Notes |
- The grandchildren - the whole family - were astounded that Thomas Crawford McBride had come west. He had been the first person to preach restored Christianity in Missouri and now he would be among the first few men to preach it in Oregon. Here are the words of John Rodgers McBride as he recalled his grandfather's arrival:
Early in September after a day of rain, which had mistened the parched earth and cleared the skies of autumn haze, a little party of five on horseback, with one or two pack animals, rode around the point of the lofty hill which fronted our house.
My father was absent, but the family were at their usual duties. I was engaged under my mother?s instructions in digging a small channel that would lead a stream of water that flowed from a spring through a little piece of ground devoted to a vegetable garden.
We saw that the party were travelers, and that they had dismounted at the house. My mother hurried over the few yards between where we were and the door, and I followed full of curiosity.
My elder sister had brought seats before we arrived, and there seated quietly was my grandfather, Thos. and two others, both of whom I recognized, and one woman and a little boy about two years old. One of the men was the husband of a cousin of mine, the other a man from the same county in Missouri, and his wife and little boy. Without one word of their having even contemplated the journey, or having started from their Missouri home, they had thus suddenly come upon us.
My grandfather was then 70 years of age, and his hair was white as winter?s snow. He looked wearied from his long travel of 2,000 miles, and he had ridden for 41 days continuously on horseback, sleeping in his blankets on the ground at night without shelter, to find us.
The party had left the train at Ft. Hall, on Snake river, in the month of August, and reached our home on the 13th of September. The lady, Mrs. Ellen Wright, had performed the same feat while her husband and herself, seating the little boy on a pillow in front of them, had by turns carried him all that long distance. It was of such stuff that the early pioneer was made.
When we left Missouri the year before, my father?s mother was living, and his brother and sister were domiciled in good homes, with not a suggestion that any of them contemplated any change, much less that which involved the long journey to Oregon. But before they had heard from my father?s experiment they had all been seized with a desire to ?go west,? and all followed by the next year?s train.
Location of McBride's grave marker:
Go west from Carlton 2.5 miles
to McBride Cemetery Road. Turn
north to Stout (lane) at top of hill.
Open cattle gate and continue
to the cemetery.
My father?s mother had died a few months after our departure the year before. My uncle, Caleb Woods, and my father's brother, Dr. Thomas McBride, two of my cousins, by the name of Davis, and their brother-in-law, Elisha Bedwell, were of the party, and the latter had accompanied my grandfather on his horseback journey in advance of the train.
It is characteristic of all the old frontier people that what they did they did promptly, and so without warning or suspicion of their coming, they had arrived in our midst.
From Overland to Oregon: Yamhill County, 1846 by John Rodgers McBride. Available in the McMinnville, Oregon Library.
The grandson just quoted matured to become a U. S. Representative from Oregon. The elder sister referred to later became the wife of Sebastian Adams, the founder of McMinnville College.
http://ncbible.org/nwh/ProMcBrideTC.html
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