Part of a series of articles titled People of the Oregon Trail.
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Robin and Polly Holmes, the Oregon Trail
Courtesy of Oreg. Hist. Soc. Research Library OrHi89474
Robin and Polly Holmes – Oregon Trail[1]
By Angela Reiniche
Before the Civil War, most African Americans traveled to the American West as slaves. Chattel slavery could be found in every state and territory, and intense local debates took place about its suitability in places such as Oregon Country, where Robin and Polly Holmes (along with their three-year-old daughter Mary Jane) arrived after a long journey on the emigrant trail from Missouri in 1844. Brought there by their owner, Nathaniel Ford, a former sheriff, the Holmes family had landed on “free soil.” Ford, however, repeatedly denied the growing family their eagerly awaited emancipation. It was only after Robin Holmes agreed to prospect for gold on Ford’s behalf in 1849 that he found a solid opportunity to negotiate his family’s freedom. Robin, Polly, and their infant son, Lon, were given their emancipation papers in 1850, but they had to fight a lengthy courtroom battle to secure the freedom of their other son and their three daughters. When the case came before Judge George Williams, a free-soil Democrat and member of the Oregon Supreme Court, on 13 July 1853, he ordered Ford to return the Holmes children to their newly-emancipated parents. The Holmes’ victory, alongside similar cases tried throughout the Pacific Northwest, was part of an effort among both African Americans and their allies to contest the discriminatory legislation of the antebellum era.[2]
The Holmes family’s journey from Missouri to Oregon Country was similar to that of other enslaved peoples brought to the American West in the antebellum period. Before their relationship began with Nathaniel Ford, the couple had been the slaves of a “Mayor Whitman” of Howard County, Missouri, for twelve years before being sold at a public auction in 1841 to satisfy considerable personal debts. Ford, who was sheriff of Howard County at the time, had issued the writ of execution that removed the Holmes family from Whitman’s custody. Court testimony reveals that, for reasons that remain unclear, the buyer could not be located and Ford agreed to “keep [Robin] and his wife Polly” and they “remained in [Ford’s] service until the spring of 1844.” In the same testimony, Robin Holmes said that, at that time, he believed he and his family had been Ford’s property, but by 1852—when Holmes filed suit against Ford—he believed that his family were not Ford’s slaves after all.
In 1852 Holmes argued in court that Nathaniel Ford, who had his own money troubles in Missouri, convinced Robin and Polly to accompany him to Oregon by promising that they would be granted their freedom after helping set up a farm in Oregon Country. The Holmes family left Howard County, Missouri, on 14 May 1844, traveling with Ford, his wife, and their six children. Eleven days later, at the jumping-off point of Independence, Missouri, Ford was chosen as captain of their emigrant train, perhaps because of his experience as a land surveyor and flatboat man. A copy of the wagon train manifest notes that it consisted of 358 people (almost half of them children), 54 wagons, 500 head of cattle, 28 mules, and 60 horses. The company traveled what became known as the “usual route” of the Oregon Trail, which took them across Kansas and Nebraska to the Platte River; by July 28 they camped in view of Scotts Bluff. They crossed South Pass about a month later, reaching Fort Bridger (present-day southwestern Wyoming) on August 31. By the end of September, they reached a place near present-day Baker City, Oregon, before continuing over the Blue Mountains to the Columbia River, which they followed west until reaching the Willamette Valley on 6 October 1844.[3]
Once Ford staked his claim in the nearby Rickreall Valley in early 1845, he retrieved Robin, Polly, and Mary Jane from Oregon City to start the work of establishing a farm. The Holmes family lived in a small cabin on Ford’s farm, from which he allowed them to sell the produce that they raised. Ford refused, however, to honor his promise of emancipation. The California Gold Rush changed everything, and Robin Holmes agreed to travel to the mines and bring back enough gold to satisfy Ford to the point that he would finally grant his family their emancipation. Once in California, Holmes found work as a cook in a mining camp and in his off-time prospected for gold. When he returned to the Rickreall farm in 1850, he brought $900 with him, which equals about $30,000 today.
Not long after Holmes’ return from the gold mines, Ford manumitted Robin, Polly, and their newborn baby, but kept their other children, Mary Jane, Roxanna, and James. (Another child, Harriett, had died while visiting her parents in 1851. Robin blamed Ford for her death.) Robin, who with his family had moved to Nesmith Hills, and then later to Salem, operated a shrub nursery and a small commercial fruit tree farm.[4] Although illiterate, he had learned from Oregon’s Black abolitionist community and their allies that the Territory had disallowed slavery. A year after Harriet’s death, Holmes sued Ford for the custody of Mary Jane, then twelve years of age; James, who had been born in February 1845; and Roxanna, born in February 1847. Holmes, frustrated with the pace and inconsistencies of the local legal system in Polk County, took his fight to the Oregon Supreme Court in the summer of 1853. On 13 July 1853, Judge George H. Williams ordered in favor of Robin Holmes, ruling that Mary Jane, James, and Roxanna were “hereby awarded to the custody of their parents …and remain with them as their children as fully in all respects.” Williams also ordered Ford to pay all costs associated with the proceedings, which amounted to $21.50.[5]
Nathaniel Ford had a difficult time letting go of the children and even after the verdict attempted to get them returned under the auspices of the Fugitive Slave Act. Mary Jane remained as a paid servant in Ford’s household. She eventually married Reuben Shipley, also a former slave, at age twenty-two, but not before Ford required her husband to pay $750 for her “ransom,” despite the fact that the courts had liberated her with the 1853 decision. The rest of the Holmes family had faced formidable odds and had their fair share of financial difficulties in the years following their (re)union; a Polk County assessment roll showed the value of Holmes’s personal property at only $655. (The average value of personal property held by the other twenty-eight taxable residents of Polk County was $1,309.)[6] In Robin Holmes’ will, dated 1 February 1862, he ordered that after the payment of his debts and burial cost, each of his four children receive a five dollar “legacy” payment, and that whatever remained would be “given to my wife Polly Holmes, for her life, to be used and enjoyed by her.”[7]
Robin Holmes died and was buried in the Salem Pioneer Cemetery the next year. In 1870, at the age of sixty-eight, Polly Holmes was living at the Oregon Hospital for the Insane, an asylum in East Portland. The census enumerator, a physician presumably working for the hospital, listed her condition as “insane.”[8] She was still there in 1872, and lived on into the 1880s.[9] The only child of Robin and Polly Holmes who lived to see the turn of the century was Mary Jane Holmes Shipley Drake, their eldest daughter, who lived until 1925.[10]
[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] Shirley Ann Moore, Sweet Freedom’s Plains: African Americans on the Overland Trails, 1841–1869 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), kindle edition, loc 3432. For more on the specific details of the Holmes case see: Darrell Millner, “Holmes v. Ford (1853),” Black Past, accessed 8 August 2017, http://www.blackpast.org/aaw/ holmes-v-ford-1853; Scott McArthur, “The Polk County Slave Case,” Historically Speaking: A Periodic Publication of the Polk County, Oregon Historical Society 3 (August 1970):1–10; and Fred Lockley, “The Case of Robin Holmes vs. Nathaniel Ford,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 23 (March–December 1922): 111–37. For an overview of slavery in the antebellum American West see chapter 2 of Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998).
[3] James Clyman and Charles L. Camp, “James Clyman: His Diaries and Reminiscences,” California Historical Society Quarterly 4, no. 2 (1925): 307–60.
[4] Moore, Sweet Freedom’s Plains, kindle loc 3417–24.
[5] Lockley, The Case of Robin Holmes, 136–37.
[6] “Black in Oregon, 1840–1870,” Oregon Secretary of State, State Archives, accessed 22 June 2017, http://sos.oregon.gov/archives/exhibits/black-history/Pages/families/holmes-robin.aspx,.
[7] Ibid.
[8] 1870 U.S. census, population schedules. NARA microfilm publication M593, 1,761 rolls. 1870 United States Federal Census [database on-line] (Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2009).
[9] Oregon Historical Society; Portland, OR; Oregon, Biographical and Other Index Card File, 1700s–1900s [database on-line] (Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2014).
[10] Wagner, Tricia Martineau. “Drake, Mary Jane Holmes Shipley (1841–1925),” Black Past, http://www.blackpast.org/aaw/drake-mary-jane-holmes-shipley-1841-1925.
Last updated: March 7, 2023