Family history

My uncle, Terry, is our family genealogy expert and has recently started sending stories about some of our ancestors via email.  This comes on the heels of helping chart my mom's family tree back to the days of the Vikings.  He has a regular day job, but genealogy is his passion.

 Anyway, the first story he sent out was about the journey of my maternal grandmother's grandfather's trip across the country on the Oregon Trail.  He was one of the younger children in a family of eight, and survived a harrowing journey across the country that culminated in both of his parents passing away and the surviving siblings banding together and raising themselves. Eventually, my grandma's grandfather grew up and had a family of his own and then eventually my grandma came along and now here we are today.  I wonder what they would think of Oregon now, having come to it when it was dominated by open space, populated by Native Americans and parts were covered in lots and lots of trees.

It's a pretty amazing story and I thought I would post it here today, as a way to remember part of where we came from.  I'm sure there were a million different reasons that people would leave nearly all their possessions and relatives to travel thousands of miles to an unknown part of the country, but it still amazes me that people went at all.  I don't think I would have been able to do it. I guess the promise of a better life, land, and new beginnings had a pretty strong pull.

Anyway, here's the tale, straight from my uncle's computer to ours:

The Akins, and the Journey West

        James Franklin Akin and Eliza Richey (my maternal great-great-grandparents, I think) were married in Pike County, Illinois, in 1832.  James was born in North Carolina and Eliza, in Kentucky.  Their ancestors had come to Virginia from England, Ireland and Scotland.  After their second child was born, James and Eliza moved to Salem, Iowa, and they had eight children in all.
        In the spring of 1852, they set out with ox teams and wagons for Oregon.  Four families, the Akins, Richeys, Ingrams and Booths, who were related by marriage, traveled together.  The Akin children ranged in age from 19 to 2 and their names were James, Elizabeth, John, Nancy, Franklin, Frances, Caroline, and Mary Ann.  They followed the North Platt River up to the continental divide and then came down into the Snake River watershed.  It was a six-month journey of drudgery and hardship, in which one out of five people died.
        Eliza Richey Akin, the mother, was somewhat frail from having Typhoid Fever a few years before.  When they arrived at the Three Island Crossing of the Snake River in southern Idaho, they struggled all day to get the livestock to cross the river.  For the next two days they dragged cattle behind wagon beds and ferried wagons across.  Eliza became feverish during this time and the day after they got everyone across, she died on the North side of the crossing.
        The party continued on to Fort Boise, where they crossed the Snake River again and proceeded into Oregon.  They arrived at the Columbia River, near The Dalles, in early October, with cold, damp winds coming up the Gorge.  They built log rafts and then by the time they made it to the Cascades, nearly everyone was sick.  The youngest child, Mary Ann, who was only two years old, became feverish and died by the Lower Cascades.  Some of the people were so sick that they had to abandon livestock and hire boats to bring them down into Portland.
        Two weeks after arriving in Portland, James Franklin Akin died, leaving his seven surviving children as orphans.  When he was near death, his brother-in-law, Stuart Richey, who had lost his wife and six-year-old daughter, asked him, “Would it pay to undertake this trip with such an enormous sacrifice of life?”  James replied, “My hope was to bring my family to a better country, and with the same light I had when we started, I should undertake the same thing again.”

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One last thing to add:  my grandma has a small chair in her house that her ancestors brought over on the covered wagon.  It has its legs cut off, so that it could sit flat on the floor of the wagon.  I love to look at it and so do the kids.  We've even gotten a couple of kids' books about the Oregon Trail from the library, so they know a little bit about it.   That chair is the only tangible artifact we have of that time, and it's in good condition, so hopefully it will last a good while longer and be able to educate several more generations!