How Mrs Worsley Went to Oregon

The family story was that in the spring of 1863 Barbara Worsley and her five children and some workers engaged to work for her husband in the mill he was founding in Brownsville, Oregon, sailed from New York to Panama, crossed the Isthmus by mule, and sailed up the Pacific Coast to Oregon. But I was reading a David McCullough book, Brave Companions, in which one chapter treats the Panama Railroad, a subject that I definitely read about in his great book The Path Between the Seas, and only just now did the penny drop; I realized that because the railroad was finished in 1855, of course Barbara and her party did not ride mules across the Isthmus after all.

So I started researching online records and found some facts upon which to hang my suppositions.

Barbara Worsley left Trenton, New Jersey, in June 1863 with her children, 13-year-old William, 11-year-old Benjamin, 6-year-old Sarah, 4-year-old Joseph, and 6-month-old Laura. On June 13th they embarked on the SS America, a steamship on The People’s Line, under Captain Jeff Maury. The ship’s passenger list shows “Mrs. Worsley and two children,” which probably meant that she paid the passage for herself, for Sarah, and for Joseph, and baby Laura went free because she had to be carried. Either the two older boys went with their father overland the summer before this, or they were among the 300 “other passengers” not named.

In 1863 the Panama Railroad had been operating for eight years, so Barbara and the children must have ridden the train from Colon to Panama City. The fare was exorbitant, $25 per person for first class, $10 per person for second class, with personal baggage costing 5 cents per pound. I don’t find that there were children’s rates or special fares, but there could have been something to mitigate the cost. Perhaps she had the money for the first class fares; I don’t know the Worsley family’s financial state in those years. The train ride took only four to five hours to cross the Isthmus rather than the four to eight days that the mule trains used to take (mules were used only for the final 20 miles of the trip from the Atlantic to the Pacific; the first part of the journey was in native dugout canoes navigating up the dangerous Chagres River). The railway, initially completed with nearly two hundred wooden bridges, had immediately been in the process of being upgraded so that all those bridges were rebuilt with iron. All the wooden trestles and all the pine ties had to be replaced with more permanent materials as well to withstand the tropical rains and heat. Passengers would have looked out on amazing jungle vistas in some places and in other places would have felt that they were traveling through tight green tunnels, so closely did the workers cut the vegetation so that the train cars barely fit. The noise, heat, clouds of mosquitoes and other insects, coal smoke, and intense humidity would have made their time in the tropics uncomfortable under the best conditions.

In Panama City they connected with the SS Moses Taylor, and in this ship they steamed up the Pacific coast, arriving in San Francisco on July 12, 1863. Despite their relatively short time down in Panama, Barbara was bitten by an infected mosquito and was incubating malaria. The disease can take from a week to a month before symptoms appear, depending on the health of the infected person and on the type of malaria it is. The CDC website says, “The shorter periods are observed most frequently with P. falciparum and the longer ones with P. malariae.” The malaria parasite infects blood cells and causes the production of substances that produce the fevers and chills that are the most common symptoms of the disease. Sometimes the infected cells no longer circulate freely but collect against walls of veins and cause other problems.

By the time they arrived in San Francisco, Barbara may have been suffering the first wave of the disease’s attack, with chills and fever, headaches and possible vomiting. These attacks classically recur every two to three days. She might have thought she had caught the flu and tried to wait until she was better. Otherwise, she might have still been symptom-free and could have immediately set sail for Oregon. As soon as she became ill, it must have become a nightmarish journey for her, trying to look after a growing baby and two small children. She would have had to rely on her six-year-old daughter Sarah to help as much as the little girl could.

She and her children arrived at the port of Marshfield in July or August 1863. Looking at the possibilities, I see that the Brother Jonathan was arriving in San Francisco from the northern ports every couple of weeks, which means it was regularly traveling back and forth; that could well be the steamer that let Mrs. Worsley and her children off at old Coos Bay. The mail would have allowed her to inform her husband of exactly when they were arriving, so he could well have met her at the city of Marshfield on the shores of Coos Bay. I hope he did meet her when they came off the boat!

(A sad note about the Brother Jonathan, in 1865 against her captain’s advice, by order of her owners she was overloaded at the port in San Francisco, and enroute to Portland, she struck a reef at Crescent City and sank with all 166 on board.)

To reach their new home in Brownsville, just north of Eugene, the Worsleys would have traveled by horse-drawn wagon. Today the drive is 142 miles; back then, it may have been about the same distance depending on which way the roads went, but of course what roads there were would have been quite primitive. Surely by the time they were in the wagon traveling to Brownsville, Mrs. Worsley was getting seriously sick.

Malaria had few treatments at that time and place. Quinine was known, but it was probably hard to come by in that area, if they even correctly diagnosed what was wrong with Barbara. The rigors of the journey surely sapped her strength, and without being able to rest and get better, she may have suffered from one of the common complications such as pneumonia or sepsis, or perhaps she had the more virulent form of malaria that attacks the brain and causes seizures, coma, and death. She suffered for several weeks at least, and probably for a little more than a month. By the end of the first week of September in Brownsville, she was dead, and the family was devastated.