Within a year William remarried, to Mary "Polly" Shields, daughter
of Banner Shields and Margaret Weir, and granddaughter of the Revolutionary
War soldier William Shields of Frederick County, Maryland. In 1832,
hearing that former Cherokee Indian land was available through the sixth
and last of the land lotteries in northwest Georgia, William applied for
and was granted a 160-acre tract in the original Cherokee County, later Murray
County. The plat map shows that a William Walker owned plot no. 300
in the 12th District, third section of Cherokee County. Lot 300 was
on the east side of a ridge running north and south, which may not have been
to his liking, if this is the same William Walker. In addition to farming,
he practiced the trade of carpentry, building furniture, houses, and grist
mills. The first three children of the second family, all daughters,
were born in Georgia. For whatever reason, by 1840 the family moved
back to east Tennessee. Little Eliza Ann, five years old, remembered
that year, when they all caught "chills and fever" and managed to cure themselves
by living all summer upon the top of Lookout Mountain, near
Chattanooga.
Land hunger was still with William, however. He may have
heard of migration to Oregon in the early 1840s and decided to make Oregon
his ultimate goal, but at that time he may have thought Oregon was too remote,
or not settled enough, to emigrate immediately. In 1844 he took the intermediate
step of moving to Greene County, Missouri. All the household goods were loaded
into wagons and, when they reached the Mississippi River, onto a flatboat.
While crossing the Mississippi, William caught a large catfish, the
biggest fish little Eliza Ann had ever seen. Upon arriving in Greene
County, they settled at Cave Springs, north of Springfield, and lived in
tents for the first year while William built a log house.
Along with them came Polly Shields Walker’s younger sister,
Ann Eliza Shields, who married John Killingsworth, also from Tennessee, in
Greene County in 1844. Here the children of the first marriage were
to marry, also to new arrivals from Tennessee and other states. And
here the Walkers were to become acquainted with families who were to be their
companions on the Oregon Trail and neighbors in Lane County: the Gays,
the Renshaws, and the Reids. Eliza Ann Walker was to remember the interior
of their rude church: a fire in a dirt frame in the middle of the room, onto
which coal, which smoked less than wood, was piled. On cold Sunday
mornings, one person at a time would go stand by that fire. Candles
on the walls shone through tin lanterns punched with holes, which sufficed
for light when there was no wind. The song leader, a red-headed man,
lined out the hymns two lines at a time. "When we got to singing with
books, we didn’t like it at all," she remarked. Other details
of life in Greene County at this time appear in the diary of Martha Gay
Masterson; the Mastersons were neighbors of the Walkers both in Missouri
and Oregon (the diary is published as One Woman’s West, ed. Lois
Barton).
Farther along the trail, probably in the great sage plain between
the Sweetwater and Bear rivers, he awoke one morning to find that three of
his oxen had died. This was an area with alkali pools known to kill
stock. According to an flowery and highly romanticized sketch of Eliza
Ann published in the Brownsville Times in 1914, her father asked his family
to get on their knees and pray for deliverance. Soon afterward a man
came riding up and said he had some cattle he wanted to send to the Willamette
Valley, seemingly a direct answer to prayer.
William Walker, his elder sons, and the Killingsworths signed the
roster at the Umatilla Agency on the same day, September 27, 1853. This
step, taken at the eastern edge of the Oregon Territory, meant that they
had officially arrived in Oregon and could now apply for donation land claims
in the Willamette Valley. They still had hundreds of miles ahead of
them. When they finally got to Lane County, they all took adjacent
claims, and started improving them so as to claim ownership in one year.
The claim was officially settled on the first of November. The land
that William Walker acquired proved no better for farming than had the land
in Georgia. It was marshland, at Camas Swale south of Spencer Butte.
The first year or so must have been difficult. Once again, the
family lived in rather primitive conditions while William built their log
house. The three cows they had brought with them furnished the
family’s cream and butter and Dutch cheese. There being no grist
mill nearby, Mrs. Walker ground flour in a coffee mill that she had brought
across the plains. Her husband took an ox team to Marion County so
that he could buy flour and bacon from Isaac Cook, whom he had known in Missouri,
and who had come to Oregon in 1845. Game and wild berries and fruits
were plentiful enough. Even so, William may have been a bit relieved
when Rev. Robert Robe came calling in the summer of 1854 and, without warning,
announced before the whole family that he wanted to marry Eliza Ann. As a
wedding present, her mother gave her a glass serving bowl, "Roses in Snow"
pattern, that had been brought across the plains.
After four years William sold that property and moved to Eugene,
where he opened Walker’s Drug Store. His first store (in which
the family also lived) was on Ninth Street (now Broadway); this was later
moved around the corner to Willamette Street. He sold groceries and
patent medicines (he was the agent for Dr. Jayne’s Celebrated Family
Medicines) as well as shoes, writing supplies, and oilcloth. At about
the same time, after giving up the business of sheep raising on his homestead,
John Killingsworth opened the Star Bakery in Eugene, the first bakery in
Lane County. Killingsworth and his son were to improve Eugene by planting
nearly all the town’s shade trees. The People’s Press,
an early Lane County newspaper, contains advertisements in 1859 for
Walker’s Drug Store. But in 1861 he sold the drug store and bought
farm and river land; for the next ten years he was ranching in the Springfield
and Pleasant Hill area. In 1868, his son Albert Shields Walker, who
was to be the first mayor of Springfield, married Sarah "Lizzie" Higgins
and at this time the Walker household contained William, Polly, son Albert
and wife Lizzie and their infant son Alva, and youngest daughter Tryphena.
Daughter Martha married William Winter and the Winter family were living
next to the Walkers in 1870.
The following year William Walker purchased a farm at Pleasant
Hill where he was to live nearly the rest of his life. In 1881, the
year of his death, he sold the Pleasant Hill property and moved back to
Springfield. The 1880 Federal Census for Lane County, the year before
his death, notes that both he and Polly Shields Walker were suffering from
"paralysis," perhaps as the result of strokes.
On December 28, 1881, William Walker died in Springfield. His
body was interred the following day in the Eugene Masonic Cemetery, according
to his obituary in the Eugene Weekly Guard. His sons Hugh Marion
and Mathew Eagleton Walker are also interred there. The Portrait
and Biographical Record of the Willamette Valley, Oregon mentions that
in his youth William Walker had been a Whig and afterwards affiliated, probably
as a Republican, with the abolitionists.
According to my research to date (1997), William Walker has 313
descendants; if spouses are included, the number is 472. These resided
mainly in Oregon, California, Washington and Idaho. This family history
is written in hopes that I might contact others researching this family,
and to give those interested in the history of Lane County some account of
their contributions.
Sources:
Letter from Eliza Ann Walker Robe to her grandson Donald Marsters,
Brownsville, OR, 1925-26.
Portrait and Biographical Record of the Willamette Valley,
Oregon (Chicago: Chapman Pub. Co., 1903), p. 1121 (biographical sketch
of Albert Shields Walker).
"Eliza Ann Walker Robe," by I. L. Hilleary, Brownsville Times,
Friday, 10 April 1914.
Walker Family Bible in possession of Mrs. A.R. Tiffany (D.A.R.
member), 2045 Potter St., Eugene, OR (Salt Lake Family History film
#893732).
A Journey Across the Plains with an Ox Team, by George Stowell.
Unpublished typescript in collection of Lane County Historical Society.
Includes George Stowell’s account of the 1852 attempt to reach
Oregon.
Genealogical Material in Oregon Donation Land Claims, Genealogical
Forum of Portland.
Knox County, Tennessee Orphans’ and Guardians’ Court
Records
Knox County, Tennessee Marriage Records
People’s Press (Eugene, OR), 8 March 1859, p. 4, col.
4; 1 October 1859, p. 3, col. 5.
Eugene Weekly Guard, 31 December 1881 (obituary of William
Walker).
Greene County, Missouri Marriage Records
One Woman’s West: the Diary of Martha Gay
Masterson, ed. Lois Barton (Eugene, OR: Spencer Butte Press,
1992).
Barton, Lois. Spencer Butte Pioneers (Eugene, OR: Spencer
Butte Press, 1982).
Lane County, Oregon Marriage Records
Smith, James F., The Cherokee Land Lottery (Baltimore:
Genealogical Pub. Co., 1969).
U.S. Federal Census, Greene County, MO., 1850.
U.S. Federal Census, Lane County, OR, 1860, 1870, 1880.
Shields, John Edgar, A History of the Shields Family
(Harrisburg, PA: Shields, 1969).
Robe, Hermon Linn. Oregon Pioneer Tales: Poems (Eugene,
OR: Robe, 1955).
Carey, Charles Henry, History of Oregon (Chicago & Portland:
Pioneer Historical Pub. Co., 1922), vol. 3 pp. 362-363 (biographical sketch
of William Milton Killingsworth).
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