Article

Amanda Gardener Johnson, the Oregon Trail

Amanda Gardner - the Oregon Trail
By Angela Reiniche^[1]

“I was afraid to accept my liberty, much as I would have liked to stay [in Missouri]. The word of a Negro, even if a free Negro, was of no value in court…. for Negroes were the same as cows and horses and were not supposed to have morals or souls….so I came to Oregon with my owners.”^[2]
- Amanda Gardener Johnson

Amanda Gardener was born in Liberty, Missouri, on 30 August 1833 and became a wedding present to her owner’s daughter, Nancy Wilhite. When Gardener was seven years old, she was given to Wilhite’s daughter, Lydia, who had recently married Anderson Deckard. When she was in the ninth decade of her life, Amanda (Johnson, by then) told her story to Fred Lockley, who was compiling for the Works Progress Administration a volume of interviews about the lives of pioneer women across the American West. During her interview, Johnson rationalized the fear that drove her decision to decline Anderson Deckard’s offer of emancipation in 1853 as he planned his family’s emigration to Oregon Country. He thought she might want to stay in Missouri where her family lived, but Amanda knew how perilous life could be as a free Black woman in a slaveholding state. Deckard also refused an offer of $1,200 from a local merchant wishing to purchase the twenty-year-old Gardener; he told the would-be buyer that she was “the same as one of our family” and had cared for their four children since their births. Amanda Gardener, who made clear to Lockley that she had been “a free woman since she was twenty,” left for Oregon in March 1853 and arrived there six months later.^[3]

It is unclear what exactly Deckard or Gardner understood about the status of slavery in Oregon or the right of free Blacks to reside there. Early Oregonians’ attitudes towards slavery can best be described as “complicated.” Most Anglo emigrants to Oregon Territory in the 1840s and 1850s opposed slavery, yet they did not want to live alongside African Americans; many were non-slaveholders from Missouri that knew all too well the impossibility of competing with slaveholding farmers. On 5 July 1843, a decade before Deckard’s journey, the small Anglo population of Oregon voted to approve a provisional territorial government—and to prohibit slavery. Yet less than a year later, that same government passed an exclusion law against Blacks giving slaveholders a deadline to remove their slaves from the territory. Slaves were freed automatically if their masters failed to remove them, but—once free—they could not stay in Oregon (under penalty of a “lash law”). Finding the law unnecessarily cruel, territorial voters rescinded it in 1845. The second of the three exclusion laws, passed on 21 September 1849, prohibited new Black emigrants from settling in the state but stipulated that those already there could stay; it remained in effect until 1854.^[4]

As controversy about the expansion of slavery into the American West swept the United States in the 1850s, Oregon Territory law continued to prohibit the ownership of slaves. In 1857 the aspiring state’s voters doubled down on their previous positions, enthusiastically endorsing an exclusion clause while rejecting slavery. When Oregon was admitted to the Union in 1859, it was the only free state with an exclusion clause in its constitution; Black people could not own property, make contracts, or reside in the state. For this reason, many African Americans, whether free or enslaved, faced significant challenges at the western end of the Oregon Trail.^[5] Even if officials rarely enforced the laws, they may have discouraged African American settlement in Oregon and left a legacy that may have carried over into the present day; today, just two percent of the state’s population is Black.^[6]

After the six-month journey, during which Amanda Gardner saw “herds of shaggy-shouldered buffaloes, slender-legged antelopes, Indians, sagebrush, graves by the roadside, dust and high water and the campfire of buffalo chips over which I cooked the meals,” Deckard found a donation land claim, which he could take possession of via Oregon’s federally-sanctioned Donation Land Law. They lived at Oakville, between Albany and Peoria, in present-day Linn County. Amanda lived with the Deckard family for at least five years and found a job working at Magnolia Mills, James Foster’s flour-making business. She was ecstatic to be earning $3.50 per week and told Lockley that, “I decided I had come to the land of promise, a land that was flowing with milk and honey.” She married Ben Johnson, a blacksmith and former slave who had also made the trek from Missouri to Oregon in the same party as Gardener. They had a “fine wedding” on 12 April 1870, at the home of her employer, Mr. Foster. The couple lived in Albany, where Johnson had opened a blacksmith shop.^[7]

Amanda Johnson remained close with the Deckard family, continuing to care for Lydia’s children and grandchildren. She stated, “I never get over feeling that my first duty is to my family. Whenever any of the Deckards are sick I always go to nurse them and take care of them, for, you see, they are my people, and the only people I've got.” While twenty years of slavery in Missouri might have curtailed the development of Amanda Johnson’s sense of self-determination, her relationship with the Deckards, their interdependence on one another, and their lifelong connection provided a different kind of empowerment that sustained her throughout her life in the West. When Lockley interviewed Johnson at the age of eighty-eight, she was living with a Deckard granddaughter and related that she was “strong and well” and had been free “since I was twenty.”^[8]Amanda Johnson died five years later, at her home in Albany.

[1] Part of a 2016–2018 collaborative project of the National Trails- National Park Service and the University of New Mexico’s Department of History, “Student Experience in National Trails Historic Research: Vignettes Project” [Colorado Plateau Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit (CPCESU), Task Agreement P16AC00957]. This project was formulated to provide trail partners and the general public with useful biographies of less-studied trail figures—particularly African Americans, Hispanics, American Indians, women, and children. Thank you to the Oregon-California Trails Association for providing review of draft essays.

[2] Fred Lockley, Conversations with Pioneer Women (Eugene, Ore.: Rainy Day Press, 1981), 210.

[3] Lockley, Conversations, 208–11.

[4] Greg Nokes, “Black Exclusion Laws in Oregon,” The Oregon Encyclopedia, accessed 8 January 2020. https://oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/exclusion_laws/#.XhYHjEdKjIU. For more on slavery in Oregon, see Greg Nokes, Breaking Chains: Slavery on Trial in the Oregon Territory (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2013).

[5] Nokes, “Black Exclusion Laws in Oregon.” For more on African Americans and overland trail travel, see Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, Sweet Freedom’s Plains: African Americans on the Overland Trails, 1841–1869 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016). For more on sectional tensions and the question of slavery in the American West, see Michael Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

[6] “QuickFacts: Oregon,” United States Census Bureau QuickFacts, accessed 8 January 2020. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/OR.

[7] Lockley, Conversations, 210–11.

[8] Lockley, Conversations, 211.