By Elwin A. McCornack

Written to Walter E. McCornack of Chicago, Ill. on the occasion of the Centennial celebration of the arrival of Andrew and Helen McGeough McCornack in America, from Scotland.

Dear Cousin Walter:                                       July 19, 1938

You have asked me to write the story of that branch of the McCornack family which came west in pioneer days and include some personal reminiscences, either first or second hand.

As I write these lines I am west bound on one of America's fastest and finest trains.  My route crosses seemingly endless miles of level farmland, and this afternoon will follow for hours and hours the banks of the Platte River in western Nebraska—the "Old Oregon Trail."  As I ride these miles and look from the car window I see things that other people in the car do not see.  I can see outside on the prairie a long, thin winding line of straining oxen and creaking wagons, flanked and trailed by herds of loose stock and farther out mounted guards and scouts, the gray covered wagons trailing in a steadily rising cloud of dust, the loose stock and outriders scattered over the waving grass of an endless prairie.  One of these wagons is drawn by a team of horses and beside it walks Andrew McCornack, a sturdy Scotchman in his early thirties.  A substantial yoke of oxen draws the next wagon; a lad of eight with goad and the call of gee and haw encourages this team on its dusty way.  The boy is Walter, the oldest son.  The mother—who a few years before back in the little settlement in Illinois as Maria Eakin had joined young Andrew in life's adventures—can be seen under the great covered forward bow of the lead wagon.  She holds a baby, a boy of a few months, and in and out of the wagon clamber three other small boys.  These four were Edwin, William, Eugene and Herbert, the baby.

The McCornack family is bound west to find a new home.  The country through which they trek is five hundred miles from the eastern settlements.  Eighteen hundred miles ahead over two mountain ranges white settlers have established themselves in fertile valleys, and word has come from these settlers that free land is to be had and that a church has been established in the wilderness.  In between lay twenty-three hundred miles of mountains, swift rivers, parched deserts and Indians.

The bluffs that stand back to the right and the left of the train on which I ride were anxiously scanned for menacing Indians by all that came this way with the wagon trains.  On the narrow banks of the Upper Platte, the road-bed on which I ride is built of soil ground fine by the jolting wheels of those covered wagons.  The distance traveled from the time "chain up," rang out in the morning till the wagons pulled into a hollow square at night, I now cover in twenty minutes; I am carried along secure in every comfort.  Out there on the prairie Grandfather made camp beside his wagons in the wind and the smoke and the dust—the women bedding the children and themselves down in the wagons and on the ground; the men, as their turn was called, going out into the night with their rifles to stand guard.

They accepted these hardships to find homes and opportunity—to carry religion and education into a wilderness—to make fruitful an idle soil—to establish a nation beyond the rim of civilization.  I doubt though that they, even with this vision, could foresee the ultimate fulfillment of their mission.  Their uncertain destination of that day has in two generations become a land endowed beyond the understanding of that time, and these same youngsters who rode west in the covered wagons and their brothers and sisters born in the new country have had a large part in its building.  Able, progressive farmer though he was, I wonder if Andrew McCornack as he trekked westward with nothing certain ahead of him but faith in his ability to accomplish, would have believed that a son of one of these boys in the covered wagon would one day set out over that very same trail to bring to people three thousand miles away one thousand carloads of the fruits of the soil, grown where he and his fellows were yet to turn the native sod, or that almost daily over that and other routes across the continent other grandsons of his would be sending carload after carload of lumber cut from the great forests of the Pacific he was yet to see; that though he was to find hundreds of miles of land, fertile and unclaimed, yet so rapid would be the growth of this new country of the West, that his sons and grandsons would join in damming back the tides and the waters of the great inland lakes that more fertile land might be claimed for the plow.

Andrew McCornack was born on the old farm at Kirkowan, Scotland, and came to America with his father and family in 1838.  He assisted his parents in establishing themselves in a farm at Elgin, Illinois, and later married Maria Eakin who had come to America with her parents from the north country, Ireland.  It may have been the call of adventure or the belief that in the then little known Pacific Northwest there existed greater opportunities for a growing family than in the older East that induced the young couple to convert everything salable into wagons, oxen, stock and certain indispensable household goods and join a wagon train headed for Oregon.  I am inclined to favor the latter reason.

The journey commenced in April, 1853, and was ended in September of that year.  The wagon train with which our people traveled seems to have been well captained as good progress was made, pestilence and Indian trouble avoided, and river and mountain crossings made with minimum loss of stock.  After arriving at the settlement of Portland, Oregon, Grandfather lead his family to the Puget Sound country—now Washington state—and settled in a wild and worthless country near Fort Nesqually.  His locating there was a mistake and was probably due to the fact that a Presbyterian church and school had been established there.

A cabin was built, land broken and pioneer life began.  Indians were everywhere but usually friendly and the growing boys learned much of their ways—how to take salmon with ingenious native spears; how to hunt the game which abounded in the woods and to speak fluently the picturesque Indian jargon.  Wild animals preyed on the stock and had to be hunted and snared.  Wild cattle and hogs roamed the woods and sometimes put the boys up the trees.  Their stories of escape are rich in adventure.  On one occasion when the five boys were herding cattle on the far side of the river a panther which had been preying on the cows began screaming nearby.  Walter, realizing that the cattle would stampede for home leaving the boys on the wrong side of the river with the beast, gave orders for each boy to get a cow by the tail.  The stampede started, the boys hanging on desperately through brush and water until all reached safety on the other shore.

Indians were sometimes troublesome.  Once when the parents were away an Indian insisted on a drink of water.  Walter stationed himself with a musket and told Ed to offer him a dipper of water through the door.  As the door opened a bit the Indian stuck his foot in the opening and forced his head in.  Walter's quick, "Klatawa hyac," and the leveled rifle were too much for the red man's nerves.  He had seen enough of the inside of the white man's house.

It is related that two especially large Indians became troublesome, strutting back and forth in front of Grandfather challenging him to fight.  They refused to go away and became more insolent.  Grandfather, a man of unusual strength, suddenly seized each Indian by the scalp-lock and drove their heads together with such force as to thoroughly take the fight out of them.

This, however, was a poor farming country and it was decided to make a move.  Everything was again loaded into the wagons, this time with two little girls, Helen and Janet, and the trek with flocks and herds made into the Willamette Valley.  Here another mistake was made as again a start was made back in the hills, this time the Camp Creek Valley, where a school and church had been established.  It proved, however, that feed was not plentiful and many of the stock died of larkspur.  A move was imperative and this time a location was selected on open valley land west of Eugene, and again all set to work.  In a very few years the family owned seven hundred acres of good farm land and were successfully engaged in growing grain and raising livestock.

It was here the family grew up—seven boys and five girls—working at home on the farm and going to school.  It was from here they scattered up and down the Pacific coast, everywhere taking a substantial and leading part in the civic and industrial life of the communities in which they lived.  They played a full part in the building of the Great West.

Grandfather was a believer in good stock and a great lover of horses.  When he came from Illinois he brought with him a black mare of Morgan breeding, by the name of Kate.  Horses were dear in those days and Kate was all the family could afford, but she had been selected with a fine eye for quality.  She lived many years bearing many foals, finally being blind from falling in a well but always the object of pride and affection.  In later years the family was noted for its good horses, and the men would show with pride those which were descendants of old Kate.  The family also held in affection the names of two of the cows that, after the loss of the oxen in Wyoming, pulled their wagon across the plains and at the same time supplied the little folks with the life sustaining milk.  These names, Nora and Molly, were for years given to favorite domestic animals.

While driving a spirited team in 1872 Grandfather was thrown from the wagon and killed.  Good horseman that he was, he would want me to add that it was not inability on his part to handle the team which caused the accident, but the dropping of the wagon tongue and the over-turning of the wagon.  He had, however, lived a life of broad usefulness and was much respected.  I have been told by old timers that the train of sixty carriages and wagons which followed him to burial set a precedent in that day.  He, with Walter and Ed, enlisted in the first Oregon regiment during the Civil War and while Ed saw hard service against the Indians, the units to which the others were attached were held in reserve to protect the settlements.

He served in the Oregon Legislature in 1865-67 and in an effort to reduce the evils of the liquor business of that day, introduced and secured the passage of a bill placing a license on saloons.  Oddly enough the writer years later, while serving as chairman of the committee on alcoholic traffic in the Oregon Senate, found himself drafting and passing liquor control legislation following the repeal of the eighteenth amendment.  Family tradition has it that Grandfather saved enough from his meager state pay at one session to buy Grandmother a washing machine—a luxury almost unheard of in those days.  This, the writer can say, is more than he was at any time able to do during his term of legislative service.

I cannot go on without reference to Grandmother.  Grandfather I never knew, but of all of my childhood recollections, none are so dear to me as the memory of this little woman.  Though firm in matters of right and wrong she had a gentleness and understanding that drew small boys to her irresistibly.  This seems to be more remarkable when we realize that much of her life had been spent in a rough and sometimes bitter struggle in a wild country.  Her interest in young people was tremendous and their well-being and education were dear to her.  A great reader of good books, she never ceased to educate her own mind.  Some of her most successful sons have credited her with an inheritance which made it possible for them to accomplish the things they did.

In reviewing the McCornack clan and commenting on their individual and common virtues and accomplishments, I would be remiss if I failed to mention a faculty which seems to have long been common to the men of the clan.  We boast of our prowess as woodsmen and athletes, as soldiers and statesmen, as scientists and financiers and we make claims for the family in the future.  We may overlook the fact that each succeeding generation of McCornack men take unto themselves wives of their own choosing from outside the family and that the original stock is diluted thereby a full fifty percent with each succeeding generation.  This percentage would in a few generations eliminate any family heritage accruing to the family name were it not for this common gift to the McCornack men—the ability to pick good women.  I do not say this lightly.  Of more consequence to the family name than the McCornack men are the women they marry.  In our branch of the family there have been wonderful women, and were I to call for an expression today from some thirty of my generation they would rise and name them the Salt of the Earth, and to our young men I would leave this word—"See to it that you do as well."

Church and School

Even though our people who struggled across the plains in covered wagons were willing to leave established settlements in the East to find new homes and better living in the West their first interest beyond food and shelter was church and school.  School for the children and church for the whole family.  These people lived a rough life.  Their schools were, in the light of present day standards, woefully inadequate, yet many of the brightest men of our time came out of these little log school houses with their split cedar benches and stone fireplaces.  Many of these men went out into the world of that day and took their places in the professions and in the field of science and business along with the most highly schooled men of the times.

In the matter of religion these pioneers gathered in any place of worship no matter how humble or how rough.  Most of them, to be sure, had their own particular faith to which they subscribed back in the states, but out here in a primitive and sometimes savage setting they welcomed any opportunity to gather with their fellow men and hear the word of God expounded.  Many books could be written about these circuit riding evangelists.  Many of them were rugged characters with powerful minds and forceful expression and they preached the dynamic gospel of that day.

Undoubtedly the best known of those rugged circuit riding preachers was Joab Powell who rode the Willamette Valley from the settlements of Oregon City and Forest Grove on the north to the Calapoaya and the forks of the Willamette on the south.  Like many evangelists of his day, and ours too, he dramatized his teaching of the bible and though illiterate by standards of this day his ability to picture vividly the actions of his bible characters brought his story most forcefully to his listeners.  It is related that he talked to packed houses wherever he could get a large meeting place.  A contemporary of Joab Powell has passed on to the writer the unexpurged text of his story of "The Fall of Man as told in the book of Genesis."  This was said to be typical of his sermons.

"In the beginning God the Lord made heaven and earth and he prepared the garden of Eden as a home for the man and woman he had created.  It was as purty as any park you have ever seen, and had all the fancy fruits you ever heard of.  The Lord he took Adam and Eve into the garden and he sez to them:  this is all yourn and everything in it cept that apple tree.  It bears the fruit of knowledge and of it you shall not eat.  But a serpent came and talked to Eve and told her they should help themselves to the fruit of the tree and when Adam came in she told him what the serpent had said and she asked Adam to go up into the tree and get some of the fruit.

"Now at the end of the day in the cool of the evening God come walking in the garden.  He come to the place where the tree of knowledge was and he saw the ground all littered up with the cores of the apples but he didn't see nuthin of Adam or Eve.  So God he called Adam and he got no answer.  Adam was there but he knowed he had disobeyed God's command and he took Eve and hid away back in the bushes.  Then the Lord he called out in a most powerful voice 'Adam.'  Adam was skeered and he shook all over but he was afeered to go out and meet the Lord because he know'd he'd done wrong.  He just scruged down in the grape vines and trembled.  Then God got good and mad and called in a voice that shook the earth like thunder, ADAM come out of them bushes.  Adam and Eve was plumb terrafied and come creeping out of the bushes like whipped dogs and they stood in the presence of God and trembled.  God said, I gave you this garden for your own and everything in it but them apples offn that tree and I told you them apples you was not to eat.  Now you has listened to that lying serpent.  You clumb up into the tree got the fruit and did eat it.  You have disobeyed the command of God.  Now Adam and you Eve:  Cursed be the ground for thy sake.  Thorns and thistles shall it bear unto thee.  In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat thy bread all the days of thy life.  And he drove them two out of the garden and he shut the gate."

I well remember a pioneer preacher of a somewhat later day, the Rev. Champ Calloway.  As quite a small boy I heard him preach in the old twenty by thirty school house.  He preached the good old Hell-Fire-and Damnation sermons, the kind that shriveled the souls of the hardened transgressors and left the innards of a ten year old boy, just contemplating a life of crime, purged as by fire.

Those old boys had something at that.  Though the best odds they would give anybody was ten to one he would go to hell anyway they pictured the torments of hell so forcefully and with such vividness that everyone who heard them preach from the hardened gambler to the timid old maid was only too glad to take up the short end of the bet and try to cash in on it.  Knowing the odds against them and the fullness of the penalty they really put out to lead better lives.  The present generation I am sure does not have this same stimulus to right living.

Tales From the Trail

The following simple anecdotes are a few that have survived of the many which must have collected about the slow moving wagon train as it made its way westward, and about the family home in its first years in the new country of the West.

The first of these as told by the late General Condon McCornack reveals not only the hazards and some of the uncertainty of the long overland trek but also gives us an intimate picture of the people themselves who made the crossing.

Grandfather's Prayer

While crossing the plains somewhere between South Pass and Green River, Grandfather's wagon train was persuaded to take a short cut.  After some days they became lost and found they were wandering aimlessly among the hills and could not find the way out.  They went into a dry camp while Grandfather climbed over several intervening ridges to a high hill, or side of a mountain from which he was able to get a good view of the country and plainly see the parked train and the way in which they should go.  However, while returning to the train through the hills, a fog came down and he became confused in his directions and found he was lost, with no idea where the train was.  He became greatly perturbed over the fate of the train, as he was the only one who could save them from death by thirst.  He thereupon got down on his knees by a large rock and prayed that God would help him find the train and keep the many innocent souls there from death.  Upon arising from prayer, although the country was still enshrouded in fog, he looked carefully in every direction and said to himself:  "The train is over there."  He at once set out in that direction and after a half hour saw the train in the valley directly ahead of him.  After a short prayer with family and friends to return thanks to God for their deliverance, they hooked up and proceeded in the way he had chosen, without further difficulty.

That is the story that was first told me by Grandmother, and years later by Aunt Mary.  It illustrates something of the times and the man and it is immaterial whether it was, as his immediate family devoutly believed, a direct intervention of God in an answer to prayer; or as the modern materialist or psychologist would say, a simple natural sequence in that Grandfather's rest and short distraction from worry cleared his mind and allowed his normal judgment to become uppermost; or as some believe, it was the working out of one of the laws of nature all of which are the methods by which Divine action is exercised rather than by direct intervention.

—Condon C. McCornack

Eugene R. brings these stories of the Oregon Trail.  They bring to us intimately the people and the problems of that day.  The first of these was told to him by his father, Walter R. who as a boy of ten years was the oldest son of the family.

On leaving their homes in Illinois the women of the party, not yet familiar with camp life and the art of outdoor subsistence cooked up great quantities of food and packed it for the journey.  This was to last the party until the final outpost of civilization was reached where fresh supplies would be stocked for the long overland trail.

As the days passed these prepared provisions ran low and before the last settlement was reached they were all but gone.  In crossing a river the little that was left became soaked with water and at the next stop it was spread out on canvas to dry.  As the family sat down around this frugal meal the boys, driven by the hunger of healthy young bodies, pounced on their portions without ceremony.  Their father, however, waved them back with the admonition that even though it was but little they should first give thanks to God for having it.  Walter recalled that at the time he felt the insufficiency of the meal hardly justified the formality of the giving of thanks but that during later days on the trail and later on in life he learned the value of little things and the appropriateness of being thankful for them though at the time they might seem ever so small.

—Eugene R. McCornack

Eugene R. also sponsors this anecdote:

On leaving the settlement of Portland, Oregon for their new home at Olympia the extreme difficulty of the overland trip made it necessary for the family to separate, Grandfather and Walter taking the wagons and livestock overland and Grandmother with her four little folks going by water, down the Columbia and up the Cowlitz to meet the overland party at some designated spot in the wilderness of these northern woods.  A large Indian bateau carried Grandmother and the children.  There huddled in the bottom of the bateau with her four little boys about her, with their destiny in the hands of savage and not altogether prepossessing Indian boatmen she faced the future.  Here again a faith in the goodness of God must have been a sustaining factor.

Not a word could be spoken which these savages understood.  Grandmother made a camp by the riverbank when the Indians brought the boat to shore.  She arose with them as the tide or the winds or the moon prompted them to travel.  Those must have been trying days but years later Grandmother in relating the story to her grandson laughed away the hazards of the journey and told how the boatmen, faithful to their trust, had delivered them at the appointed spot on the riverbank where the family was reunited.  With a little embarrassment she laughingly told of one amusing incident.  With the health and comfort of her little folks in mind she had on leaving the Illinois home insisted on bringing along a little child's bedroom vessel, a thing almost unheard of on the frontier of that day.  The first morning beside the river she woke up to find the Indian boatmen using it in preparing their breakfast.  By signs she sought to protest its use for this purpose attempting to tell them it was an improper use they were putting it to.  The red men in turn assured her that they were not harming it in any way and that it was a great convenience in preparing their meals.  It remained in the Indians' possession throughout the trip and was returned to her unharmed with a show of pride on the part of the simple natives, as of a trust fulfilled.

—Eugene R. McCornack