This Road We Traveled

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  Another Forest Grove citizen and volunteer extraordinaire Mary Jo Morelli gave countless hours and made arrangements so I could immerse myself in Forest Grove and Tabby’s life and I am grateful. With the help of Friends of Historic Forest Grove; Eva R. Guggemos, the librarian at Pacific University; George Williams, a descendant of an early university trustee; the docents at Old College Hall; and descendant, historian, and author Stafford J. Hazelett, I’ve had the privilege of these many months getting to know this remarkable woman, Tabitha Moffat Brown. I am indebted to each of these fine people for whom history beats inside them “like a second heart.” I thank them for meeting with me, answering questions, giving me tours of Historic Forest Grove, private showings of artifacts held in Old College Hall, family photographs, archival information at Pacific University, and for sharing their genuine love for this Mother of Oregon. Whatever is good about this story belongs to them; whatever pales is my failing to capture Tabby’s remarkable character.

  A point of clarification in my use of “forest grove” and Tualatin Plains. Forest Grove as a town did not exist until 1872, years after Tabby died. For most of her life, Tualatin Plains referred to large sections of land west of Portland (which also didn’t exist as an incorporated city until 1851). I use the terms interchangeably in part to anchor the place where Orus established his claims and Tabby began the orphanage (Forest Grove). That settlement consisted of small cabins on large tracts of land where forest groves brought shelter and building materials that later allowed clusters of cabins to form the eventual town. Perhaps the fact that there was no town when Tabby began her orphanage and school speaks to her vision and commitment to meeting a need even in the midst of nowhere, believing that one day it would be somewhere, and so it is. Pacific University continues to thrive on the Tualatin Plains in the heart of Forest Grove and the Willamette Valley of Oregon serving students from around the world.

  It’s likely that the legislature honored Tabitha, Tabbe, Tabby (as I call her and so she called herself) for her care of children on the Tualatin Plains following the tragedy at the Whitman Mission in the Oregon Territory in 1847. She pushed to establish an orphanage and then to develop a school and university. Tabby tells the story of her later life’s work in her long letter known as “The Heroine’s Letter,” written several years after the crossing to Oregon. I was intrigued not only by her accomplishments but by the woman, the wife and mother and grandmother and the storyteller.

  Preliminary research showed that while her oldest son, Orus, and his family and her daughter, Pherne, and her family traveled the Oregon Trail from St. Charles, Missouri, to Oregon, Tabby financed her own wagon she shared with her brother-in-law, eighteen years her senior, and an unnamed driver. Her youngest son, Manthano, did not head west, though it’s believed he had originally intended to. Orus Brown did take the Columbia route of the trail while Tabby and the Pringles took the new cutoff. Whether Tabby wanted to go west but was told she couldn’t or whether she instigated the family migration is unknown, but given the signs of separation noted above, I chose to make her one who wanted to go but whose family thought that due to her age and disability ought to remain safely in St. Charles. A conversation with a descendant confirmed that view, along with a possible romantic connection with her brother-in-law.

  There are many wounded people in this story. Tabby had been lame since childhood, married a pastor in New England, had four children (three survived), and then was widowed at a time when women had few options except the ones we have today: to get clear about what mattered in her life and have the courage to act on that. She kept her family together, taught school, and following a tragedy with her sons’ shipping interests, took her family to Missouri. Once her children were grown, she never lived with them while in Missouri nor in Forest Grove nor Salem—until a few months before her death. I thought that was an interesting family dynamic, since so many extended families did share their abodes. Did she prefer that arrangement or was it another pain in her heart? Pherne and Virgil Pringle grieved the loss of a son, Oliver, who died at nine months, and Tabby herself lost a son at the age of six. The Browns and Pringles witnessed tragedy on their journey, were destitute and starving, and were in their mountain crossing the same winter as the Donner Party was caught in the Sierras. Relief parties were more accessible to the Pringle/Brown party, and as news of the other tragedy reached the Applegate followers, there must have been both joy that they had survived and agony of knowing that another choice might have taken them to an even more tragic life-and-death challenge. There are wounds and there is healing. These characters experienced both.

  It’s a fact that Tabby was well-educated, a voracious reader, and wrote letters that were later published in newspapers back East. Many were preserved and provided a flavor of this woman’s personality. As I researched, I found threads of other early Oregonians I’d written about: Eliza Spalding and her family in Forest Grove, the Sager children, even that those taking the Southern Route crossed Soap Creek and thus might have encountered Letitia Carson. Imagine my delight when I discovered that Catherine Sager—also lame—married Clark Brown, Tabby’s grandson, and that Eliza Spalding, the mother, taught at the Tualatin Academy. The frontier was a small town in many ways. As a writer, I enjoy the paths that cross the one I’m currently working on.

  Who Tabby was before she became an Oregonian intrigued me. What enabled her to continue to shine her light in remarkable ways until the day she died? My speculation about her character is informed by facts, many provided by a descendant, Ella Brown Spooner, in her books, The Brown Family History: Tracing the Clark Brown Line; Clark and Tabitha Brown: The First Part of Their Adventures & Those of Their Three Children in New England, Washington and Maryland.[2] The latter contained excerpts of Tabby’s husband’s sermons; a discussion of their congregational problems; the three marriage proposals; as well as the sea exploits of Tabby’s brother-in-law and later, her sons; their time as newspaper publishers. The Browns were also friends with Martha Washington, spent time at Mt. Vernon while waiting for the glebe to be ready. How I tried to figure out a way to include that little episode, but alas, I had to leave it out. Mrs. Spooner also noted that Francis Scott Key, author of our national anthem, was a personal friend and responsible for the publication of Pastor Clark Brown’s book of sermons that Virgilia, in my story, held as precious.

  Virgil Pringle’s parents did start the library in St. Charles, Missouri, and began a literary society. Virgil kept one of the most complete diaries of the crossing, especially important since they were of the first party to take the fateful Scott-Applegate Trail. He wrote down more than miles traveled and gave us distinctive images like “romantic sand hills” and “indifferent grass.” The originals of his diaries are in the archives of Pacific University in Forest Grove and were reproduced in Overland in 1846: Diaries and Letters of the California-Oregon Trail.[3] Pherne Pringle did sketch many landmarks on the Oregon Trail. Her drawings are in the archives at Pacific University as well. Librarian Eva Guggemos graciously met with me on more than one occasion and offered access to the archives related to Tabby and the university. The Applegate Trail of 1846: A Documentary Guide to the Original Southern Emigrant Route to Oregon by William Emerson[4] allowed me to write in the margins and peruse and consider what that fateful crossing required of the human spirit. The book includes excerpts from other diarists who took the cutoff, lists of those providing relief, wagon information, and other details.

  Scott-Applegate Trail, 1846–1847: Atlas and Gazetteer by Charles George Davis,[5] a memorial edition celebrating 150 years of the trail, and Wagons to the Willamette: Captain Levi Scott and the Southern Route to Oregon, 1844–1847 by Levi Scott and James Layton Collins, edited by Brown descendant Stafford Hazelett.[6] This book offered additional details of the politics surrounding the desire to have an alternate route from Oregon to the east that did not require traveling along the Columbia River. (Stafford Hazelett’s work also includes some of Pherne’s sketches.) Those work
s also suggest possible explanations for why the trail was not cut out for that first wagon train. My husband and I have driven the Applegate route coming from the east, through the Black Rock Desert, the Umpqua and Calapooia Mountains into the Willamette Valley on a similar route taken by Tabby and her family. Imagining their journey took on new meaning when we had our own flat tire at dusk and were delayed in changing it until after a rattlesnake had chosen to move on from the shade beneath our car.

  A contemporary journey on the Oregon Trail gave me Rinker Buck’s The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey.[7] The book chronicles Mr. Buck and his brother’s adventure on a covered wagon pulled by mules from Missouri to Oregon. This history/memoir/travel book was published as I finished the first draft of This Road We Traveled. It offered the insight above all that adventurers of all ages and eras must discover for themselves that “no one knows” what lies ahead. One can only do the best one can.

  The history of Tualatin Academy and Pacific University and its chartering and funding were all informed by George Williams’s shared material and A Changing Mission: The Story of a Pioneer Church by Carolyn M. Buan.[8] I’m grateful for her scholarship and willingness to share it.

  I can’t say enough about The Oregon-California Trails Association (OCTA) and their work to preserve and mark not only what remains of the physical trail but documents related to it. Their bookstore, website, and journals offer rich histories not found anywhere else. The Overland Journal, published by OCTA, included an extensive article, “Oxen, Engines of the Overland Emigration,” by Dixon Ford and Lee Kreutzer.[9] It arrived in time to perfect my understanding of travel with oxen. It was one of many articles that keep alive the history of a trail that moved hundreds of thousands of immigrants from east to west.

  Other historians of great help were George Williams, a descendant of one of the early trustees of both the Tualatin Academy and Pacific University, and his wife, Lavern. He generously shared his six-inch-thick binder of stories, articles, family reminiscences, academy meeting minutes, etc., with me. I asked him what he thought would have happened if the trustees—or anyone—had disagreed with Tabby, and his immediate response was, “Oh, they’d lose.” My sentiments exactly. Everything I could read about her suggests she was a stalwart, faithful, active, and determined woman until her death in 1858 at the age of seventy-eight. She is buried in the Pioneer Cemetery in Salem, Oregon.

  I also had the privilege of meeting with docent Deni Cadd and other members of Friends of Historic Forest Grove (www.historic forestgrove.org) and received a tour of the fabulous museum housed in Old College Hall, the oldest building of the university having been constructed in 1848 and believed to be the only building in the West in continuous use for education. Tabby’s orphanage sat behind this building and is today marked by a stump on the beautiful campus about forty-five minutes west of Portland, Oregon. The docents and the many artifacts (including a violin) presented by descendants through the years and kept by the Historic Friends offer a picture of a remarkable woman who earned her place of honor in Oregon’s statehouse and who is worthy of being remembered in the wider history of settlement of the West.

  Tabby never wrote a memoir (although Catherine Sager Pringle did—Across the Plains in 1844[10]), but Tabby did write numerous letters.[11] I used the device of her working on her memoir to offer insights into those personal discoveries but also as a legacy for her family. Letters written to her by her son Manthano survive. In one he wrote, “I am sorry to see that you have the same cruel lash for my back that you had while I lived on Sharrette Creek.” He goes on to defend himself against accusations his mother has apparently made about him: “. . . shutting my doors against my friends and opening them to those of my wife, but you are badly mistaken for I should be glad if you would throw away your prejudice and make your home with me for life . . . I think that I am wrongfully whipped.” Why didn’t she stay with him? Was it because he owned slaves? Or were there other reasons? That letter and a few others suggested her strong will, and certainly her willingness to express an opinion could have kept her family at bay. Her claim in her “Heroine’s Letter” about her survival with her brother-in-law those three days alone also contained the explanation of how her glove gave up the secret to her financial success, where she lived in Salem, and her description of the pastor’s wife she stayed with as “ignorant and useless as a heathen goddess,” her journey by boat to the Pacific, deciding to visit Orus and what happened after. No doubt, to disagree with her would be an uphill battle. And yet we learn, too, of her compassion for the orphans from the 1847 wagon trains, the missionary children who also arrived with the disintegration of the Board missionaries following the Whitman tragedy, and her generosity in serving without compensation those early years of the orphanage. From all accounts, she did indeed save her brother-in-law’s life.

  Fabritus Smith was a real person who came from New York and, according to census information, stayed at the Roberts household in Salem that winter of 1847. Whether that’s how he met Virgilia Pringle is unknown, but they did marry and he did become a legislator, and Smith Fruit Farms was still in existence many years after the deaths of Virgilia and Fabritus. We don’t know if Virgilia was a poet, but her descendant Ella Brown Spooner was, and her mother was an artist, so I thought perhaps some of that talent might have been handed down through DNA.

  The character of Judson Morrow is a fictionalized account, as no name for the ox driver is ever given, though descendants believe that Virgil’s nephew, Charles Fullerton, may well have been Tabby’s driver. Many young men hired on as drivers as a way to earn their way across the continent to claim that 640 acres of free land.

  Nellie Louise Blodgett Morrow is also a fictional character, but she is based on a real contemporary woman whose daughters Claudia Brooks, Ginger Bradbury, and Kristi Morrow donated to the Barlow-Gresham Educational Foundation in return for the privilege of naming a character in one of my books. Nellie Louise was not only the perfect 1840s name, but she represented many on the Oregon Trail who did indeed become disconnected from their families taking a different route while they thought their child was with a relative who had planned to take the same route, but didn’t. Some of these families were never reunited, and others might be two years in finding lost kin. I’d already created a personality for Nellie Louise when I asked her daughters for a description and found uncanny connections to the short, dark-haired seamstress who was generous and caring, who loved to read, who looked out for others, including a son with a disability. The lotion mentioned in this book came from the real Nellie Louise, as did her ability to touch her palms to the ground without bending her knees.

  A second successful donor, Beth Willis of Gresham Ford, in furthering the work of the Barlow-Gresham Educational Foundation, gave her character-naming choice to Sue Piazza. Look for Sue’s choice in an upcoming novel.

  Beatrice’s character grew out of my sister-in-law Barb Rutschow’s love of chickens and her careful watch of their behavior. Then I discovered that, as a child, Melinda Stanfield, retired physician and Lenten Study partner, had chickens as pets. She dressed them up, trained them, and even got the family dog to carry one on his back. Between the two of these chicken-loving women, Beatrice came alive.

  Deep gratitude goes to my support team from Baker/Revell—editors Andrea Doering and Barb Barnes, publicist Karen Steele, marketing director Michele Misiak, and an amazing sales team—and my agent of many years, Joyce Hart of Hartline Literary. Leah Apineru of Impact Author and Carol Tedder kept me from overbooking and also making my presence at events and on social media less painful than if I’d been handling things on my own. Bookstore owners and staff who keep inviting me back for events warm my heart. Thank you. My webmaster, Paul Schumacher, patiently waited for my updates. Several others must be thanked for their continued prayers, confidence, and care: Judy Schumacher, Loris Webb, Judy Card, Susan Parrish, Gabby Spengler, Carol Tedder, Janet Meranda, Marea Stone, Sandy Maynard, Blair Fredstrom, Kathleen Lars
en, and last but never least, my mapmaker and best friend, Jerry.

  I hold a special affinity for Tabitha Moffat Brown beginning a grand adventure when she was sixty-six years old. I saw her as in a period of “spent light,” as referenced in John Milton’s poem “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent.” As I enter my seventh decade, answering Tabby’s questions about what she was to do with the rest of her “light” cast a reflection of my own journey toward finding meaning. Add to that, while in revision, I fell and broke my foot! For a short time, I was as lame as Tabby.

  Friends, family, and faith offer the greatest hope to keep exploring those questions of meaning while facing challenges of life’s uncertain journey. It’s my hope that Tabitha Moffat Brown offers insight for your journey. My thanks to you, dear readers, for traveling with me.

  Warmly,

  Jane Kirkpatrick

  www.jkbooks.com

  Resources

  [1] “A Brimfield Heroine,” Covered Wagon Women Diaries and Letters from the Western Trail 1840–1849, ed. and comp. by Kenneth L Holmes, 2 vols. (Glendale, CA: Arthur C. Clark Co., 1983).

  [2] Ella B. Spooner, The Brown Family History: Tracing the Clark Brown Line (Laurel, MT: The Laurel Outlook, 1929); Clark and Tabitha Brown: The First Part of Their Adventures and Those of Their Three Children in New England, Washington, and Maryland (New York: Exposition Press, 1957); and its sequel, Tabitha Brown’s Western Adventures: A Grandmother’s Account of Her Trek from Missouri to Oregon (1846–1858) (New York: Exposition Press, 1958).