Not everybody believes in keeping diaries or writing down recollections, but more than 170 years later, a journal written by a pioneer who crossed the Oregon Trail brings to life a part of history by someone who actually lived it.

That’s what we have in cherished recollections written in the 1890s by John Rogers James, whose family rumbled across the Oregon Trail in 1852 and settled in the Chehalis Valley in a community between Rochester and Grand Mound that became known as Jamestown. One of the James descendants, Scott Horner, graciously let me borrow and copy the typed recollections a few years ago.

John Rogers James, known in later years as “Uncle Johnnie,” was born on Sept. 1, 1840, at St. Keverne in Cornwall, England, the fourth son of Samuel and Anna (Foxwell) James. Then in 1842, when he was just a toddler, he and his parents along with his older brothers Samuel II, Thomas, and William set sail for America, leaving behind the tempestuous Atlantic storms beating rocky cliffs of Cornwall. His parents had discussed moving to Australia, South Africa, South America, Canada and the United States. They settled in a Cornish community in Wisconsin, where John Rogers James’ recollections begin.

“My earliest recollections carry me back to Caledonia, Racine County, Wisconsin,” he wrote. “We were living in a log house on the banks of a little stream called Root River that flowed into Lake Michigan at the town of Racine ... For five miles to the east between us and the lake was a flat, densely wooded country, with numerous bog holes, marshes and swamps.”

He described the region in detail, and then wrote, “Father went back to England in 1848 and took Brother Thomas with him. This was about five years after we settled in Wisconsin. Father had business to settle up, having sold his farm (in England).”

But then a letter arrived from Samuel James Sr.

“A letter came from Father asking Mother to pack up and come back to England,” he wrote, adding that an uncle advising that they pack the 26 encyclopedia volumes in barrels for the journey across the sea. But a return trip to England never materialized.

“I do not know what occurred to change the plans unless it was the great stir and much-talked-of Oregon and the discovery of gold in California. ... Anyway, Father returned and Brother Thomas about a year later. The summer of 1850 we were busy getting ready for the long journey to Oregon.”

It’s quite possible Oregon proved the lure as they gave their fifth son (and sixth child after the birth of Ann Elizabeth) the name of Richard Oregon James. The family later added two other children — Allen and Mary.

Doubtless, had they returned to England, some other family would have settled the Grand Mound area.

Instead, the James family headed west, joined by an old Wisconsin pioneer, Daniel Lucas and his wife and three sons. James described their companions as “a desirable addition to our party as Mr. Lucas was familiar with frontier life, the making of camp and caring for cattle. This was all new to our people, never having camped out a day in their lives.”

They left on Oct. 5, 1850, a Saturday, and drove to Yorkville, where they spent the night with aunts, uncles, and cousins. They wintered in Dudley, Iowa, where they prepared for the rest of the westward trip. They left Iowa in April 1851 and, along with their oxen, trudged through Illinois, across the Mississippi River, and into what he described as “Indian country.”

At the broad, shallow Platte River four miles from Fort Laramie, he said, they camped in the midst of Sioux and Cheyenne natives.

“They would pat themselves on the chest and say, ‘Me good Indian,’ and gave us to understand that they were not like the Pawnees,” he wrote, referring to the tribe inhabiting present-day Nebraska. “They seemed to be altogether different and had an abundance of buffalo, deer, and antelope meat to live on.”

He described tents or wigwams made of tanned buffalo skins stretched upon poles and fastened together at the top.

“I went around peeking in at the openings of the teepees and saw whole strings of buffalo meat hanging up drying in the smoke of a fire built in the middle of the tent,” he wrote. “A large motherly looking squaw, with great wide tanned leather skirts that spread away out, took me by the hand and was going to show me around. She looked so friendly I was marching right along when Mother chanced to see me from where she was busy over a fire getting supper. She came up hurriedly and grabbed me from the opposite side of the big skirts. Afterward, I heard her telling Father that ‘a big squaw was leading Johnnie off.’”

He described the tribal members as the finest looking he’d ever seen, “tall and straight and manly looking, full of life and anxious to make trades, and Father bought two Indian ponies for Brother Tom and me.”

On the trip west, the boys helped drive loose stock.

On Sept. 9, 1851, they arrived in the Willamette Valley, where they established a homestead on the Clackamas River near present-day Milwaukee, Oregon. But the damp weather that winter prompted them to look for another place to live. In June 1852, Samuel James and his son, William, traveled north on foot to investigate the Puget Sound country. They followed the Cowlitz River and then the Cowlitz Trail to John R. and Matilda Jackson’s at Highland Prairie, north to Sidney Ford’s at present-day Centralia and even farther north to Olympia, which had one store, a butcher shop, and Michael T. Simmons’ grist mill at Tumwater, and then on to Fort Nisqually. Pioneers advised them to settle on “the large prairie with the mound on the Chehalis River.”

“Father and Billy returned to our home on the Clackamas, and we determined to go on to Puget Sound after harvesting the crop on Dr. Welsh’s farm,” John Rogers James wrote.

The three eldest brothers planned to drive the cattle north, crossing the Willamette River at Oregon City and ferry the cattle across the Columbia River and then travel north of the Cowlitz River near Toledo and wait at the Jacksons’ home for the family to arrive by boat.

“Father made arrangements with Dr. McLoughlin at Oregon City for the use of one of the Hudson Bay trading boats, a ‘Batteaux,’” he wrote. “I took my first lessons in caulking as we repaired the old boat on the shore of the Willamette opposite the town of Oswego.”

After they loaded their camping provisions, bedding, wagon wheels, yokes, and chains into the boat, John Rogers said, “I got my first lesson in handling an oar.”

When they landed at Portland, he wrote, “there was one street of wooden buildings, some of them two stories high, the street following along the river and just back of it a forest of timber. It did not look as if there was anything there to support a town. There were quite a number of sailing vessels in the harbor, English and American, to load lumber and piling for the San Francisco market.”

Three days later, they arrived at the Cowlitz River, where they hired six Indians to paddle them up the river to Cowlitz Landing just south of present-day Toledo. Then they continued north along the Cowlitz Trail to the Chehalis River Valley.

“The next day, Oct. 12, 1852, we unyoked the faithful old emigrant cattle at the last stopping place, the last camp: two years and seven days since we had started from Wisconsin. And I am the only one of the ten in the family left as I pen these lines on the identical spot, August 8, 1915.”

During the Indian War of 1855–56, he and his family erected a stockade and sheltered in Fort Henness, where he carried a musket at 15 as a member of the home guard.

In 1859, the James family expanded west to Elma, Cosmopolis, and the Grays Harbor area at the mouth of the Chehalis River. John Rogers James filed a donation land claim on what today is part of Hoquiam. He later sold the land to G.E. Emerson who operated the first lumbermill on the Grays Harbor River. They divided their time between Grays Harbor and Grand Mound, where they raised sheep and beef and sold it in Victoria, Canada.

“Upon the discovery of gold on Fraser River in 1858, there was a strong demand for mutton sheep. First at Bellingham Bay, Whatcom, and later at Victoria, B.C,” he wrote. “I followed the sheep trading business pretty steadily for 30 years through ’70, ’80 and ’90 to 1893, gathering sheep all through the Willamette Valley and driving them home. This was before the railroad came. The sheep were wintered on the prairie and sold in the spring after shearing.”

He continued to tend his sheep until his death on April 16, 1929, at the age of 88. He was survived by nine children, 34 grandchildren, and 24 great-grandchildren, most of them in the Rochester and Grand Mound area. His wife had died 43 years earlier. His father was 61 when he died in 1866, and his mother passed away 13 years later, when she was 73.

Nearly a half century later after John Rogers James died, in August 1977, a reunion to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the James family’s arrival at Grand Mound drew 205 family members and friends with at least 83 of them direct descendants of James, Samuel and Anna Maria James. Horner is descended from Samuel II.

Upon his death, The Centralia Daily Chronicle wrote on April 20, 1929: “But for his writings, ‘Uncle Johnnie,’ old days at Fort Henness, the settling of Grays Harbor and the open hospitality of the old pioneers at Grand Mound must ever remain only in memory.”

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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.