Westward to Utopia

In the evening by lamp-light, Willie was buried here November 26, 1855

The wave of migration across North America in the middle of the 19th century was filled with stories of yearning for a new life with greater opportunities. One of those, with some unusual twists, is captured in the miniscule Willie Keil's Grave State Park in Pacific County.

In the 1860 census, 27% of Washington's non-native population were foreign born (about 13% are today). Of that group, 40% were from Ireland, escaping the potato blight famine (1.7 million Irish citizens emigrated to the US between 1841 and 1860, comprising about 5% of the entire US population). After Ireland, Germany was the homeland of the next largest group of foreign-born residents.

Willie's father, Wilhelm Keil, emigrated from Germany in the 1830's as social dislocations of the industrial revolution were breaking the old order. Arriving in New York, Keil and his wife Louisa soon gravitated to the hinterlands of western Pennsylvania, attracted to the intentional communities developing in that region.

Perhaps pushing back against the dehumanizing aspects of capitalist industrialization sweeping northern Europe and the northeastern US, communitarian societies emerged seeking to establish a more perfect society in the American wilderness. Many took their inspiration from a verse in the Acts of the Apostles 4:32-35: "All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had."

For a while, the Keils were attracted to a colony inspired by fellow German immigrant Johann Rapp. The obvious limitations of Rapp's insistence on celibacy caused a schism in the group, with the dissidents attracted to Keil's leadership. Rallying around Keil's central focus on the "Golden Rule," the maxim of reciprocity found at the heart of most religious traditions, and the principle of all material goods held in common, more than 200 people followed Keil to northern Missouri and founded the community of Bethel in 1844. Spread over more than 6,000 acres, the community became self-sufficient in food and building materials, and quickly developed a reputation for the manufacture of sturdy pioneer wagons and its distillery's Golden Rule Whiskey. Eventually catching the bug that energized the wagon builders' customers, the community endorsed a plan to establish a new colony in the Oregon country. Scouts were sent, choosing an area near Willapa Bay, and 34 wagons were prepared, provisioned with flour, bacon, cornmeal, dried apples and peaches, beans, salt, pepper, rice, tea, coffee, and sugar for 250 followers.

Wilhelm's 19 year old eldest son, Willie, was perhaps the most enthusiastic proponent of the emigration plan. In recognition of his navigational expertise, he was selected to drive the lead wagon. Preparations reached a fever pitch as the day of departure approached, but Willie fell ill with abdominal pain, fever, chills, nausea, headache and a rapid heartbeat. Within days, he was dead. In the 1850's, 5% of US deaths followed the same course....malaria. One of the most prevalent and debilitating human diseases, its vector, a single-celled Plasmodium microorganism was not endemic to North America, but was brought to the continent by colonization. Transmitted to people in mosquito saliva, the organism migrates to the liver and infects the hepatocytes responsible for protein synthesis and storage. Within two weeks, the hepatocytes rupture and the multiplying organisms stream through the body within red blood cells. Without treatment, death can come rapidly.

As Willie lay dying, Wilhelm made him a promise-- no matter what happened, he would lead the wagon train to the new colony. Just four days later, he made good on the promise, by putting a lead-lined coffin into a specially-built hearse. Willie's body was reverently laid in the coffin, then it was filled with Golden Rule Whiskey and sealed. The hearse was placed at the head of the wagon train and remained there for the entire journey.

Overall, 90 in 1,000 travelers on the Oregon Trail died from infectious diseases, primarily cholera, by drinking water tainted with germs spread by human feces. 9 out of 1,000 died by accidents, mostly drownings, gunshot wounds and getting run over by a wagon. About 1 in 1,000 died as a result of conflict with Native Americans.

1855 was a remarkable year in the annals of emigration to the Oregon Country. Established in 1818 as a jointly held area open to commerce and settlement by citizens of the US and Great Britain, the competing goals of British (fur trade) and American (farming settlement) purposes led to negotiation of the Oregon Treaty of 1846 in which America won administration of the territory south of the 49th parallel. The American position was strengthened by the fact that around 5,000 American settlers had already emigrated along the Oregon Trail. Resolution of the competing claims increased travel on the trail, and over 7,000 traversed the route from 1846-1849. The greatest westward migration began in 1850, though,as 33,000 emigrants reached Oregon in the next five years. Things changed in 1855, as resistance to the migration came from the Sioux and other nations of the prairies and interior west. Well publicized attacks on caravans caused many wagon trains to abort their plans and return home. Only about 450 emigrants made it to Oregon that year; over half of them were the Keil party. Keil credited their group's safe passage to divine intervention, a policy of generosity towards native people they encountered on the trail ("I made no difference among men....it was my duty to treat the Indians just as well as the whites"), and their German language. Others believed that the presence of Willie Keil's whiskey-embalmed body at the head of the group deterred potential trouble. Whatever the reason, the caravan completed the first 600 miles across the prairie to Fort Laramie without incident or loss, traversed the second 600 miles across the continental divide to Fort Hall with only minor stock losses, and struggled less than many across the final 600 miles of arid lands and steep mountains to arrive at The Dalles on the Columbia River. Loading their wagons onto steamboats, they completed the journey (with a couple more portages around the Cascades of the Columbia and the isthmus between the Columbia and Willapa Bay). Arriving at the onset of the fall rainy season, Keil reacted to the place with similar emotions to William Clark a half-century earlier. "Our clothes and our shoes actually rot on our bodies because of the mud and wetness," he wrote to a friend. Finding the Willapa unsuited to his dream of paradise, Keil signed over the properties to the members who had located there, and buried his son at the place now marked by the state park.

Wilhelm departed with the rest of the group to the Willamette Valley and founded the Aurora Colony. Aurora became one of the most enduring and successful intentional communities in the US, growing to include more than 600 people and 15,000 acres and thriving as an oasis of cooperative work for the common weal until the death of Wilhelm Keil in 1877 began the dissolution of both the Oregon and Missouri colonies.

So.....why did so many people endure the hardships and threats to their families' lives, to emigrate to Oregon and Washington? Historian Will Bagley investigated the question in detail in his book So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California, 1812–1848. He summarizes the reasons into a few categories:

1---A Better Place: Peter Burnett arrived in Oregon in 1843 and described it thus: "The scenery of her mountains and valleys is simply magnificent. Her snow-clad mountains, her giant forests, her clear skies in summer, and her green and blooming valleys, constitute a combination of the beautiful that can not be excelled." Many wished to escape the unpleasant humidity and prevalence of malaria in the midwest and south. Some left because they "could not think of staying in that sickly country another summer."

2---Adventure: Antonio Rabbeson (of later dubious fame as Chief Leschi's accuser) wrote "I was very conscious to make a trip across the plains so that I could kill buffalo...and have a good time. That was about all of my motive--a young fellows idea of adventure."

3---Running from Something: Debt, misbehavior, embarrassment, involuntary servitude, abusive or failed relationships, hunger, and dehumanizing industrialization all pushed people to move far away in the hope of outrunning life's hardships.

4---To Be Better?: Peter Burnett assessed his fellow travelers thus: "Some were idle, worthless young men, too lazy to work at home, and too genteel to steal; while some others were gamblers, and others were reputed thieves. But when they arrived in Oregon they were compelled to work or starve. They were all honest, because there was nothing to steal; they were all sober, because there was no liquor to drink; there were no misers, because there was no money to hoard; and they were all industrious, because it was work or starve."

5---Slavery: A revealing window into one small aspect of slavery's impact on America was revealed by Robert Wilson Morrison. "I am not satisfied here," he said of his Missouri farm, "there is little we raise that pays shipment to market; A little hemp and a little tobacco." Unless a man owned slaves, which Morrison refused to do, "he has no chance, he cannot compete with a man that does. I'm going to Oregon, where there'll be no slaves, and we'll all start even." Morrison settled on the coast a few miles south of Cape Disappointment State Park. Slavery was prohibited in Oregon by the state constitution of 1857, but it also contained a provision excluding African Americans from the state entirely.

6--Opportunity: One consequence of the journey for many was the creation of a privileged future for their descendants. In 1843, the provisional government of Oregon authorized 640 acre claims for male pioneers. The federal Donation Land Claim Act in 1850 granted 320 acres free of charge to every unmarried white male citizen eighteen or older and 640 acres to every married couple arriving in the Oregon Territory. In the case of a married couple, the husband and wife each owned half of the total grant under their own names. The law was one of the first that allowed married women in the United States to hold property under their own name. With occupancy and development, these claims became the basis of wealth that often transcended many generations.

7---The Grass is Greener: The urge to undertake a migration on the scale of that undertaken by Wilhelm Keil and the thousands of others that trekked west in the mid-19th century is probably embedded in our humanity. The populating of the planet was driven by people moving away from the home they knew into a place of potential new opportunity. Many of history's migrations have involved conflict and displacement. Some have been characterized by encouragement---inspiring the inscription on the Statue of Liberty:

"Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Migrants and refugees from war-torn Syria and the breakdown of civil society in parts of Central America are heeding the impetus in our time. The fractious and discordant responses of North American and European societies to the influx of newcomers, saddening in its sefishness, demonization of fellow humans and lack of empathy, is nonetheless understandable as a reflection of history.

History does not necessarily define our future, however. People DO rise above their base instincts and work together with kindness and generosity to make the world better. Wilhelm Kiel's leadership fostered communities dedicated to the proposition that all people benefit when others are treated as we would want to be treated ourselves. Martin Luther King, Jr. sparked hope in the essential goodness of human beings when he paraphrased abolitionist Theodore Parker:

"the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

--David

Portrait of Wilhelm Keil courtesy of Oregon Historical Society

"Emigrants" drawing courtesy of National Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive Center, Bureau of Land Management