traveling over a tolerable road until we arrived at the Mormon Station, distance 11 miles.” The Mormon Station was a post maintained by the short-lived Brigham Young Express service on the south side of the upper Sweetwater.
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Arthur Menefee wrote: “Next morning at the point of leaving a conflict took place, which terminated in the death of E. On August 2, the company was camped at Rock Creek about 15 miles east of where the trail crosses the Continental Divide at South Pass. Even on the day Ephraim Brown was killed, he remained uncannily reserved. Joseph, he rarely mentioned anyone by name. After June 4, when he briefly described the marriage of his widowed daughter, Mrs. All supted together in mutual friendship & harmony and continued until next morning when a little storm rose between Mary & Nancy.”Īrthur Menefee was a dispassionate and impersonal diarist. They left home on May 13, 1857, apparently in different contingents, for on May 24 while camped at the Grand River in western Missouri, Arthur Menefee wrote: “Nim and Ephraim coming up about 1 o’clock. So it was a big company comprised primarily of kinfolk, perhaps a dozen wagons and many animals including at least 125 head of loose cattle. All three were married to daughters of Paulina and Ira Sheckles, Sr.: Rebecca, Mary and Nancy. The center of authority in the company was the trio of Arthur Menefee, his son Nim Menefee and Nim’s brother-in-law Ephraim Brown. The count for the number of people in the wagon train comes to 27, but the list is probably incomplete. Some members of the company can be identified, however, including three unmarried brothers of Nancy Brown: Ira, Napoleon and Jackson Sheckles. It is short on detail and lacks a company roster. The only account of the journey is Arthur Menefee’s diary. By then Arthur, age 61, had married the young widow Rebecca (Sheckles) Witt, then about 24, the sister of Nancy (Sheckles) Brown and Mary (Sheckles) Menefee.Įphraim and Nancy Brown were the parents of four children, of whom only three can now be identified-William, Ann and Harriet.
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The ensuing wagon train of 1857 became a general migration of many members of these extended families, including Nim’s father, Arthur Menefee, and several more of his grown children and teenage daughters. After saving a portion of their profits and perhaps selling the store-the record is unclear-they returned to Missouri with a plan of returning to California with their families. Many of them would be in the wagon train of 1857.Ībout 1852, Ephraim Brown and Nim Menefee, brothers-in law, went to California where for a year or two they were partners in a general store in Sacramento. All told, these relatives numbered 33 people at the time of the 1850 census. The Menefees lived with an aunt next door to the Browns Ira Sheckles, the sisters’ younger brother, also lived there. Among these were two of Nancy’s married sisters, Rebecca Sheckles Witt and Mary Frances Sheckles Menefee, wife of Nimrod W. Nearby were several farms occupied by her extended family. They settled on a farm in Ralls County, in northeast Missouri near the Mississippi River.
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In 1846 he married 16-year old Nancy Ann Sheckles. Still, there were 21 reported murder trials that resulted in executions on the trail.īut of the graves of the nearly 200 people involved in these incidents, only one survives, that of Ephraim Brown, killed in 1857 on the trail at Rock Creek near South Pass.Įphraim James Brown was born in Kentucky about 1823. Others who killed emigrants in fights or in self-defense were sometimes banished from their company. Most often the perpetrators were unidentified and escaped punishment. Rieck’s numbers do not include another dozen or more anonymous individuals reported as dying after incidents of violence, and many more reported cases of attempted murder.īodies of obvious murder victims were occasionally found on the trail. During that time as many as half a million people made the trip west. Rieck, the leading expert on trail deaths, has documented 89 murder victims by name and another 83 “unknowns” who were slain by their fellow emigrants. Disagreements over divisions of property, not to mention outright theft, led to conflict and, once in a while, killings.įor the years 1841 through 1865, Richard L. The many irritations of the journey tended to make for short tempers.
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Details, however-who killed him, why and how-are frustratingly sketchy.Īrguments and fights were frequent on the overland trails, and murders happened from time to time. Missourian Ephraim Brown, a leading figure on a wagon train bound for California, was killed near South Pass in 1857 in what appears to have been a bitter family dispute. Out of nearly 200 people who died from murder or other homicides on the Oregon Trail in the mid-1800s, only one lies in a grave with a known location.