The Dust of Previous Travel

When my grandfather Roger Adams passed away in 2019, I received a large, dusty box. My grandfather had a voracious mind, and one of his intellectual passions was the Oregon Trail, which ancestors on my mother’s side had traversed in 1846. Like thousands of others, the Buell family traveled roughly 2,000 miles of land in their quest west, their footsteps falling on prairie grass, forest paths, muddy riverbanks, and mountain passes. My grandfather collected everything he could find to better understand this journey. As the resident family historian, he passed this collection on to me.

Roger Adams’s personal archive of Oregon Trail history. All photos provided by the author.

As I combed through his haphazard research, I felt closer to him than ever before. Through years of painstaking research, starting in the 1970s, he compiled papers and records chronicling the stories of our ancestors. My grandfather was a professor of marine science, and it turns out that marine scientists are not always the best historians, so his eclectic collecting often wandered off-course, including research on beekeeping and plant biology. Eventually, life got in the way, and these papers sat in a box in his office. His questionable methodology, however, did not impact the quality of the relevant sources he gathered, and within those pages, he collected a series of voices calling out across time.

Some of Roger’s Oregon Trail sources.

One of the members of that Oregon Trail party, Caroline Buell, described the 1846 journey as moving “on through heat, and dust, that could hardly be endured; the dust… caused by previous travel.”¹ One hundred seventy years later, I too found myself in the dust of previous travel, albeit the dust of paper: handwritten accounts, newspaper interviews, and genealogical records. And instead of obscuring my vision, the dusty documents brought clarity. At its root, history is an exercise in collective memory, and this tiny collection of memory served as a window into a distant, yet deeply personal past. This is the story of my family, but it is also the story of what we choose to preserve, what we prescribe importance to, and how we want ourselves to be remembered.

Elias Buell, the patriarch and leader of my family’s 1846 Oregon Trail wagon party, came from a long line of men driven by lusts for land and fortune. In a 1922 article for the Oregon Pioneer Association newsletter, Sarah Radford, Elias’s granddaughter, imagined her colonial ancestors this way: “since the landing of the pilgrims on New England’s rock-bound coast, ever westward, the star of empire has taken its way.”² The first Buell to live in North America, William, had arrived in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1630 with a party of Puritan emigrants. Generations of the Buell family lived in various counties in Connecticut until Samuel Sr., Elias’s grandfather, moved to Fort Edward, New York, in 1763. Samuel Jr., Elias’s father was born that year.³

Elias and Sarah Buell, c. 1850s.

Samuel Buell Jr. lived in various counties and towns across New York, and married Jerusha Griswold in 1796. Born in 1799, Elias was the oldest of their seven children. The family later moved to Indiana in 1816. While there, Elias met and married his wife, Sarah Hammond, in 1817, and they had seven children. In 1846, Elias and his family set off for Oregon. ⁴

The journey west consumed two years of their lives. The wagon party consisted of more than fifty people from six different families.⁵ Thirty-three of the travelers were children, with the youngest child, Mary Connor, only two years old at the start of the journey. Caroline Buell and John Findley, traveling with their families, fell in love on the journey, marrying on May 4, 1847. Their daughter, Sarah, was born at Fort Vancouver on May 28, 1848. Sadly, her father did not live to see her birth. Dying of unknown causes, he passed away on December 23, 1847. The travelers buried him along the trail. Later in life, Sarah Findley, who became Sarah Radford, wrote an article for the Oregon Pioneer Association sharing memories of the journey. Although she was only a baby at the time, the stories told to her by her mother and others loomed large in her mind.⁶

Martha Connor, three years old at the start of the trip, remembered being strapped on the back of an ox with her sister while her mother rode a pony and carried her newborn baby. She remembered feeling fearful during the challenging legs of the trip, but also how beautiful the snow looked up in the Cascade mountains.⁷ Caroline Buell remembered the mirages that haunted the thirsty travelers: “there appeared in the distance a line of timber—large and beautiful trees, stretching across the country. Timber indicated water, also. The delightful scene continued for a time, as the weary pilgrims, with happy anticipation, came moving toward it; then finally faded away.” Others recounted a story of a baby born during a thunderstorm while “keen flashes of lightning rent the air, accompanied by peal after peal of reverberating report, and a torrent of rain.” Caroline later described the child as “a real, though tender, pioneer of Old Oregon Country.”⁸

Maxine Borden in 1914, just under a year old.

As I pieced together the stories, I recalled another, more recent journey. My great-grandmother, Maxine Borden, one of Elias Buell’s many descendants, traveled in a covered wagon from California to Washington in 1917, when she was two years old. Much like her ancestors, she held these memories in her steel-trap mind, and shared pieces of her adventure with me when I was a child. My mother, in her infinite wisdom, recorded these conversations with the family video camera. So, I traded the dusty box of paper records for a dusty box of video tapes.

The Bordens traveled in a covered wagon pulled by two horses. “It was smaller than a prairie schooner,” recalled Maxine, but it was of a similar design. They traveled alone as a family. Sometimes, the children were allowed to ride in the wagon, but mostly they had to walk beside it. Maxine remembered a mountain crossing on the border between California and Oregon when the horses got spooked and almost ran the wagon off a cliff. “My father left and came back with two more horses and a man,” said Maxine. “As the four horses traversed the cliffs, my father drove them from the wagon, and the man led them from the front.” Maxine, her mother, and her siblings had to walk behind the wagon for the duration of the pass in case the horses became frightened again.

My great-grandmother also remembered crossing a river that had been dammed up, making it relatively shallow. They put the wagon on a barge, which the horses pulled across the river, but the family cow did not fit on the barge. She followed behind them through the water, led by a rope. Maxine remembered watching the cow walk behind them, consumed by the fear that it would get swept away by the current and lost forever.

The Borden family in 1923.

The Borden family settled in Washington state for some years, but they did not stay, and Maxine eventually lived in Maine, and later in Florida. In her lifetime, the drive westward took on a new meaning; the march across the continent had long been completed, but the quest for novelty and adventure continued. She exists in my memory as a bridge between two eras, riding in that covered wagon in 1917, yet flying in a plane across a field a few years later. She worked on battleships during World War II, which she described as being “a Rosie the Riveter.” She raised my grandfather and his siblings to be curious, clever, and ambitious. As I listened to her stories as a child, I imagined her, and our family, in motion, always chasing something, always seeking new horizons. 

These carefully preserved memories, handed down across generations, are a record of our meaning-making, an archive of our creation. I will care for the stories, adding my own to the pile, until it is time to pass them along to the next generation. History is a collection of the deeds of humanity, and I am honored to steward this dusty collection of my family’s humble deeds. As Sarah Radford wrote in 1922:

In taking the pen, I see, looming on the horizon of my mind, a long train of canvas-covered wagons, slowly wending its way, bearing precious living freight of brave souls, amid danger, hardships and privation, to face the perils of an unknown land… We bid those loved ones, who have since passed on to the “West beyond the West,” those whose blood flows in our veins, a sad and long farewell… Memory recalls, each, whom we have lost, but, ’tis only for a while.⁹

Maxine Adams (née Borden) with family in Florida in 2010. The author is sitting on the stairs, first on the right in the second row. Maxine is seated beside her.

1. Sarah Findley Radford, “A Sketch of Pioneer Days,” Transactions of the 56th Annual Reunion of the Oregon Pioneer Association (1922): 23.
2. Ibid.
3. C. W. Buell, “This is a true copy of the genealogical account of the Buells, which was written by Elias Buell in 1870” (unpublished manuscript), 1, 5.
4. Ibid., 5.
5. Elias Buell, “A More Complete Account” (undated, unpublished manuscript), 1.
6. Radford, “Sketch of Pioneer Days,” 23–26.
7. Elias Buell, “A More Complete Account,” 3.
8. Radford, “Sketch of Pioneer Days,” 24.
9. Radford, Pioneer Days, 23–29.