Losing Ada

Traveling west in the mid 1800s was not an easy undertaking. It is often filled with hardship and heartache. Traveling westward in those days was not for the faint of heart or the weak in constitution. One family was heading out to Oregon, and things just didn’t go as planned. The Magill family consisted of Caleb and Mary Magill and their six children ranging from the eldest, Benjamin at 15 years, to the youngest, Ada at 3 years.

The trip from Brown County, Kansas to Oregon would be a long one, and it was often fraught with danger, so the family wanted to get an early start. One good thing was that their June 1864 early start put them ahead of some of the troubles that just weeks later lead to the deaths on the trail of Mary Kelly and Martin Ringo. Long-simmering tensions along the trails broke out into sporadic warfare later that summer between emigrants and people of the Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes. Kelly and Ringo were victims of those tensions.

Unfortunately, missing out on those tensions didn’t make the trip easier for the Magill family. Late in June 1864, 3-year-old, Ada Magill fell ill with dysentery when they were camped near Fort Laramie. They stayed in camp until Ada’s health improved, and then the family continued along the trail another 100 miles to a spot near present Glenrock, Wyoming, in Converse County. In early July 1864, the family was camped alongside Deer Creek, near present Glenrock, when Ada again became sick, but next morning seemed better, so the family continued on. They had gone only a few miles when Ada became very ill again, so they stopped and camped. That night, July 3, she died, as Caleb told the story years later. Devastated, but under the gun to get to Oregon before winter, they built a coffin for little Ada from the boards of an abandoned wagon. They buried Ada in her “Sunday best calico dress,” as the family remembered it later, then, “They heaped stones on the grave to keep wolves and coyotes out and went on toward Oregon,” according to historian and retired schoolteacher Randy Brown.

The Magill family went on to Oregon and settled in Polk County south of Portland in the Willamette Valley. I’m sure the arrival was bittersweet, because they were still grieving. Brown said that most of the information he got on the Magill family came from W W Morrison of Cheyenne, who was a freight conductor on the Union Pacific in the 1940s. Strangely, when Morrison contacted Magill family members still living at that time in Oregon, little information was available on Ada or her passing, and no family letters or diaries mentioning that have survived, so far as is known. The grave is not mentioned in any other emigrant diaries that have turned up. Nevertheless, its location is well documented.

The Oregon Trail route continued be an important trail long after the end of the covered wagon era. A new railroad was built in 1888, that passed close to Ada’s grave but respectfully, did not disturb it. Engineers were surveying for a better road between Glenrock and Casper in 1912, and they found the Magill grave, on a knoll 20 feet north of the old trail and marked with a rough, inscribed headstone. They knew it would end up right in the centerline of the new road. Surveyor L C Bishop, who later would become Wyoming’s state engineer, or chief water officer, decided to move the grave 30 feet north to the edge of the new road. As they dug up the grave, they found under a large stone slab about five feet down, according to Brown, Bishop, and a shovel crew of convicts from the Converse County jail “pieces of the little girl’s skull, a few small bones, some pearl buttons and a few cut nails.” It had to be a really hard find, but that is what happened to those old pine box graves in those days. I’m sure they felt awful. Bishop carved a new stone with the same inscription as the original and buried the original about three feet deep in the new grave. I feel like that was a very respectful and honorable thing to do.

While the railroad is no longer used and was removed in the 1980s, Ada Magill’s grave still remains, protected by a sturdy fence, and marked with a plaque placed by the Oregon-California Trails Association. The Ada Magill’s grave lies in sight of the North Platte River.