Those that know me know that I love to delve into historical places, especially when it comes to the old West: Ghost towns. Vintage locomotives. The history is darkly vibrant. Or vibrantly dark. I seek to hear the whispers of the past. What stories would they tell?
I drove up to Sunny Valley and stopped at the Applegate Museum which I was quite impressed with, with interpretive displays of the Applegate Trail and its history. Just down the road from the museum is the covered white bridge, which crosses Grave Creek.
According to HMdb.org, or the Historical Marker Database, the year was 1846. The Crowley Family on their last leg of the Applegate Trail (southern alternate route to the Oregon Trail) heading north stopped at the creek to bury their daughter, who around the age of 15, died of Typhoid fever. They buried her just beyond the bridge. Due to the event, the creek was named Grave Creek.
I stood at the edge of the creek, looked through the covered bridge and wandered over to Martha's grave site. My mind tends to wander in moments like this. What if you could take away the bridge, the roads, the houses and put yourself back to 1846? What if we took away our modern conveniences of heated (or air conditioned) vehicles that can travel 70 miles an hour on the interstate getting us 120 miles in just 2 hours? What if we had to be on foot, or on horseback, pulling a wagon at a whopping speed of 3 mph, taking us months to cross the Western territories through the heat of summer and the cold of winter? What fears would we experience? Native Americans fighting for their homeland? Predators such as wolves, bears, or cougars? Or what about a worse fear, such as starvation, hyperthermia or just plain being lost in the wilderness?
Standing there at the face of the grave of Martha Crowley, I could hardly imagine with a family's hopes and dreams of completing the journey to the promised land of Oregon, setting up a farm, finding prosperity and watching your daughter grow into a woman, get married and bring grand children into their lives. But that's not the history. So much of it is skewed. So much forgotten. All that is left is the grave site, and the name of the creek, and a covered bridge that marks a moment, a long forgotten moment of history to those who pass by on Interstate 5 with only the distant view of a white wooden covered bridge in the distance--hardly noticeable unless you look.Looking out over the hills imagining their time in 1846, and looking down at the deep green mossy creek and how the wagon train must have crossed it, there were no whispers. There were no stories. Just a gentle breeze of a long forgotten moment on a late summer day in southern Oregon.
