End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center • 1726 Washington St. • Historic Oregon City, Oregon
Oregon Trail History 101
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Henry's brother, Adam, emigrated to Oregon in 1842. He was present at the May 2, 1843, meeting at Champoeg where the Provisional Government of Oregon was voted into existence. Adam and Henry had signed an agreement in early 1842 with 34 other men to organize a company to head overland for the Oregon Country. In the end, all but six men backed out and stayed in Missouri; Henry was among the group that stayed, while his brother was among the half-dozen who struck out for Oregon in '42. Like several other early Oregonians who were present at Champoeg, Adam Hewitt later moved south to seek his fortune in California. He is believed to have served in the Union army during the Civil War, but little information about him survived in the family's annals.

Henry Hewitt's interest in emigrating to Oregon drew in Daniel Matheny, his father-in-law, at least as early as 1842. Matheny was born in unincorporated territory in what is now Jefferson County, West Virginia in 1793. He was a classic citizen-soldier, enlisting and mustering out no less than three times over the years. Serving first in the War of 1812, Matheny was elected First Lieutenant during his second tour of duty and Captain during his third. He settled in Platte County, Missouri after mustering out for the final time in 1839, where his eldest daughter met and married Henry Hewitt. Like the Hewitts, Matheny had followed the frontier west to Missouri. Though Matheny considered joining the party that Adam and Henry Hewitt tried to form in 1842, his wife, Mary Cooper Matheny, asked him to put it off for a year, promising that she would willingly accompany her husband if only he would wait until 1843. Mary must have been a thoughtful woman, as not only did she make her husband prove his resolve by waiting a year, but she had the foresight to bring many different kinds of seeds to try in Oregon's soil and climate. Among the seeds she chose to bring were seends of the flax plant. Linen fabric, a staple of the Nineteenth Century, is made from flax. With water-powered textile mills providing the demand, flax was a major cash crop in the Northwest for many years. It is believed that the Mathenys and Hewitts were the first to raise flax in the Oregon Country.

Along with Henry and Elizabeth Hewitt, the entire Matheny clan pulled up stakes and set out for Oregon in the Great Migration of 1843, the huge wagon train that is generally considered to have opened the Oregon Trail. Captain Matheny, Henry Hewitt, and the elder Matheny sons often served as scouts for the wagon train, riding ahead to mark the trail and find campsites for the wagons. Matheny, with his years of military service, and Hewitt, with his frontier experience and proud family history, were well suited to the job. Hewitt had the honor of driving the first wagon out of the Blue Mountains in present-day eastern Oregon, braving a steep slope and an uncertain road to prove to the other pioneers that the route was passable. Through the entire journey, Hewitt made sure that his wagon was always at or near the front of the train, and the Mathenys were never far behind. Hewitt named his lead ox "Doc," and Doc's brass bell has been passed down through the family for generations.

After arriving in Oregon City, Hewitt and the Mathenys continued to explore and scout the territory, now turning their attention to finding a likely plot of land to claim. In the fall of 1843, they scouted downriver as far as present-day downtown Portland before returning to their loved ones in Oregon City. The early years of settlement in the Oregon Country were difficult for many emigrants, and the Hewitts and Mathenys stayed together for many years, cooperating and sharing resources to build a prosperous future for both families. They spent their first winter in Oregon in the area of present-day Hillsboro, west of Portland, in a cabin built for them by Adam Hewitt.

When the weather broke, the menfolk scouted upriver and found their land. Matheny chose a promising spot near the south end of a large island in the Willamette River known as Grand Island. Just south of Grand Island was Mission Bottom, where Jason Lee founded his first mission (following a flood, Lee relocated to Mission Mill within present-day Salem). The French Prairie, where a number of French-Canadian trappers had been farming the land for some years with the blessing of their former employer, the Hudson's Bay Company, stretched several miles west and north from Mission Bottom to Champoeg, where Henry's brother helped bring the Provisional Government into existence. Along with Fort Vancouver and Oregon City, the area was one of the areas first to be claimed by white settlers. Matheny chose his claim along the river as much for its strategic location as for the quality of the land, as he soon established a ferry to connect the settlers of the French Prairie region with another community of land holders on the west side of the Willamette that was growing along the Yamhill River. This was the first ferry Willamette Valley capable of transporting a wagon and ox team across the river in a single crossing, and it is one of the few river ferries in the Northwest which is still in operation today. Though the ferry has been replaced and modernized over the years, most recently in 1997, by longstanding local tradition the craft is always named the Daniel Matheny.

Downriver from the Matheny claim, Henry Hewitt purchased the oldest farm west of the Willamette River from Joseph McLoughlin, the half-Indian son of Dr. John McLoughlin, the Chief Factor of Fort Vancouver who had presided over the entire Pacific Northwest for 20 years on behalf of the Hudson's Bay Company. The young McLoughlin had built a cabin, cleared and fenced several acres, and was tending a small orchard of apple seedlings, and he sold his interest in the claim for $400 and a team of oxen. After discovering the damp, occasionally violent nature of Oregon winters, Henry and his wife were glad to have found a homesteader willing to sell his cabin. They lived in the McLoughlin cabin until Henry could build a larger cabin of hewn logs, which in turn served the family until they could afford a proper house. As a reminder of the early days in Oregon, the family preserved a beam from the original split rail fence built by Joseph McLoughlin.

The story is told in the Hewitt family that one afternoon during the log cabin days, when Henry had gone into Oregon City on business and left Elizabeth Matheny Hewitt at home looking after her children and youngest brother, Jasper, an Indian entered the cabin and tried to steal a rifle. Elizabeth, seeing where his gaze fell, realized what he was planning and leapt for a gun she knew was loaded. As fate would have it, the Indian went for the same gun. The two of them wrestled for the rifle, the Indian tossing the 135-pound woman hither and yon as he tried to shake her grip loose. Finally, he let go and told her in the local Chinook jargon, "Mika hyas skookum kluckman." ("You are a mighty, stout woman.") Elizabeth waved the rifle at the door and told him to get out -- "Mika clatwa!" -- and he got. Despite this incident, the Hewitt family had a tradition of respect for Oregon's Indians, as the family elders credited Indians, in particular a Cayuse known as Sticcus who spoke not a word of English, for guiding the wagons of the Great Migration of 1843 through the mountains.

The Mathenys and Hewitts were pillars of the community for many years, participating in the Provisional Government, attending church every Sunday, scouting routes for roads in the surrounding area, and developing their land claims. Both families had taken out 640-acre claims (one square mile, the maximum ever allowed in Oregon for a single family claim) which gave them quite a bit of land to work with. Captain Matheny platted the town of Atchison around his ferry crossing -- a natural place for a town to develop -- and placed his first advertisement for "a public sale of lots in the town of Atchison, in Yamhill County on the west bank of the Willamette River at Matheny's Ferry" in the pages of the Oregon Spectator on April 29, 1847. The advertisement specified that Matheny would accept wheat in lieu of cash payments. Matheny's town prospered for a time, but improved roads and the development of a rail network in the Willamette Valley doomed the river traffic that supported it, and it eventually withered away. Despite being founded as Atchison, the town quickly came to be known as Wheatland because grain was the primary crop of most of the surrounding farms. At its height, as many as 40,000 barrels of flour a year were shipped downriver through Wheatland, which was home to over 300 souls.

After several years of farming, Henry Hewitt's pioneer wanderlust got the better of him when word of the gold strike at Sutter's Mill reached Oregon in 1848. Hewitt was one of thousands of Oregonians who enjoyed a head start on the '49ers from the East, and though he never struck it rich, he made good money before returning to Oregon. Gold fever apparently hit Hewitt hard, as he left home again in 1851 and '52 to prospect for gold.

In 1875, three years after the death of Captain Daniel Matheny, the Hewitts sold most of their Donation Land Claim and moved upriver to Salem, where Hewitt bought a ferry and operated it until 1883. He sold the ferry in '83 for $6000 and 240 acres of land on a hill southeast of Portland, and Elizabeth and Henry moved back to their first homestead north of Wheatland and the old Matheny claim. Only five years later, Hewitt sold his 240 acres to newspaper editor Harvey Scott -- the brother and most prominent opponent of Abigail Scott Duniway, Oregon's leading suffragette -- for $15,000 This hill is now known as Mount Scott, a familiar Portland landmark.

Henry Hewitt died on January 15, 1899, and Elizabeth passed away on October 13 of the same year. They were buried side-by-side in the family burial ground at Hopewell Cemetery.