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Tabitha Brown, the Oregon Trail

A historical portrait of a woman. — Tabitha Brown, from Centennial History of Oregon.
Image/Public Domain

Tabitha Brown – Oregon Trail^[1]
By Angela Reiniche

Tabitha Moffat was born 1 May 1780 at Brimfield, Massachusetts, to Dr. Joseph Moffat and his wife, Lois Haynes Moffat. At age nineteen, she married Clark Brown, a minister. They had four children together: Orus, Manthano, John, and, lastly, a daughter named Pherne. After eighteen years of marriage and an assortment of homes across the eastern United States, Clark Brown died; her son John also passed away at the age of six. Soon after her husband’s death in January 1817, Tabitha and the three surviving children stayed at the home of George and Martha Washington until they located a home in Maryland. Clark’s brother, Captain John Brown, retired from the sea and came to live with them. In 1824, the Brown family moved to the St. Charles and Hickory Grove areas, west of St. Louis, Missouri.^[2] Tabitha opened a school and, for the next twenty years, provided a comfortable life for her children while providing education to others.

By the mid-1840s, however, changes were afoot. Tabitha’s oldest son, Orus Brown, had already traveled the Oregon Trail; in 1843, leaving behind his second wife and seven children, he left Hickory Grove with the Great Migration of 1843 to see the Oregon country. While there, he made and improved a land claim near Forest Grove, Oregon, and explored the area with Dr. Elijah White—an important figure in the region’s early settlement and a crucial intermediary between white settlers and Native nations. Orus returned to the United States in 1845, reporting that Oregon offered a stark contrast to the economically depressed and malaria-ridden valleys of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. His sister, Pherne, and her husband prepared to accompany Orus on his return to Oregon in 1846; they did not, however, intend to take Tabitha Brown with them.^[3]

Orus spent the winter of 1845–1846 trying to convince his sister and uncle (but not Tabitha) to sell the bulk of their possessions and plan a spring journey to Oregon. Not wanting to be left behind, Tabitha—by then sixty-five years old—concluded that family ties were stronger than her own fear of the long journey; assisted by her nephew Charles Fullerton, she packed all her belongings into a wagon and prepared to head west toward the Oregon Territory. Her son Manthano, detained by ill health and a wife reluctant to leave her family, stayed in Kansas. Captain John joined the wagon train, along with Orus and Pherne and their respective families.^[4] The party, a caravan of forty wagons, left for Oregon on 15 April 1846 “in high expectation of gaining the wished-for land of promise.”^[5]

Years after she had settled at Forest Grove, in the Oregon Territory, Tabitha told her siblings the story of her journey across the plains. She wrote that there was little of interest to report until they reached Fort Laramie; after that point, several wagons led by the experienced Orus Brown began to pull ahead, staying separate from Tabitha’s wagon for the remainder of the trip. Both wagon trains passed Fort Hall in August, which was about eight hundred miles from Oregon City via the best-known route. At that point, about four months into their trip, Tabitha’s children and grandchildren, led by Orus Brown, continued west along the main route (described as “the old road down the Columbia River”) and arrived safely in Oregon via the Barlow Road; they reached the toll gate at the east entrance on 28 September 1846.^[6]

However, three or four of the emigrant trains (including Tabitha’s) ended up following a man named Jesse Applegate, who insisted that—if the emigrants followed him—they “would be in settlement long before those who had gone down the Columbia.” The travelers agreed to follow their new guide. Unfortunately, Tabitha wrote, “our sufferings from that time no tongue can tell.” According to her diary, the “guide robbed and lied,” leaving them “to the depredations of Indians, wild beasts, and starvation.” While he did not personally rob the travelers, Applegate’s optimism led them into dangerous situations—such as sixty miles of desert without water or grass for their stock. Applegate rushed ahead of the travelers, entrusting them to a man named Levi Scott. With his help they reached the Applegate Trail, which led north from California.^[7]

Once in Oregon, they climbed what seemed to Brown like mountain after mountain; most of their cattle died along the way, their wagons broke, and members of their party grew ill—some mortally so. They had to stay vigilant, day and night, watching out for “hostile Indians” so that they could protect what little they had left of their supplies and conveyances. When they encountered the Klamath and Rogue River communities, they lost most of the rest of their cattle. All Tabitha Brown had left was the horse she had taken from Missouri.^[8]

Tabitha, having lost her wagon, described the grueling three-day, twelve-mile journey through Oregon’s Umpqua Mountains. Brown described the passage with some detail, illustrating an image of a canyon strewn with dead horses, broken wagons, bedding, clothing, and the remains of people who had either been too fatigued or too starved to finish the journey. She watched hundreds of wagons fall apart as they struggled through “mud and water up to our horses’ sides much of the way.” Brown noted that she had only seen one wagon “out of a hundred” make it to the other side of the mountain intact. Her worst experience was yet to come, however, after the realization set in that they had to cross the Calapooya Mountains. Winter had already set in, they had very little left in the way of food, and they “were a long way from any white settlement.”^[9]

The perennially resolute Tabitha Brown remained steadfast in her belief that they would make it through their trials. “[T]hrough all my sufferings in crossing the plains, I had not once sought relief by the shedding of tears, nor thought we should not live to reach the settlements,” she wrote. “The same faith and hope that I had ever had in the blessings of Kind Providence strengthened in proportion to the trials I had to encounter.”^[10] After three slices of bacon and a cup of tea, her portion of the remaining provisions, she and Captain John—who was “too old and feeble to render any assistance to me”—saddled their horses and rode to catch up with a wagon train that had left the previous day. They camped with them but the next day Uncle John, who was quite weak and ill, fell off his horse; Brown expended great effort getting him back into his saddle, which she led by the bridle while riding her own horse, looking two miles ahead to the next mountain they had to climb.^[11] After she and her late husband’s brother tackled that obstacle, they found themselves in a large valley that Brown described as a “wide, solitary place, [with] no wagons in sight.” Soon the sun began its descent toward the western horizon, the wind blew fiercely, and then the rain started to fall. Once she realized that the wagon tracks they had been following were no longer visible, Brown “alighted from [her] horse, flung off saddle and saddle-pack and tied the horse to a tree with the lasso rope”; after her brother-in-law learned that she planned to camp there for the night, “he gave a groan and fell to the ground,” leaving her to fashion a makeshift tent from her wagon sheet and secure the Captain’s horse and move his belongings under the tent. Then Brown had to rouse him from his resting place on the ground, but “his senses were gone” and she had to “cover him as well as [she] could with blankets …expecting he would be a corpse before morning.”^[12]

That, however, was not to be the Captain’s fate. After an evening of prayer strengthened her belief that “kind Providence …was watching over me still,” Tabitha Brown woke to the sounds of other emigrants milling about the campsite, and half a mile away she saw the wagons that she had tried to catch up to the previous day. After packing up and mounting their horses, “we were soon there [with the wagons] and ate plentifully of fresh [venison].” A few days later, Tabitha Brown reunited with her children and grandchildren in the Umpqua Valley, near present-day Sutherlin, Oregon. For all of them it “was a joyful meeting….they had been near starving….they all cried because they had nothing to eat.”^[13]

It took the party several days to navigate the next snowy pass, and they waited while a path was cut for them. They sent Octavius Pringle, Tabitha’s fourteen-year-old grandson, to find relief provisions for the travelers, and within a week he had returned with food.^[14] Before long, however, they “were again in a state of starvation.” Tabitha Brown took pride in the fact that, while everyone else wore plainly their despair, she never showed her own. A few days later, Orus Brown, who had taken the old emigrant route, showed up in their camp with “four pack horses and provisions for our relief”; after reaching the settlements in September, he learned of the suffering of the other emigrants and decided to help. Shortly thereafter, the emigrant party left their camp and made a final fifty-mile push to the Willamette Valley.^[15]

Brown wrote that “on Christmas day, at 2 P.M. I entered the house of a Methodist minister, the first house I had set my feet in for nine months.” Destitute upon her arrival, Tabitha soon discovered a single coin—a “half-bit” worth just six and one-quarter cents—in an old glove. Applying the ingenuity that had shown itself time and time again on the overland journey, Brown came up with an idea. She bought three needles and, after trading some of her old clothes to Indigenous women for deerskin, she began making men’s and women’s gloves. Before long, she had developed a profitable business.^[16]

Tabitha spent her first winter in Oregon (1846–47) with the Pringle family in the Salem area, then moved during the following summer to the Astoria area. She then sought the companionship offered by missionary families and spent the winter of 1847–48 in the home of Rev. Harvey Clark and his wife at West Tualatin. At some point during her stay with the Clarks, the reverend convinced her that a nearby log meeting house would be the ideal site for a boarding school for nearby children—particularly those who had been orphaned on their way to Oregon Territory or the California gold fields.^[17] Clark opened the school in March 1848 and charged the parents who could afford to pay one dollar per week for boarding and tuition. By summer, Brown had thirty students, both male and female, between the ages of four and twenty-one. Three years later, the student enrollment had grown “[her] family” to forty students at $2.50 per week.^[18]

Not long after, Clark donated part of his land claim for a town site and a building was constructed that would eventually house Pacific University, founded by Clark and Tabitha Brown in 1854.^[19] By that time, Tabitha Brown had purchased a “nicely furnished white frame house on a lot in town” which she rented out for $100 per year.^[20] In her letter to her family back east, Tabitha Brown described the trials and joys of her overland journey and her life in what had become the town of Forest Grove. She proclaimed that her hard work, which she had yet to quit, had earned her a considerable accumulation of property and livestock on which she collected rents—half of which she donated to the University. At the end of the letter, she stated that “this much I have been able to accumulate by my own industry, independent of my children, since I drew six and a quarter cents from the finger of my glove.”^[21] She passed away on 4 May 1858.

[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] Ella Brown Spooner, Clark and Tabitha Brown (New York: Exposition Press, 1957), 105–6; and Ella Brown Spooner, ed., Tabitha Brown’s Western Adventures: A Grandmother’s Account of Her Trek from Missouri to Oregon, 1846–1858 (New York: Exposition Press, 1958), 9–10.

[3] Dale Morgan, Overland in 1846 (Georgetown, Calif: Talisman Press, 1963), 529–30.

[4] Captain John Brown was always game for an adventure and insisted on going along, too. Capt. John was 77 years old, although he led a reporter near Independence, MO, to believe he was the father of the extended family and that he was only 72. Morgan, Overland in 1846, 529–30.

[5] Brown, Tabitha and H.S. Lyman, ed., “Documents: A Brimfield Heroine – Mrs. Tabitha Brown,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 5, no. 2 (June 1904), 200.

[6] Fred Lockley, “Impressions and Observations of The Journal Man,” Oregon Journal, 28 August 1928, p. 10, c. 6.

[7] Quotes from Brown and Lyman, “Documents,” 200. There is no evidence that Applegate actually robbed the travelers; rather, they had to jettison their possessions along the way, and some emigrants felt that Applegate had engineered this to benefit merchants at the end of the trail. Applegate may have over-promised and under-delivered, but there is no evidence that he did so maliciously. He was simply far too optimistic about his route to Oregon, which he truly believed was better and shorter than the Oregon Trail. When he left the travelers, he took with him a crew to clear the way for the wagons; however, Applegate did not stay to supervise the crew, explaining the rather difficult conditions encountered by travelers like Tabitha Brown. Stafford Hazelett, correspondence with National Trails staff, 5 July 2018.

[8] Spooner, ed., Tabitha Brown’s Western Adventures, 13.

[9] Spooner, Tabitha Brown, 14–16. To note, Brown’s letter made reference to the “Calipoose Mountains,” which, indeed, are the Calapooya Mountains, a spur of the Western Cascades, named after the Kalapuya Native Americans of the Willamette Valley; see Lewis A. McArthur, Oregon Geographic Names, Seventh Edition (Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 2003), 137–38.

[10] Spooner, Tabitha Brown, 16–17.

[11] Brown and Lyman, “Documents,” 201.

[12] Brown and Lyman, “Documents,” 202.

[13] Brown and Lyman, “Documents,” 202.

[14] Virgil Pringle diary, entries November 3 (Octavius departs) and 9 (Octavius returns with food). Pringle’s diary has been reprinted in multiple places. See Morgan, Overland in 1846 and Transactions of the Forty-Eighth Annual Reunion of the Oregon Pioneer Association (1920) (Portland, Oreg.: Chausse-Prudhomme Co., 1923).

[15] Spooner, Tabitha Brown, 18.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Evidence suggests that this idea was entirely Clark’s. In 1848, many Oregonian men abandoned their children en route to the California gold diggings (news of which had yet to reach the rest of the United States, and—for that matter—the world). Hazelett, 5 July 2018.

[18] For a detailed account of the school via one of its students, see H.S. Lyman and Jane Kinney Smith, “Recollections of Grandma Brown,” The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society 3, no.3 (September 1902): 287–95.

[19] Mary Jo Morelli, “Tabitha Brown, the ‘Mother of Oregon’,” Forest Grove (Oregon) News-Times, Feb. 11, 2009.

[20] Spooner, Tabitha Brown, 18.

[21] Ibid.