When I think of my father without my mother, I think of him sitting with his brothers after a family dinner. They are handsome, quiet men who strike matches, light their pipes, and as Mother said, “smoke at one another.” When their pipes are puffing satisfactorily, one of them begins, “I remember our granddad used to say…”
I pay no attention, for I am “being nice” to my younger cousin Barbara. This is my duty at family dinners.
Father was the grandson of pioneers on both sides of his family. All through my childhood, whenever a task was difficult, my parents said, “Remember your pioneer ancestors.” Life had not been easy for them; we should not expect life to be easy for us. If I cried when I fell down, Father said, “Buck up, kid. You’ll pull through. Your pioneer ancestors did.”
I came to resent those exemplary people who were, with one exception, a hardy bunch. My Great-grandmother Bunn was rarely mentioned. I pictured them all as old, grim, plodding eternally across the plains to Oregon. As a child, I simply stopped listening. In high school, I scoffed, “Ancestor worship.” Unfortunately, no one pointed out that some of those ancestors were children. If they had, I might have pricked up my ears.
My Grandmother Bunn’s parents, Jacob Hawn and his wife, Harriet, crossed the plains in 1843 in the first large wagon train to Oregon. Jacob Hawn, born in Genesee County, New York, in 1804, of German parentage, was a millwright, pioneering his life. His first wife, like so many pioneer women, died young. He then married Harriet Elizabeth Pierson. In 1834, when Jacob was thirty and Harriet sixteen, the couple left by covered wagon for outposts of civilization in need of mills for grain or lumber. In their covered wagon, they trundled to Wisconsin, Missouri, Texas, Louisiana, back to New York, and then continued on to Missouri once more. Four children were born along the way. On May 18, 1843, the family started for Oregon with a company of “three hundred souls all told…traveling by compass due West.”
In her old age, Laura Aurilla, the eldest child, recorded her memories of that journey to Oregon with her family, “two yoke of oxen, two horses and a cow.” She was eight years old. Her little brothers were six, three, and one month old. My great-grandmother was by then twenty-five.
Laura described the company as “a happy lot of people, all of one mind to go to the new country called Oregon.” There was no sickness or fear of Indians, and in the beginning there was plenty of grass for cattle. Laura recorded that the prairie was black with buffalo. If an animal was killed, it was divided with every family and the hide saved for future use.
Laura wrote about the hazards of crossing the Platte River and of help from Indians, of bare country with buffalo chips the only fuel for cooking, and of trading with Indians for dried meat and salmon.
When food ran low, families camped off to themselves to prevent hungry children from teasing for what others might have. (“Never tease and never hint” was a pioneer rule handed down to me.) Everyone was relieved when they were able to buy flour at Fort Hall and to bathe and wash clothes at Soda Springs. The Nez Percé Indians were good to the “Bostons,” as Indians called the members of the wagon train.
Laura described the men cutting timber and clearing a road to cross the Rocky Mountains, and how her father “fixed up” the mill of Dr. Marcus Whitman, the missionary. When the wagon train reached the Columbia River in November, some travelers built rafts, while wagons and livestock were sent overland. Others, including the Hawns, bought canoes from Indians.
By November, Oregon was cold and rainy. The Columbia River and the Gorge, a funnel for raw winds, were full of rapids. Clothes were wet, the family hungry. When they were blown ashore, my great-grandfather built a fire and vowed to find food, “dead or alive.” With a sharpened stick, he speared two salmon from a stream where the fish, “running upstream, were so thick their backs were out of the water.” The family ate roast salmon “with no salt, pepper or bread” before they traveled on, walking around rough water and towing their canoe.
Laura recalled how hard they had to work to bail water out of the canoe, and how, on reaching Fort Vancouver, then a British settlement, at night, they nearly swamped the canoe. “Just then a man hailed us, ‘Who comes there?’ By this time Father was out of humer [sic], and told him it was none of his business.”
The Hawns then learned that Dr. Whitman had sent an Indian ahead bearing the news that a millwright was on the way. The man, hired to hail everyone who came along, stood on a rock in the rain and cold for four days and nights waiting for Jacob Hawn, the millwright. “So our hardships were ended,” Laura wrote.
With provisions supplied by Dr. John McLoughlin, the missionary, the family was taken to Oregon City, where millstones shipped around Cape Horn were waiting to grind the harvest into flour for arriving emigrants. Dr. McLoughlin put men to work building a house for the family while, under Jacob’s supervision, others constructed the mill, the first in what would become, in 1859, the state of Oregon.
There is not a word of self-pity. Laura never refers to herself, only to “we.” She was often tired, cold, and hungry, but so was everyone else. She must have taken responsibility for her little brothers, not easy when a foal, the first stallion in Oregon, was loaded into the wagon with the children. Hardship was to be expected when one was a pioneer. All her life she remembered that journey with wonder, and with pride at the part she had played in the history of the United States.
Jacob Hawn took up a plot of land near Oregon City, later moving near Lafayette. He built grist mills and bridges in the Willamette Valley. He also built the Lafayette Hotel, sometimes called Hawn’s Tavern, which was used for court sessions and religious services. It also became a schoolhouse, for Harriet provided a room for a school and room and board for a young man eager to teach. Jacob acted as postmaster while continuing to build grist and lumber mills. He died in 1860, at the age of fifty-six, of “the hemorrhage.”
Harriet Hawn must have been a woman of strength and endurance. Before the death of her husband, she bore four more daughters, one of whom, Mary Edith Amine, was to become my grandmother.
Widowed, Harriet moved with her children to The Dalles, then a rough mining town, where she built a hotel. She lived in The Dalles until she died, apparently enjoying her hard life.
The Bunn side of my father’s family was considered less interesting, the Johnny-come-latelies of the family, for Great-grandfather Frederick Bunn did not cross the plains until 1851. To the surprise of my generation, the Bunns are now better known than the Hawns because of the house in Yamhill, now an Oregon landmark.
Frederick Bunn was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in 1825. He and his brothers and sisters were orphaned and divided among families who could take an extra child. Frederick was reared by a Mr. Wright in Texas, but in 1851 returned to Missouri, where he married Elmira Noel. A wife was a valuable asset, for in 1850 the Donation Land Act had been changed to entitle a married man to twice as much land as a single man.
The couple set out for Oregon, a journey of great hardship for Great-grandmother Bunn. She became pregnant, and Indians, who had been friendly and helpful to the Hawns in 1843, had turned hostile by 1851. To be eighteen, pregnant, terrified, and living in discomfort and hardship was too much for the young woman to bear. Her only child, my grandfather, John Marion Bunn, was born in Carlton, Oregon, nine months after the beginning of the long, hard journey. Elmira became an invalid who lived in terror of Indians all her life, even though the Indians were often imaginary.
John Marion Bunn married Mary Edith Amine Hawn on September 30, 1872. They bought land in and around Yamhill and a wheelwright’s house that they enlarged into the first fine house in Yamhill. They had ten children, eight of whom survived—five boys and three girls. The farmhouse at the time of my father’s boyhood held three generations and was a lively place.
My father told one story of growing up in Yamhill. When he was fifteen, his father sent him to the butcher shop to buy some beefsteak. Instead of buying the meat, he continued, by what means I do not know, to eastern Oregon, where he worked on ranches all summer.
When I once asked my Grandmother Bunn if she had worried about my father when he did not return, she answered, “Oh my, no. We knew he would turn up sooner or later.” Turn up he did, three months later.
All his father said was “Did you bring the beefsteak?”