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 Harrison Wright, emigrant of 1844Pioneer Family of the Month - March 1997 Many people who crossed the continent on the Oregon Trail left behind a past. The chance to make a fresh start 2000 miles away from home must have been a powerful lure to Harrison Wright, as he left behind his wife and children when he set out from Missouri in 1844. The reason he left his family is lost to history, but census records for 1840 show that he was not resident in the household, indicating that the split had come at least four years before he moved to the Oregon Country. He was never officially divorced from his first wife, Caroline, but both she and Harrison eventually remarried. After living in Oregon for several years, Harrison wrote to his brothers in Missouri to let them know that he was well. Through them, Caroline learned that he was alive. His daughter, Nancy Agnes Wright, was old enough to remember him and wrote to him time and again in the 1850s. Despite Nancy's many letters -- and still more letters written on her behalf by Harrison's brothers and, on one occasion when Nancy's fortunes were at a low ebb, his former wife -- he apparently wrote back to her just once over the years. The last letter Nancy wrote was dated November 7, 1869. In it, she pleads for another letter from her father, writing in closing, "You do not know how sad it makes me feel father to never hear from you and to think that you do not love me or care for me." Nancy died not long after, and because she had left Missouri at the outbreak of the Civil War, Harrison's relatives back home had lost track of her. Whatever problems Harrison Wright had in the East, he apparently did not repeat his mistakes after settling in Oregon. He took out a claim along the Molalla River, a mile or two downstream from "Uncle Billy" Vaughan's homestead, on the ancestral hunting grounds of the Molalla Indians. Harrison paid two good horses and a few dollars more in trinkets for permission to claim a section of the tribe's land. He began operating a ferry on the river, later opened a general supply store in the town of Molalla, volunteered to ride against the Cayuse tribe following the killings at the Whitman Mission in late 1847, and served in the state legislature during the 1860s.  On February 22, 1847, at the age of 32, Harrison Wright married Lavina Elizabeth Frazier, who had emigrated to Oregon with her family in 1843 and was about 3 weeks shy of her eighteenth birthday. Less than a year after the Wright marriage, the settlers in the Willamette Valley organized a volunteer army to fight the Cayuse Indian War. While Harrison was off fighting, a renegade Molalla Indian named Crooked Finger organized militant Indians of tribes to the south of his home for a raid against the emigrants living on Molalla land. The settlers heard he was coming and mobilized everyone who was left in the area after the earlier mobilization for the Cayuse War, and several Molalla warriors who didn't want war with the whites volunteered to fight alongside them. With her husband away, Lavina Harrison opened her husband's store and gave the Indians the rifles and ammunition they asked for. At Butte Creek, the settlers and Molalla warriors set up an ambush along the trail that Crooked Finger's band was using to approach the prairie. The Indians retreated, and the militia followed them to their camp. Led by infamous Indian-hater George Wines, the Indians fighting with the settlers were said to have gone on a rampage because many of the renegades who had joined Crooked Finger were tribal enemies of the Molalla. Legend has it that when some of the white settlers protested the massacre of women and children, Wines replied, "Nits breed lice."In 1848, Lavina had the first of eleven children, three of whom died in infancy. The couple was married until Harrison, then serving in the state legislature, died during a smallpox epidemic in 1869. The family was rescued by a neighbor who had lived through a smallpox infection when he was a child and was therefore immune to the disease. He taught the family a frontier vaccination technique. Since smallpox was closely related to cowpox, the virus could be weakened by infecting a cow; the family then willingly infected themselves with puss from the cow. This technique may have spared their lives, but Lavina, who infected herself only when her children were nearly recovered, was reportedly badly scarred by the pox. Harrison was buried in an isolated grave on the family claim. Lavina survived her husband by more than 40 years, passing away in 1912 at the age of 83.
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