the established Oregon Trail for a new and untested 'shortcut' into the Willamette Valley from the south — the Applegate Trail.

The southern route, blazed that same year by Jesse and Lindsay Applegate and others hoping to give emigrants a safer alternative to the dangerous raft passage down the Columbia, proved in 1846 to be a brutal, ill-supplied ordeal. Promoters met the wagons near Fort Hall with promises of an easier road; instead the emigrants were swung far south through high desert and the Klamath and Rogue River country, lost most of their cattle, and reached the terrible Umpqua Canyon with winter coming on. Provisions ran out, wagons were abandoned, and people died of fatigue and starvation in the canyon — some, by Tabitha's own account, reduced to eating the flesh of cattle lying dead by the wayside.

Tabitha Brown survived it, and her account — set down in an 1854 letter to her brother and sister-in-law back East, later printed as 'A Brimfield Heroine' — became one of the celebrated firsthand records of the Applegate ordeal precisely because of who wrote it: an old woman who endured what killed younger travelers and described it with dry humor, faith, and grit. She wrote that the party was 'carried hundreds of miles south of Oregon' and that she 'rode through in three days at the risk of my life, on horseback, having lost my wagon and all that I had but the horse I was on.'

What followed was a second act as remarkable as the crossing. The family reached the Willamette settlements at the very end of 1846; one account places Tabitha in Salem on Christmas Day. Penniless, she found a single coin and turned it into the seed of a livelihood, then took in orphaned and needy children and helped found a school — the Tualatin Academy and Orphan Asylum — that grew into Pacific University. For that work Oregon honors her as the 'Mother of Oregon,' and her trail letter remains a touchstone of pioneer endurance in old age.

Timeline

The Departure

Tabitha Brown had already lived a full and difficult life before she ever saw the prairie. Born in Brimfield, Massachusetts, on May 1, 1780, she married the Reverend Clark Brown in 1799 and was widowed young, raising her children largely on her own and supporting them by teaching. By 1846 she was a grandmother of sixty-six, and when her son Orus — who had gone to Oregon in 1843 and returned to fetch the family — urged them to emigrate, she chose to go rather than be left behind. The party that gathered in Missouri that spring was a true family caravan: Orus Brown and his family; Tabitha's daughter Pherne with her husband Virgil Pringle and their children; Tabitha herself; and her brother-in-law Captain John Brown, a former sea captain now in his seventies.

They set out in April 1846 over the standard route, crossing the plains with that year's emigration. Virgil Pringle kept a diary of the journey, and for the first months the crossing was the familiar one — the Platte, Fort Laramie, South Pass — hard but unremarkable by the standards of the trail. Tabitha, for all her age, held up under the travel, and the family made its way west toward present-day Idaho, where emigrants had to choose how to make the final descent into Oregon.

It was near Fort Hall that fate turned on a decision. Promoters of the new southern route met the emigrants with assurances that the Applegate Trail offered an easier, safer way into the Willamette Valley than the perilous raft passage down the Columbia. Orus Brown distrusted the scheme and kept his own company on the established northern road; but Tabitha, traveling with the Pringles, went with the larger group that turned south onto the untried cutoff — a choice that would nearly cost them their lives.

The Route

The Applegate Trail had been scouted and partly opened that very season, and its promoters meant well, but in 1846 it was nowhere near ready to carry families with wagons safely. The route swung far south and west — by Tabitha's reckoning hundreds of miles below Oregon, into country toward the present Nevada and California borders — across long dry drives with scarce grass, among the Klamath ('Clamotte') and Rogue River peoples, before turning up into the mountains. Emigrants who had been told the cutoff would save time instead found themselves crawling across waterless stretches that broke down their already worn oxen and forced them to lighten and abandon wagons.

As the weeks dragged on and the season slipped toward winter, the situation grew desperate. Provisions calculated for a shorter journey ran out. Cattle died or were left behind, and the trail-makers' guides, stretched thin, could not shepherd the strung-out and faltering column. Virgil Pringle's diary and other accounts record the mounting hardship — short rations, lost animals, sickness, and the dawning fear that they had been led far astray with no easy way out.

The worst lay at the end: the Umpqua Canyon, a narrow, boulder-choked, brush-tangled gorge perhaps twelve miles long that the wagons could barely be forced through. There the column jammed and broke apart. In Tabitha's words the canyon was 'strewn with dead cattle, broken wagons, beds, clothing, and everything but provisions, of which latter we were nearly all destitute'; some families were caught in it for two or three weeks, and 'some died without any warning, from fatigue and starvation,' while others 'ate the flesh of cattle that were lying dead by the wayside.' It was in this final stretch, separated from the main body and burdened with her failing brother-in-law, that Tabitha Brown faced the crisis she would later describe.

The Crossing

Tabitha's own 1854 letter is the heart of her story, and it is unsparing about the southern route's final ordeal. By the time the family reached the Umpqua country the party had splintered, and she found herself pressing on with old Captain John Brown, who was sick and failing, while others went ahead to try to bring back help. She wrote that they were 'carried hundreds of miles south of Oregon into Utah Territory and California,' that they 'fell in with the Clamotte and Rogue River Indians' and 'lost nearly all our cattle,' and that she crossed the Umpqua Mountains, 'twelve miles through,' riding 'in three days at the risk of my life, on horseback, having lost my wagon and all that I had but the horse I was on.'

In one of the most retold passages she described the old captain nearly giving up in the wilderness — lying down at one point, expecting to die — while she, the older of the two, urged and helped him onward through the cold and hunger. Her voice in the letter is remarkable for its lack of self-pity; she relates near-fatal suffering with a dry, almost wry steadiness, crediting her endurance to faith and stubbornness rather than to luck. By the time she reached the settlements she had, by her account, nothing left but the horse beneath her.

At last, at the very end of 1846, the survivors of the southern route began to reach the settlements of the Willamette Valley, where the established residents and the relief sent out to meet the late, starving emigrants took them in; one account has Tabitha arriving in Salem on Christmas Day. She and Captain John Brown came through alive, the Pringles survived, and Orus Brown's company — having stayed on the northern road — had arrived earlier and helped raise aid for those struggling in on the Applegate. The family was reunited, ragged and destitute but, against the odds for a party that included two travelers past sixty-five, essentially intact.

What Decided It

Arrival & After

Tabitha Brown reached the Willamette Valley at the close of 1846 with, by her own account, almost nothing to her name. The famous turning point of her later life came from a single coin — a Spanish picayune she found among her effects — which she used to buy a few needles; with those she made buckskin gloves to sell, slowly earning a footing. Settling near the future town of Forest Grove, she found a calling among the many children left orphaned or destitute by the hard emigrations of those years.

With the encouragement of the Reverend Harvey L. Clark and, later, the Reverend George H. Atkinson, Tabitha took charge of a home and school for such children; the school opened in 1848 and within a few years had grown from a handful of pupils to dozens. From that work grew the Tualatin Academy and Orphan Asylum, which endured and expanded and in time became Pacific University — one of the oldest institutions of higher learning in the Pacific Northwest. That a penniless widow in her late sixties, fresh from nearly dying on the Applegate Trail, should help found a college is the detail that has fixed Tabitha Brown in Oregon's memory.

She lived on in the Forest Grove area until her death on May 4, 1858, in Salem, and her 1854 letter describing the crossing was preserved and later published, becoming one of the best-loved firsthand accounts of the overland experience and of the Applegate ordeal in particular. In 1987 the Oregon legislature honored her as the 'Mother of Oregon,' recognizing both her pioneering endurance and her founding contribution to the state's education. Her story joins the trail's hardest chapter — the disastrous southern route of 1846 — to one of its most hopeful, the building of a school out of a single found coin.

Lessons

References

• Tabitha Moffatt Brown Wikipedia
• Tabitha Moffat Brown (1780–1858) The Oregon Encyclopedia
• Tabitha Brown, the Oregon Trail National Park Service
• Applegate Trail Wikipedia