Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 5.djvu/209



How a plucky woman from Hampden County, Massachusetts, made her way to Oregon and started the Pacific University. A thrilling story of peril from exposure, starvation, and Indians. The heroine a Massachusetts woman of sixty-six years.

(The following letter has recently come to light, showing what hardships a company of emigrants from Missouri to Oregon endured in 1846. It was written by Mrs. Tabitha Brown, the widow of Rev. Clark Brown, who preached in Brimfield from 1797 to 1803. Mrs. Brown was a daughter of Dr. Joseph Moffet, physician in Brimfield, his native place, some 40 years. Mrs. Brown was born in 1780, and was therefore sixty-six years old when she made the journey that she describes. This letter was written in 1854, in her seventy-fifth year. For some time after becoming a widow she was a teacher in Maryland and Virginia, and afterwards, to improve her situation and to help her boys, she removed to Missouri, where she lived a good many years. Within this period the other members of her father's family became widely scattered, and their locations unknown to her. In 1846 she stated for Oregon with her son and daughter and their families, a Captain John Brown, brother of her deceased husband, accompanying them. She was eight months on the way, and the amount of suffering she passed through, and the courage with which she met it, will be seen in the letter itself.)

Forest Grove, Oregon Territory, August, 1854.

My Brother and Sister:

It is impossible for me to express to you the unspeakable pleasure and happiness your letter of the 29th of June gave me. Not hearing from you for so great a length of time, I had concluded myself to be the last one of my father's family remaining here, a pilgrim in the wide world, to complete the work that God gave me to do. Oh, that I could be present with you and Margaret and relate in the hearing