![]() Both were rescued, but Mary’s condition took a turn for the worse and on June 10, while they camped a mile west of the fort near the North Platte, she died. When they crossed the river near Fort Laramie, either the Laramie or the North Platte, the wagon overturned, and Mary and the baby were immersed in the frigid water. An epidemic of it broke out in the wagon train, and most of the children and some adults came down with the disease.įor several days a feverish Mary and the baby rode on a featherbed in one of their two wagons driven by 14-year-old Bailey Homsley, Benjamin Homsley’s orphaned nephew. Shortly before Bryan and Samuel Thornhill contracted cholera, Mary Homsley and her baby son came down with measles, a serious affliction in early America. The baby was named Bryant Gray Thornhill Jr. Rebecca gave birth to a son in Oregon in February 1853, eight months after Bryant’s death. In a letter dated June 20 from Fort Laramie reporting their deaths, they are both said to have been from Warren County. ![]() Bryant Thornhill, husband of Mary’s sister Rebecca (Oden) Thornhill, is reported to have succumbed to cholera “soon after” Mary Homsley had died, as did Samuel Thornhill from the same cause. Many wagon train companies were hit hard by cholera, and the Oden clan was no exception. Family tradition has it that they were twins, but the 1850 census says Georgina was 9 in that year, Lycurges, 7. The children had been poisoned by a household slave, murdered in revenge for perceived ill treatment by Benjamin Homsley. Left behind in Missouri were the graves of their two oldest, Georgina and Lycurges. The Homsleys had three children at the time of their departure: Laura (sometimes spelled Leura or Lura), age 6, 2-year-old Sarah Ellen and a baby boy, whose name is now unknown. Mary Homsley’s Aunt Delilah (Fine) Shrumb had emigrated to Oregon with her husband in 1846. There was family precedent for this move. In April 1852, accompanied by Mary’s parents and 10 brothers and sisters, some with families of their own, they took the trail to Oregon. The young couple settled on a farm located in Warren County close to where Benjamin’s brother, Jeff, and his family lived. He was a native of Tennessee and 11 years older than she-born in 1815. Her father and mother, Jacob and Sarah (Fine) Oden, did eventually settle with their family in Warren County, Mo., where on June 3, 1841, Mary married farmer and blacksmith Benjamin Franklin Homsley. Wyoming has seven extant graves of that year’s casualties, but one of these victims, Mary Homsley, succumbed to a disease almost as deadly in nineteenth-century America-the measles.Ĭonflicting records say that Mary Elizabeth Oden was born either near Truxton, Lincoln County, Mo., in 1824 or near Lexington, Ky., where her parents lived before moving to Missouri. Not coincidentally, 1852 is also estimated to be the year of the greatest mortality on the trails, caused principally by the cholera epidemic then plaguing most of America. It was a crowded year on the plains, with long columns of covered wagons heading west. Soon, California Gold Rush travelers were joined by a surge of people bound for Oregon. Late in 1850, Congress had passed the Donation Land Act, guaranteeing free land to pioneers who could make it to Oregon Territory. Scholars estimate that the year 1852 saw the largest number of emigrants ever on the transcontinental trails.
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