The Sager Orphans — 1844, Oregon Trail

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.