Oregon Pioneers

6. Our Life on the Oregon Trail in 1851

Voice of Nancy Beulah Rice Cook

As told in 1870

“Head’m up! Move’m out!” shouted Beckwith. My husband

was the wagon master and leader of our crew. What a motley crew

we were when we left Burr Oak Ridge, Iowa in March of 1851.

That means we have lived in Oregon almost twenty years now. We

had been waiting for spring to arrive and the grass to grow on the

prairie. We had so many kids and so many head of oxen, horses,

cows, chickens and even a pig or two. For instance, Ruth and

Alfred had 28 head of oxen, which he drove all the way to Oregon.

We had five Conestoga wagons and each was pulled by four

oxen and loaded down with our supplies. Each wagon could only

hold up to 2000 pounds and some of that weight had to be saved

for people. You could hear us for miles around because of the

clang, clang, clang of all the pots and pans and other supplies

which hung inside and outside each wagon. We were, after all,

moving to a new home and we took everything we could. We were

going to be on the trail for months and then we were going to have

to set up housekeeping again in Oregon. Those wagons were going

to be our home for a long time. We hated to leave any of our

belongings behind.

We were all family. Mansfield’s father, Beckwith, and my

mother, Polly, had married after their spouses had died that terrible

winter of 1839. Between them they had twelve children. When

mother and Beckwith married they had no grandchildren but soon

the grandchildren began to arrive. By 1851 they had nineteen

living grandchildren between them. My brother Cyrenius, and

Mansfield’s sister Berzilda, decided to stay in Iowa, but the rest us

decided to take advantage of the Oregon Land Grant Law and we

moved our families to Oregon to settle on our new land: FREE

LAND!

We were not on the Oregon Trail alone however. Some of

our friends from Burr Oak Ridge left for Oregon that spring too.

Sometimes we traveled along side them, and sometime we

separated. There were also a lot of other folks going to Oregon and

sometime we joined up with them. In some places along the trail

there was quite a traffic jam.

Our family group consisted of five wagons but sometimes we

were in a moving village of up to fifty or one hundred wagons.

Mansfield and I had a wagon, which we shared with mother,

Beckwith and our four children. Jeb, Mansfield’s brother, and his

wife Mary, who is my sister, and their three children, had a wagon.

My sister Lucinda and her husband, Linus Bushnell and their four

children had a wagon. My sister Ruth and her husband Alfred

Collver and their two babies shared a wagon with my brother

Horace, his wife Eliza Jane and their baby. Beckwith’s sister

Sophia, her husband Henry Smith and their baby shared a wagon

with Beckwith’s other sister Harriet, her husband Abraham Cutlip

and their baby. John Alva Harry and Eliza Jane’s uncles Daniel

and Absalom Bolton rode their horses, shared wagon space with

several of us and took their turn at driving the oxen and the stock.

Altogether there were sixteen children under eleven years old

and six of them were under one year old. By the time we reached

Oregon in July 1852 we had twenty children, because four of us

had babies in our winter camp in Provo, Utah. There were twentyone

adults and some of them were barely 20 years old. I don’t

know what we were thinking when we put this train together.

To be continued: