LIFE AND DEATH AMONG THE FIRST OREGONIANS

early pandemics of the oregon territoRy

When talking about life and death in Oregon Territory it is important to keep in mind that the re-settling by white traders and pioneers did not occur without the unsettling of Native populations. Various diseases brought to the region by Euro-Americans severely affected the lives of Native Americans. Smallpox was the earliest documented of these deadly epidemics in Oregon, though some theories postulate that the disease may have been present in the region as early as 1519, brought to the Pacific Northwest by Spanish Conquistadors. The disease likely arrived in the 1780s through inland trade before Europeans settled in the area, however dates are difficult to substantiate as these observations were made after-the-fact by white explorers. For example, in 1806 Lewis and Clark noted that they encountered a pockmarked woman in a partially deserted village on Sauvie Island. The Corps of Discovery estimated that the Clackamas people numbered around 1,500. However, that number was likely several hundreds more as various groups regularly travelled between fishing, hunting and trade camps. By 1855, only eighty-eight Clackamas people survived in Oregon.

Head Flattening Among the Chinookan People

Up until 1845 head-flattening was used by many Pacific Northwest tribes to distinguish social status. Typically those with flattened heads could not be taken or sold as slaves. Correspondingly, slaves could not flatten the heads of their children. The process began in infancy and lasted until the baby was about a year old. Though methods varied, the baby’s head was usually wrapped in a bandage and a board hinged to the top of a cradleboard was placed on the baby’s forehead. It was tightened as the months went on. Doing so molded the forehead into a wedge shape with a flat, elongated profile. The practice did not affect mental capabilities and the child experienced no pain as the bones in a baby’s skull are soft and malleable.

THE WORLD’S LONGEST GRAVEYARD

Life and death on the overland trail

It has been 175 years since the Overland Trail officially opened and wagon trains began making the trek to the Oregon Territory, but what did this journey actually mean for those who left home in search of new opportunities? The decision to travel west was a dangerous one. Births and deaths were often documented in trail journals in the same manner that one might comment on the weather or trail conditions. Though these were significant life events, travelers could not dedicate much time to celebrate or mourn. 

There were a surprising number births that occurred on the trail. In the nineteenth century it was not uncommon to lose the baby, mother, or both in childbirth.  Unsanitary conditions and the lack of midwives and doctors made the experience that much more difficult.  

Nearly ten percent of those who braved the Overland Trail did not survive. The two thousand mile trail has been called “the nation’s longest graveyard” with nearly 65,000 deaths over a twenty-five year period. Accidents caused by weather, animals, water crossing, and negligence were commonplace.  Shootings were usually cited as accidents, but murders did occur. Smallpox and dysentery were rampant killers, but cholera, a waterborne disease, claimed the most casualties as it thrived in unsanitary conditions and was fast-acting. The first symptom was a stomach ache that quickly turned to intense pain.  Resultant diarrhea and vomiting dehydrated the sufferer and their skin wrinkled and turned blue. If the victim survived the first twelve to twenty-four hours, they usually recovered.

Grief, the mother of invention

Prior to the Barlow Road’s construction, the Cascade mountain range was deemed insurmountable. Emigrants then were often faced with a choice: settle in the Dalles, which was quickly becoming overcrowded, or take a chance and ferry one’s party down the Columbia river. The decision to brave the river was not one made lightly. In 1843, three years before the opening of the Barlow Road, emigrant Jesse Applegate was forced to watch as his son and nephew drowned during the party’s attempt to navigate the Columbia. “Father and Uncle Jesse, seeing their children drowning, were seized with frenzy, and dropping their oars, sprang from their seats and were about to make a desperate attempt to swim to them,” recalled one of Jesse’s nephews. “Our hearts are broken. As soon as our families are settled and time can be spared we must look for another way that avoids the river,” said Jesse’s brother, Lindsay, after the tragedy. In response, Applegate headed a survey team to find an alternative travel route that would bypass the Columbia entirely, eventually founding the Applegate Trail, also known as the Southern Emigrant Trail.

oregon’s first midwives

Midwives also played an important role among the local Native American tribes. The Klamath women used midwives to provide care during childbirth along with the woman’s mother who would provide prenatal advice as well as support during the postpartum period.

Managing pain before modern pain relievers

In the mid-nineteenth century there was usually no pain relief available to the masses other than alcohol. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, some native peoples in Oregon would use yarrow plants to ease headaches, toothaches and swelling. While anesthesia in the form of ether and chloroform became available in the mid 1840s it was not widely accepted or accessible.

Hidden Mother Photography

Hidden mother photography is a contemporary name for a trend that developed out of the necessity to minimize the movements of an infant or small child. Popularized in the 1860s when exposure times took as long as thirty seconds, a shrouded or obscured figure sat or stood within the frame of the photograph to provide a familiar comfort to the child and inhibit any movements that could result in a blurred image. Other methods to ensure stillness included head or neck clamps, chair tethering or administration of over-the-counter opiates. 

Researchers have yet to determine why these shrouded individuals were not included in the portrait. Although this method is referred to as “hidden mothers,” photos also portrayed shrouded males or other female caretakers hidden under the draperies. While experts agree that the basic practice behind concealing the figure was to calm an energetic child, its use in post-mortem photography remains unclear. The practice of shrouding waned once the photographic processes quickened.

Advent of the baby home

The story of St. Agnes

Prior to 1900 in the United States the infant mortality rate averaged between 200-300 for every 1000 live births. This rate fluctuated according to epidemics, disease, war, weather, and the famine. Additionally, complications during or after delivery could often result in the death of the baby or mother, as the germ theory had yet to take hold in society and people were unsure how to prevent the spread of diseases and infections.  In the first decades of the 1900s several improvements to hygiene practices lowered the infant mortality rate, with the use of vaccinations and antibiotics contributing to the decline as well.  In 1900 the average infant mortality rate rested at 165 per 1000 live births. Today the average is 7 per 1000. People who made it to their twenties were generally expected to live at least to middle age. 

Disease epidemics and periods of economic depression claimed the lives of parents as well.  In 1897 the Sisters of the Good Shepherd of the Magdalen opened the Magdalen Home for Orphans. The newly constructed four-story building was located about a mile north of Oregon City in Park Place on a working fifty-acre farm formerly owned by Amos L. Lovejoy. When the Magdalens moved back to Portland in 1902 to open a girls’ home, the Sisters of Mercy took ownership of the building and opened the St. Agnes Foundling Asylum (later renamed the St. Agnes Baby Home).  Several of the residents, aged newborn to fourteen years old, were abandoned or came from broken homes. Live-in nuns and other employees provided twenty-four hour supervision.

Around 1944, the Sisters of Providence took over the ministry in a different facility and St. Agnes Baby Home was dismantled in 1952. An adjacent cemetery existed until November 24, 1951, and the known burials of thirty-four children and two nuns were moved to the Mount Calvary Cemetery in Portland. Today, the St. Agnes Baby Home site lies underneath thousands of tons of infill near the I-205 interchange at Park Place.

Frontier Justice

Early Oregon and the Death Penalty

The death penalty in Oregon has long been a controversial topic with a history of repealments and reinstatements. Many re-settlers took the Old Testament concept of, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” as a culturally acceptable punishment for murder. Trail diaries even indicate that hangings occurred within wagon trains. Though these hangings were considered just, they could not be defined as legal.  The first legal system in the area was not established until after Oregon became a territory in 1848. Shortly thereafter in the spring of 1851 the first officially sanctioned execution occurred. 

By 1864 the Oregon Constitution adopted a statute that required the death penalty as punishment for first degree murder. Between 1864 and 1903, legal executions were largely a public demonstration carried out by county sheriffs in the local community. This changed in 1903 when a law passed that required all executions to take place behind the walls of the State Penitentiary in Salem.  

By 1911, Governor Oswald West recommended abolishment of capital punishment in his first message to the legislature, and shortly afterward Oregon voters, by constitutional amendment, narrowly repealed the death penalty on December 3, 1914. After WWI, proponents of capital punishment, including Governor James Withycombe, argued that the state did not have a suitable punishment for treason. The death penalty was reinstated in Oregon in 1920 with the provision that the punishment for first-degree murder would be death unless the jury recommended otherwise.  Capital punishment was again repealed between 1964 and 1977 and reinstated in 1978. Though it remains legal in Oregon, the last execution occurred over twenty years ago on May 16, 1997. 

The Whitman Murders

In the fall of 1836, Dr. Marcus Whitman and his wife Narcissa immigrated to modern day Walla Walla, Washington with the first group to embark on the Oregon Trail. The Whitman’s built a Methodist mission and endeavored to convert the Cayuse people. An 1847 outbreak of the measles caused the relationship between the two groups to deteriorate rapidly. In earlier interactions with indigenous people, European re-settlers had threatened villages with disease for the purposes of coercion and intimidation. Whether or not the individual threats were credible was made irrelevant, as the diseases themselves were real and present. Native Americans did not possess an immunity to fight the disease and the results were catastrophic.  

On November 29, 1847, Dr. Whitman, Narcissa and approximately a dozen other settlers were murdered at the Whitman Mission by members of the Cayuse Tribe. The Cayuse used guns that were traded or bought from the Hudson’s Bay Company, and though sources vary, twelve to fourteen members of the tribe were at the scene of the mass murder. When the bloodshed was over, the Cayuse took fifty-two women and children hostage. After nearly a month, Hudson’s Bay Company official, Peter Skene Ogden, paid the ransom and freed the survivors.

Tamáhas (Tomayhas) and four other Cayuse, Ti’ílaka’aykt (Tiloukaikt), K’oy’am’á Šuumkíin (Kiamasumpkim), ‘Iceyéeye Cilúukiis (Iaiachalakis), and Łókomus (Klokomas), were volunteered and turned themselves into Oregon City in 1850 to stand trial for the murders. Though they were all tried, contemporary research has cast significant doubt on whether or not all the men, or even any of the men, were actually involved or present during the killings. Regardless, the Cayuse argued that it was the fault of Dr. Whitman for not healing the sick among the Cayuse, as he had done for the white emigrants. They also argued that they were innocent because more Native Americans were killed during the Cayuse War following the actions of November 29 than were killed at the mission.

Whether all five men were present at the time of the murders or not, they turned themselves in because the tribe thought it was the only way to avoid a heightened war with the white settlers. All were found guilty, and all five were hanged in Oregon City on June 3, 1850 under the authority of Marshall Joe Meek. A report stated “The scaffold on which the Indians paid the supreme penalty was erected on the southern part of the site now occupied by the Hawley Pulp & Paper company on the east side of the road leading from Oregon City to Canemah.” The location where their bodies were buried is unknown, though interest has been renewed in finding their graves.

The Civil War and the Rise of the Undertaker

The new face of death

The American Civil War initiated new attitudes toward death and dying. An estimated 620,000 (two percent) of the country’s population, both soldiers and civilians, were killed between 1861 and 1865. The manner in which most died went against the established assumptions regarding the proper way to depart the earth-who should die, when and where the death would occur, and the circumstances of the death.   

Mid-nineteenth-century Americans adhered to the concept of a “Good Death” as central to Christian practices. The art of dying included rules of conduct that prescribed one to gladly and willingly surrender into death, how to let go of earthly attachments, how to pray, and how to align one’s own death to that of Christ’s.  The hour of death was meant to be witnessed, studied, and interpreted by relatives and friends. Dying isolated and unattended on a battlefield or field hospital without anyone to hear to your last words opposed the requirements of a Good Death. 

Both sides of the war did not have procedures in place to handle the sheer number of bodies that resulted from battle wounds and disease. As the war escalated, soldiers were regularly buried in unmarked mass graves. This initiated additional fears within soldiers and their families as many understood the prevailing Protestant doctrine of redemption and resurrection of the body as a physical resurrection. The lack of a decent burial betrayed these beliefs.

Families who had the means shipped their loved one’s bodies home. Wooden caskets were problematic when weather or other events caused delays, and several entrepreneurs found a way to cash in on this obstacle. Some sold innovative metal or lead caskets, while others developed corpse cooling boxes that assisted in preserving the body. Prior to this period embalming was typically used to prepare bodies for medical dissections, however during the war embalming became a more widely used solution for the problem of decomposition. Though it remained experimental, the procedures laid the foundation for the professionalization of the undertaker and the onset of the funeral industry.

Post mortem photography

In a period where diphtheria, typhus and cholera epidemics claimed the lives of thousands of American children and many others succumbed to conditions which today would be cured by antibiotics, death was commonplace but not any less heartbreaking. In order to cope with the death of a child or other loved one, post-mortem photographs were common to capture the image of the loved one after they died. Since photography was expensive it might have been the only photographic record of the individual’s existence.

Embalmer, Mortician, or Undertaker?

Initially embalming practices were performed experimentally by European doctors studying anatomy and looking to cure various diseases and ailments. In the early to mid-nineteenth century bodies were in great demand and embalming ensured that the cadaver was available for longer study. The process was not standardized so different combinations of chemicals were used.

Conversely, the first of America’s morticians were usually not doctors, but rather furniture makers who made the coffins, church deacons who dug the graves, and livery drivers who drove the hearse. These people became known as “undertakers” because they undertook the duties of the family in preparing the dead for burial.  Undertakers often used instruments that were designed for other purposes and the process involved a significant amount of trial and error.