Steep price for free wagon road.

Byline: WRITE ON By Pete Peterson For The Register-Guard

When Pleasant Hill settler Elijah Elliott traveled back along the Oregon Trail in August of 1853 to meet his migrating family, he brought word of a "cutoff" that would save 125 miles of travel to the Willamette Valley and the free land the U.S. government was allotting to white homesteaders.

As the sensational news buzzed through other traveling groups, more than 1,000 emigrants followed Elliott from Fort Boise, heading west along the Malheur River. Only a few knew that Elliott hadn't traveled the cutoff himself.

Because of a dozen surviving journals and memoirs, it's one of the best documented and most dramatic episodes of the wagon train era. For 150 years, storytellers and headline writers have memorialized it as The Lost Wagon Train of 1853.

Even its origin is unique. In the summer of 1852, a few Lane, Linn and Benton county residents hired "road surveyors" to mark a new route, a free (non-toll) road that would siphon emigrants off the 10-year-old Oregon Trail - which deposited newcomers at the Oregon City terminus - and, instead, divert them to southern Willamette counties.

Once on the road, Elliott's followers became disillusioned. Agnes Stewart, from Allegheny, Pa., wrote, "Traveled 15 miles today up the Malheur ... Nothing but hills and hollows and rocks." And Andrew McClure of Knox County, Ind., noted, "The road is the worst we have found this side of Missouri."

When Elliott's group emerged from the Owyhee Uplands, it turned south to what appeared to be an oasis. But the alkaline water of Harney and Malheur lakes was mostly undrinkable and the shoreline goo gave way under the oxen's hooves.

For almost three weeks, the party plodded through the mosquito-laden marshes only to discover it had traveled in a circle.

Angry men threatened to lynch Elliott then and there. Many fell ill. One woman died.

Still, records document some joy: Mary Malloy, 18, married widower Alexander Griffin, 30; and Eliza and William Shaw named their newborn son Henry Malheur Shaw.

On the southwest side of the lakes, wagons and cattle strained over a 150-mile stretch of sage-clogged desert. At one point, the group moved 48 miles without water, in places axing aisles through the neck-high growth.

By the first week of October, the migrating lines reached the cold waters of the Deschutes River, near present-day Bend. They turned southwest, and near the current town of Crescent, discovered blaze marks and downed trees left by a road crew, then inched their way around the south shore of Crescent Lake.

"Some mornings our outside covering was covered heavily with frost," wrote Esther Brakeman Lyman of Ann Arbor, Mich. "Then again, the rain would pour in torrents during the night deluging us with water."

Climbing the steep eastern side of Willamette Pass, she and others lightened their loads - throwing out tools and furniture - or simply left their wagons. They were terrified of coming mountain blizzards.

But scouts had managed to find the settlements, and within days, dozens of responding community members appeared like angels near the present town of Oakridge, pulling 94 pack animals and 23 wagons with almost incomprehensible amounts of flour and produce for the 1,000 worried, hungry people.

Lyman wrote, "Bread never tasted half so good before." A young boy, Vernalius Preston of Wood County, Ohio, held his bread but wouldn't eat - he was saving it, telling his hosts he was afraid he wouldn't get any more.

Rescuers helped the 200 families ford the wild Middle Fork of the Willamette River 25 times in the weeklong descent to the valley. And by mid-October exceedingly generous communities provided them with housing and supplies. The new road had nearly doubled the population of Lane County.

It wasn't really a "lost wagon train," says Lowell Tiller of Albany, a member of the Oregon Historic Trails Advisory Council and the Oregon and California Trails Association. For more than 40 years, he and the late Keith Clark and Leah Collins Menefee collected documents and attempted to map the route of the often leaderless collection of mostly Midwest farmers who found a way to punch a short-cut through the high desert and penetrate the mid-section of the Cascade Mountains.

A better name for the daring episode, Tiller says, is the Free Emigrant Road, one created by local settlers who wanted newcomers and a more robust economy.

Eugene writer Pete Peterson is the author of "Our Wagon Train Is Lost" (illustrated by Jerry Williams), and a stage play, "That Pioneer Road."

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DEDICATION

What: The Oregon and California Trails Association and the U.S. Forest Service will dedicate a marker to commemorate the 150th anniversary of The Lost Wagon Train

Where: The Windy- Oldenburg trailhead south of Crescent Lake on Forest Road 60

When: 10 a.m. Saturday

Hike: After the ceremony, descendants of the settlers who were part of the wagon train, history buffs and others who are interested are invited to hike a few miles of the old road

CAPTION(S):

Emigrants at Turner's Trading Post in 1853 consider the treacherous new road to the southern Willamette Valley in an illustration from Pete Peterson's book, "Our Wagon Train Is Lost." For 150 years, storytellers and headline writers have memorialized the group of settlers as The Lost Wagon Train of 1853.