Ezra Meeker
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Ezra Meeker (December 29, 1830–December 3, 1928) was an early pioneer who traveled the Oregon Trail by ox cart as a young man. Beginning in his 70s he worked tirelessly to memorialize the trail, repeatedly retracing the trip of his youth.
Meeker was born in Huntsville, Ohio, to Jacob and Phoebe Meeker; his family relocated to Indiana in 1840. Married in 1851, in 1852, with his wife and his newborn son Marian, he headed to the Oregon Territory during the era of the donation land claims, ending up near Puget Sound. They settled permanently in Puyallup in 1862, where Meeker began growing hops for brewing beer.
By 1885 his business had made him wealthy. At which time, his wife Eliza Jane convinced him to allow her to build a mansion, similar to those she had seen in Europe. Three years and $26,000 later, her mansion was finished. But by 1891, an infestation of hops aphids destroyed his crops and nearly ruined him. He subsequently tried a number of ventures, including dehydrating fruits and vegetables, working on packaging milk in paper containers and he made four mostly unsuccessful trips to the Klondike looking for gold. He also wrote a novel about his experiences on the trip west.
Meeker is an important figure in what is now the southern portion of King County and the eastern parts of Pierce County. A statue to Meeker was erected near the Puyallup Library in 1926.
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[edit] Commemorating the Trail
In 1906, at the age of 76, he decided that the nation had forgotten the Oregon Trail. He assembled a covered wagon and a team of oxen and headed east over the route, raising money as he went. At each town along the way he would stop and make speeches encouraging erecting monuments to mark the Oregon Trail route. As the trip progressed, publicity started to build, so that he began to find that towns had raised funds and organized memorials in advance of his arrival.
After reaching the start of the Oregon Trail, he decided to extend his trip all the way to Washington, DC via New York City where he was granted a permit to drive his team and wagon down Fifth Avenue. In Washington, he met with President Theodore Roosevelt who expressed interest in the trail, and who came out to visit Meeker's oxen. Congress subsequently considered but did not appropriate a requested $50,000 to mark the trail.
Ezra Meeker would repeat his trip by ox team in 1910 and again in 1916 driving an 80 horsepower (60 kW) automobile with a prairie-schooner top. Finally, in 1924, at the age of 94, Meeker flew from Vancouver, Washington over the trail to Dayton, Ohio in an open-cockpit army plane. The next day, he rode in a parade with Orville Wright, and then flew to Washington, DC and met with President Calvin Coolidge, presenting him with a plan to designate a national highway honoring the Oregon Trail. Meeker's vision of commemorating the trail, albeit unrealized, included erecting 100-foot-tall beacons to light the way for transcontinental airplanes, according to a book that he and Howard Driggs of the Oregon Trail Memorial Association published in 1932, Covered Wagon Centennial and Ox-Team Days.
Meezer finally gained traction with the U.S. Congress in 1926 when the House of Representatives passed a bill subsequently signed by Pres. Coolidge to mint a special edition of not more than 6,000,000 50-cent coins. The U.S. Mint issued the coins to the Oregon Trail Memorial Association, which sold the coins to raise funds for trail markers. Ultimately, the U.S. government only struck 264,419 coins, with the final issue in 1939.
James Earle and Laura Gardin Fraser, a husband and wife team, each designed a side of the coin. Laura's side featured a facsimile of Meeker's 1852 ox-drawn covered wagon and pioneer family marching into a blazing western sun. The reverse showed an American Indian man clad only in a loin cloth facing eastward with an outstretched arm, palm raised as if to stem westering emigrants. Earle also created two more well-known works. His sculpture End of the Trail (1918) showed a dejected Indian, head deeply bowed, his lance pointed to the ground astride a horse. Moreover Earle produced the design for Indian head/buffalo nickel.
At the time of his death in 1928, Meeker was planning a final drive across the trail, with the support of Henry Ford. On July 4, 1930, a bronze plaque bearing Ezra Meeker's likeness was unveiled at Independence Rock. The programmers of the mid-1980s version MECC computer game "The Oregon Trail" paid tribute to Meeker by listing his name alongside a fifth-place score of 2052 on the default version of the high-score list known as the "Oregon Top Ten."
[edit] Bibliography
- The Tragedy of Leschi (a book about the plight of the Indians)
- Ox-Team Days
- Pioneer Reminiscences
- The Ox Team; or the Old Oregon Trail, 1852–1906
- Uncle Ezra's pioneer short stories for children: To point a moral or teach a lesson
[edit] References
- Driggs, Howard and Meeker, Ezra; Covered Wagon Centennial and Ox-Team Days. New York: World Book Co., 1932.
- Weber, Bert; The Oregon Trail Memorial Half Dollar. Seattle: Webb Research Group, 1986. Pg. 21.
- History Ink
[edit] External link and reference
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Pioneer History of Oregon (1806 - 1890) |
|---|---|
| Topics |
Oregon Country · Oregon Treaty · Oregon missionaries · Executive Committee · Oregon Trail · Oregon boundary dispute · Pacific Fur Company · Hudson's Bay Company |
| Events |
Champoeg Meetings · Treaty of 1818 · Russo-American Treaty · Donation Land Claim Act · Whitman massacre |
| Places |
Fort Astoria · Oregon Mission · Fort Vancouver · Champoeg, Oregon · Willamette Stone · Barlow Road |
| People |
George Abernethy · Sam Barlow · Tabitha Brown · Abigail Scott Duniway · Peter French · Joseph Gale · William Gilpin · David Hill · Jason Lee · John McLoughlin · Joseph Meek · Ezra Meeker · Joel Palmer · Marcus Whitman · Narcissa Whitman |
| Oregon History |
Native Peoples History · History to 1806 · Pioneer History · Modern History |
