Ezra Meeker — 1852, and the Man Who Re-Crossed at 76

Summary

Most people who crossed the Oregon Trail did it once, looked back at the worst months of their lives, and never wanted to see the place again. Ezra Meeker was not most people. He crossed it as a young man of twenty-one in 1852, settled in the Pacific Northwest, grew rich, and then — more than half a century later, an old man in his mid-seventies — yoked a pair of oxen to a covered wagon and drove the whole route again, backwards, east toward the rising sun, for the express purpose of saving it from being forgotten.

Meeker was born in Ohio in 1830 and came of age just as the great migration was cresting. In 1852 he set out for Oregon Territory with his young wife, Eliza Jane, and their infant son, Marion, joining the river of wagons that flowed west that year — a year so deadly with cholera that the dead were buried almost in a continuous line along the Platte. He survived it, built a life on Puget Sound, and became one of the wealthiest hop growers in the world, the so-called "Hop King" of the Puyallup Valley, before a crop pest wiped out the boom.

By the early 1900s Meeker was an old man watching the trail of his youth vanish under plowed fields, town streets, and a generation that had never heard of it. The ruts were filling in. The graves were being lost. So in 1906, at about seventy-five, he set out from Puyallup with a covered wagon, an ox team, and a driver, intending to follow the old road eastward and shame every town along it into marking the route before the last witnesses died. He carried granite stones, gave talks, sold pamphlets, and badgered school children, mayors, and finally a President into helping him.

That first marking expedition turned into a life's mission. Meeker would travel the trail again and again — by ox team, by automobile, and at last by airplane — pressing the same message until his death in 1928 at ninety-seven. The monuments he set, and the organization he founded, are a large part of the reason the Oregon Trail is remembered as a national story at all. He did not just cross the trail twice. He saved it.

The Departure

Ezra Manning Meeker was born near Huntsville, Ohio, on December 29, 1830, into a farming family that drifted westward as so many did. He married Eliza Jane Sumner in 1851, and the next spring, like tens of thousands of others, the young couple caught the Oregon fever. In 1852 they set out across the plains — Ezra just twenty-one, Eliza Jane carrying or nursing their newborn son Marion, traveling in company with Ezra's brother Oliver and their father. They were part of the single largest year of the migration, when the trail was so crowded that grass was eaten to the dirt for miles around every campsite.

1852 was also one of the deadliest years on the road. Cholera swept the wagon trains along the Platte that summer, killing emigrants within hours of the first symptom and leaving fresh graves at nearly every bend of the river. Meeker would remember the trail as a graveyard, mile after mile of crude headboards and rock-covered mounds. The young family came through it, but the experience of that crossing — the labor, the danger, the dead strangers, the sheer scale of the human movement — marked him for life. He never lost the conviction that something enormous and important had happened on that road.

The Meekers did not stop in the Willamette Valley like most. They pushed north into the Puget Sound country of what is now Washington, living first near Kalama and then settling in the Puyallup Valley, where Ezra took up hop farming. The crop made him rich. By the 1880s the Meeker hop fields were famous, shipping to the breweries of England and the world, and Ezra Meeker was known as the Hop King — a wealthy, civic-minded pioneer who had platted the town of Puyallup itself. Then, late in the decade, the hop aphid arrived and the empire collapsed. Meeker spent years chasing other ventures, including trips to the Klondike, but money was never again the point. The trail was waiting for him.

The Route

By the turn of the century Meeker was an old man with a grievance: the Oregon Trail, the great highway of his youth and the route by which the Pacific Northwest had been settled, was disappearing. Farmers plowed through the ruts. Towns paved over them. The pioneers who had walked the road were dying off, and with them the living memory of where it had actually run. Younger Americans, Meeker felt, had no idea what their grandparents had endured to reach the coast, and no monuments existed to tell them. He decided, in his seventies, to do something about it himself.

The plan was audacious and a little theatrical, which was the point. In January 1906 Meeker bought a covered wagon, acquired a yoke of oxen — including a steer named Twist who became the star of the show — hired a young driver named William Mardon, and set out east from Puyallup to retrace the entire Oregon Trail in reverse. He would drive the old road from the Pacific toward the Missouri, stopping in every town he passed to plead with citizens to mark their stretch of the route with a permanent monument before it was lost. He covered something on the order of 1,300 miles by ox team that year, a slow, deliberate, attention-getting crawl across half a continent.

The expedition was as much a campaign as a journey. Meeker funded it by selling photographs, pamphlets, and copies of his books, and by charging admission to lectures he gave from the wagon itself, which doubled as a rolling exhibit. He shamed and cajoled local governments, schools, and civic groups into raising money for granite markers, and he personally helped place many of them — some inscribed simply "Old Oregon Trail 1843–57." Where he could not get a monument built on the spot, he extracted promises. The old man, his weathered wagon, and his patient oxen made newspapers everywhere they went, and the publicity was exactly the lever he wanted.

The Crossing

The crossing this time was not a fight for survival but a fight for memory, and Meeker pursued it with the stubbornness of a man who knew his time was short. He pushed on past the Missouri all the way to the East. In 1907 he drove his ox team into Washington, D.C., and — in the kind of stunt that made him famous — secured a meeting at the White House with President Theodore Roosevelt, who received the old pioneer and his weathered wagon and endorsed the cause of marking and preserving the trail. For a man trying to make a forgotten road into a national monument, presidential attention was worth a hundred speeches.

Meeker did not stop with one trip. He drove the trail again, and then he adapted his crusade to each new age of transportation as if to prove the route mattered in every era. In 1910 he made another ox-team journey; in 1915–1916 he crossed by automobile; and in 1924, at the remarkable age of ninety-three, he flew over the old trail by airplane, courtesy of the Army Air Service, looking down from the sky at the ruts he had once walked. Whatever the conveyance, the message never changed: mark the trail, remember the pioneers, teach the children where the nation's western story had been written.

To make the work outlast him, Meeker organized. He founded and led the Oregon Trail Memorial Association, lobbied Congress, and pushed for lasting commemoration of the route. His campaigning helped bring about the Oregon Trail Memorial half dollar, a commemorative coin struck beginning in 1926 whose sales were meant to fund trail markers and monuments. By then Meeker was a national figure, the last famous voice of the covered-wagon generation, and he used every bit of that fame to nail the trail's memory down in granite and bronze before it could fade.

What Decided It

Arrival & After

Ezra Meeker kept at it almost literally to the end. He was planning yet another trail expedition — this time by motor caravan — when he fell ill, and he died in Seattle on December 3, 1928, just shy of his ninety-eighth birthday. He had outlived not only his wife and most of his children but very nearly the entire generation whose story he had appointed himself to guard. The last famous pioneer of the covered wagons died with the trail's memory more secure than he had found it.

What he left behind is everywhere along the route. The granite markers he placed or inspired still stand in dozens of towns from the Missouri to the Pacific. His preserved home in Puyallup, the Meeker Mansion, survives as a museum. His memoirs and trail books remain primary sources for historians. And the Oregon Trail Memorial Association he founded became part of the long current of advocacy that eventually led Congress, in 1978, to designate the Oregon National Historic Trail — a federal recognition that traces directly back to one stubborn old man with an ox team.

Meeker's life closed a circle that few human lives ever do. He had walked west into an unmarked wilderness as a young father in 1852 and lived to fly over the same ground in an airplane in 1924. He had been part of the migration and then became its memory-keeper. Because he refused to let the Oregon Trail quietly disappear under the plow, millions of people who will never yoke an ox still know the road was there — and roughly know where it ran. That, in the end, was exactly what he set out to accomplish.

Lessons

References

• Ezra Meeker Wikipedia
• Ezra Meeker and the Oregon Trail Memorial Half Dollar U.S. Mint
• Meeker, Ezra (1830–1928) HistoryLink.org
• Ezra Meeker: Oregon Trail Pioneer, Hop Farmer & Author Encyclopaedia Britannica