The Sager Orphans — 1844, Oregon Trail

Summary

In the spring of 1844, Henry and Naomi Sager set out from Platte County, in the far northwest corner of Missouri, for the Oregon country with their six children — and a seventh, a daughter, born on the trail that May. They traveled in a large westbound company captained by William Shaw. Within a single season both parents were dead: Henry of “camp fever” near the Green River in late August, Naomi a few weeks later along the Snake, leaving seven children — the eldest barely a teenager, the youngest an infant — orphaned in the middle of the continent with the wagons still hundreds of miles short of the Columbia.

The disaster did not end the children’s journey. The families of Captain Shaw’s company carried the seven Sagers the rest of the way, nursing the baby by hand and sharing out the older children among their wagons, and in late October delivered them to the mission of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman at Waiilatpu, near present-day Walla Walla, Washington. The Whitmans, who had lost their own only child to drowning, took all seven in and raised them as a family.

Three years later the orphans were overtaken by a second catastrophe. In November 1847, amid a measles epidemic that was devastating the Cayuse on whose land the mission stood, Waiilatpu was attacked; the Whitmans and others were killed, the two Sager boys among the dead, and one of the Sager girls died of measles during the captivity that followed. The surviving sisters were ransomed and scattered among Oregon families.

Decades on, Catherine Sager — the middle daughter, who as a nine-year-old had her leg crushed under a wagon wheel on the plains — wrote down everything she remembered. Her account, “Across the Plains in 1844,” became one of the most widely cited firsthand narratives of the entire overland migration, and it is why a family wiped out in two stages, three years and a mountain range apart, is among the best-remembered of all the thousands who went west.

Timeline

The Departure

Henry Sager was a restless man. A blacksmith and farmer, he had already moved his growing family from Virginia to Ohio to Indiana and then to Missouri, never staying long enough on one piece of ground to be satisfied with it. When word of free, rich land in the Oregon country reached the Missouri frontier, the pull was stronger than any farm could answer, and in the spring of 1844 he sold out and pointed his wagons west.

Naomi Sager went reluctantly, and pregnant. She had resisted the idea of one more move more than once, but in April the family rolled out onto the prairie with their six children — John, Francis, Catherine, Elizabeth, Matilda, and Hannah Louise — joining the large company that elected William Shaw as its captain. Like most emigrant trains it was a moving village: dozens of wagons, loose cattle, a rough code of shared labor and shared defense, and the constant low arithmetic of miles made against the calendar before the mountain snows.

The seventh child, a girl, was born on the trail near the end of May, somewhere in the Kansas country. A trail birth was an ordeal with no recovery built into it — no still room, no week in bed, the wagon moving on within a day or two — and it left Naomi weakened going into the hardest months of the crossing, exactly when she could least afford to be.

The Route

The company followed the main road west: up the Platte, past the great landmarks of Chimney Rock and Scotts Bluff, to Fort Laramie, then over the long climb to South Pass, the broad saddle where the trail crossed the Continental Divide. Beyond it lay the dry, broken country of the Green and the Snake, where the route grew meaner and the grass and water less dependable.

It was on the plains, early in the journey, that the family suffered the accident that marked Catherine for life. Climbing from the moving wagon, the nine-year-old caught her dress, fell beneath the wheels, and a wagon wheel ran over her leg and broke it badly. A German immigrant doctor traveling with the company set the bone, and she rode the rest of the way mending — a child’s-eye view from inside a jolting wagon that would later give her account much of its vivid, ground-level detail.

That same emigrant doctor would soon matter far more. As the company worked its way up toward the Green River in the heat of late summer, sickness began moving through the wagons — the “camp fever” that the emigrants dreaded and that we would now recognize as typhoid, bred in fouled water and crowded campsites and far deadlier to the trains than any other hazard of the road.

The Crossing

Near the Green River, Henry Sager came down with the fever. He died in late August and was buried beside the trail, one more mound in a line of graves that stretched the length of the route. Naomi, already spent from the birth and now grief-stricken and ill herself, held on only a few weeks longer. Somewhere along the Snake she died too, and the seven Sager children — from a boy in his early teens down to an infant of a few months — were left orphaned in a wilderness still many weeks short of any settlement.

What happened next is the heart of the story, and the reason it is remembered as something other than a simple tragedy: the company did not abandon them. Captain Shaw and his wife took charge of the older children; the German doctor looked after the sick and the baby; other mothers in the train nursed the infant girl, and the families divided the orphans among their wagons and carried them on. The arrangement held across the worst of the route — the deserts of the Snake, the dust, the failing cattle, the last grinding pull toward the Columbia.

In late October 1844 the wagons brought the seven children to the Whitman Mission at Waiilatpu. Narcissa Whitman — who had lost her own only daughter, Alice Clarissa, to drowning years before — took in all seven: the four girls readily, the two boys after some persuasion from her husband Marcus. For three years the mission on the Walla Walla was the only home the younger Sagers really knew.

What Decided It

Arrival & After

The refuge became the second disaster. By the autumn of 1847 a measles epidemic, carried west along the very emigrant road the Sagers had traveled, was killing the Cayuse in catastrophic numbers while the white children at the mission mostly recovered — a lethal disparity that, in a climate of mistrust over the swelling tide of settlers, fell on Marcus Whitman as the mission’s physician. On November 29, 1847, Waiilatpu was attacked. Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and others were killed; the two Sager boys, John and Francis, were among the dead. During the weeks of captivity that followed, Hannah Louise Sager died of measles.

The surviving captives, the four Sager sisters among them, were ransomed in December by Peter Skene Ogden of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the orphaned girls — orphaned now twice over — were taken in by families across the Oregon settlements and raised to adulthood in the country their parents had died trying to reach.

Long afterward, Catherine Sager Pringle set down her recollections of the crossing and the mission in a clear, unsentimental hand. Passed around in manuscript and eventually published as “Across the Plains in 1844,” her narrative became a cornerstone source for historians of the Oregon Trail and the Whitman tragedy alike — the rare case in which a family destroyed almost to the root left behind a witness articulate enough to make their loss stand for the experience of an entire migration.

Lessons

References

• Sager orphans Wikipedia
• Across the Plains in 1844 (Catherine Sager Pringle) OregonPioneers.com
• Whitman Mission National Historic Site — History & Culture National Park Service
• Marcus and Narcissa Whitman Wikipedia