Our Scoggin Ancestors

contributed by Ann Carraway

We do not know when the Scoggin family came to America, or just where they  settled.  But, we do know that there was a river in New England which was named after one of our ancestors, the �Andro Scoggin�.  The Scoggin clan came from Scotland, and there is a dim legend concerning the name to the effect that originally it was Scott.  Later it became Scottgin {meaning Scott's son}, Which was decidedly hard to pronounce, so it was finally corrupted into Scoggin, by changing the double T to a double G. 

The family in succeeding generations scattered as far south as White county, Tennessee, near the Big Springs, the source of the Cumberland river, and it was here that our first authentic information of the family began.  

We know that here in Tennessee lived two Scoggin brothers, Woodson and James Scoggin, who married two sisters.  Woodson married Mary Green and James married Sally Green.  From Woodson and Mary Scoggin sprang our branch of the Scoggin family.

Mary Green, a generous, and resolute character, with a mighty influence over her family, was born in White county, Tennessee, in 1809.  Her father was Baptist minister, and slave owner, who gave his daughter Mary a little slave girl of 7 years, when she was married. The slave girl lived with the new family until she was about 20 years old  Then, since they were migrating to Oregon, she was given her freedom and left with negro friends, for as Great-grandmother said, "she wanted her children to learn to work and wait on themselves". 

Mary Green was one of a family of seven children.  One sister, Nancy Belle, later lived in Arkansas, and a brother, William Green, settled in near Sedalia, Missouri, and the sister Sally, who married the other Scoggin brother, are the only members of her family of whom we have any knowledge.  

Woodson Scoggin and Mary Green were married in 1828, and lived in Tennessee, in White County, where both had been born and raised.  To them was born a son, John LaFayette, on September 3, 1829, and 18 months later, a second son Gustavus.  In 1832  they moved to Missouri where Elisabeth and Martha were born.  In 1839 the father, Woodson died during a typhoid fever epidemic, four months before Woodson, the third son was born.  Mary remained a widow, caring for her five children, until about 1844 when she married James Chambers, a man 7 or 8 years younger than she was.  A young man, kind and gentle, saddled himself with a widow and five children.  

The next year, in 1845 the family migrated by ox team across the plains to Oregon, settling in the Tualatin Valley, on the North Plains, north of Hillsboro, Oregon, They, as the other very early pioneers who came,  had no trouble with the Indians.  Their struggle was with dust, and heat, and storms, and cold, trackless waterless desert, impenetrable forest tangles, treacherous rivers and insurmountable mountains.  But with the undaunted spirit of the Pioneer, and with unconquerable effort and determination, they plodded toward their goal and finally reached it, there to face with happy hearts the problems and hardships of frontier life.  

The first child of the Chamber's union, Mary Jane, was born in December 1845, two weeks after the family reached Oregon.  They had fortunately found a little old log cabin in which they could live there first winter, but there were great creaks between the logs of the walls and snow drifted in on the bed of the mother and new baby , with no ill effects to either, (our ancestors were of sturdy stock!)  Four years later, a second daughter, Letitia, joined the family.  When these girls grew to womenhood, Mary Jane married Thomas Benton Hoover and the lived for many years at Fossil, Oregon,  while Letitia married Dr. Francis Alonso Baily and Hillsboro became their home.  Of special interest to our immediate family, let me just add here, that it was at Dr. Bailey's home in Hillsboro, years later, Nov. 18,1878 that Hubert Scoggin was born.  

In 1845 when John LaFayette Scoggin, our grandfather, came to Oregon with his mother and step-father (Mr. Chambers), he was 16 years old, and four years later he went to California during the gold rush.  He was not very successful and soon came back to Oregon.  

It was about this time that there were several uprisings of the Indians, and "Fayette" Scoggin, being young and loving adventure, on different occasions joined the Indian scouts or the troops that went out to settle the Indians or bring them to justice.  

Late in the fall of 1847 when the Cayuse Indians massacred Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and others at the Whitman Mission, Fayette, then 18 years odd, joined the Oregon volunteers who went out to avenge the massacre.  The Volunteers were a mounted cavalry unit under the command of General Neal Gilliam.  They gathered at The Dalles and waited there until their posse numbered three hundred men.  When they were all ready they set out, and after days of scouting around they came upon the Indians camped on the Umatilla river, and in a sudden surprise attack early one morning, killed many Indians, broke up their camp, and recovered many stolen horses.  Some of the Indians escaped and fled toward Walla Walla with the white posse following in hot pursuit.  Many Indians were captured and taken prisoners and some of them were later tried, convicted and hanged at Oregon City for the murder at the Whitman Mission.  Only part of the mounted posse followed the fleeing Indians, and in recounting the story in later years, Fayette said that at one time the men went too far and spread out to thin, and could so easily have been cut off and annihilated, if the Indians had realized their advantage.  

Returning to the Mission, the Volunteers set about the unpleasant task of burying the bodies of murdered white people that had lain there uncared-for for many weeks. There were thirteen bodies to be buried, all men except Mrs. Whitman.  All the other women and children had been carried of by the Indians and were later ransomed by the Hudson Bay Co. under the leadership of (*1)  Peter Skeen Ogden. 

Later in the Cayuse uprising in 1855, when they attacked the whites at the Cascades, Fayette was again among the Volunteers who went from The Dalles toward the upper Deschutes river to chase the hostile savages.  On this trip a group of fifteen white men overtook a band of about 150  "bucks", with a few women among them, up on Buck Creek.  The white men were able to take refuge in a clump of cottonwood trees before they were surrounded.   The Indians had very few guns, little ammunition, and were poor shots. But they fought effectively with bows and arrows.  The white men held the Indians off with their rifles all day, while the women continually harangued the bucks to rush the whites, calling them "cowards" and "women" in jargon which Fayette understood.  Time after time the women would creep up close and set fire to the grass trying burn them out, thinking the white men would not harm them.  Finally old Bill Towey (old 2 eye) got exasperated and banged away at them, killing two women with the one shot!  After that they weren't so aggressive.  During the long day the battle raged, the Indians gave their unearthly war-whoops, trying to unnerve the white men.  Grandfather Fayette liked a joke, over on himself, and often told this one.  When the war-whooping was at its worst, try as he would, he had a hard time keeping his hat on.  He said every few minutes his hat would begin to creep up in the back, as his hair would rise in fear and terror at the blood curdling yells.  He'd pull his hat back on only to have the same thing repeated.  He said this was the only time in all his Indian fighting that this happened.   

As night came on the Indians drew off and the white men began to plan a way of escape.  They tore up their shirts and wrapped them around their horses' feet and stealthily slipped our of the Buck Hollow canyon in the dark, and escaped back to the Dalles, thirty  miles away, to safety.  In this fight many Indians were killed, but the only white casualty was one man wounded.  His companions tied him on his horse and took him with them to safety.  

Another Indian episode in which John LaFayette took part was in the rescue of a family, which had been surrounded and virtually made prisoners by the Indians in Pendleton country.  The news of their plight was brought to the fort at The Dalles, and again there was a call for volunteers.  A troop of mounted cavalrymen, including Grandpa Scoggin went out to rescue them.  They found a family with five children, and with a large bunch of horses, which the Indians had not yet been able to steal.  The soldiers hastily organized the group and got ready to make a run for their lives.  They started at night and fled as fast as they could with the family and all the food and bedding that could be carried in there little spring wagon.  They brought the bunch of loose horses, and running the team until it was winded, changed to fresh horses from the loose bunch with a little loss of time as possible.  Their running flight took them through parts of Morrow, Gilliam, Sherman, and Wasco counties, not looking for read, but keeping their general direction to the west.  Whenever they were on high ground they could see the Indians following them.. When they reached the John Day River, which flows in a deep rugged canyon, they found a way down a creek bed, forded the river, and by a miracle found a sloping bank and ridge on the other side by which they got up out of the canyon onto more level country.  (Grandfather said that in later years as he went up and down the John Day, he looked and hunted for this crossing his party found in their extremity, but he could never locate the place.)  The Indians kept following the fugitives, pressing them hard.  When up on the high country between the John Day and the Deschutes, to the great relief of the fleeing whites, they met a big company of mounted men sent out from the Fort to meet them.  The Indians following close, saw the reinforcements, and realizing they had lost the race, halted the pursuing warriors, and then formed a big circle.  As they rode their plunging Cayuses in the circle, each brave with savage disgust and rage plunged his spear into the ground all the while giving his blood-curdling war-whoop, thus showing his defiance to the whites.  Then the Indians sulkily withdrew.  The grateful family was all saved and taken care of by kindly folk in The Dalles.  This race with death lasted all night and till evening the next day and covered well over a hundred miles.  A fourteen�year-old girl of the rescued family rode horse back all the way and helped drive the loose horses.  Her bravery and endurance was one of the highlights in Grandpa's Indian stories.   

One time while Fayette was at The Dalles, the sheriff called on him to go as a deputy out to the Warm Springs to get a horse that an Indian had stolen.  He found the Indian and the horse, but had not got started home yet, when he got into an argument and finally a fight with the Indian thief.  Grandpa had the Indian down pummeling him, and about to win the bout, when the squaws joined the fight! Two of them wrapped their fingers in the fringe running down the side of his buckskin pants, and held his feet up off the ground so that he had no purchase to fight!  "So, he said as he laughed till he choked "the squaws licked me, and I had to give up and go back home without that stolen horse! 

Later in the Cayuse Indian campaign, Fayette was attacked by rheumatic fever and had to give up chasing Indians, and was taken down the Columbia, hoping to find a Doctor.  Down below the Cascades along the river lived Dick Howe, a Hudson Bay Co. man with an Indian wife,  They took the sick man in and the Indian woman took care of him, treating him with such skill that he fully recovered.  However, he never again rejoined the soldiers at the Dalles.  

About this time Dan Cupid took a hand in the affairs of young LaFayette.  Down in Southern Oregon he met sweet kindly Mary Stratton Whitley, and in February 1856 they were married.  They lived in Looking Glass Valley, in Douglas County, Oregon, where on January 13, 1857 their son, James Andrew Woodson Scoggin was born.  But Fayette�s happy married life was soon cut short.  The young wife and mother was not a very strong and robust person, and when the baby Jimmie was about six months old, his mother developed pneumonia and her health failed rapidly.  Fayette brought his wife and baby to Portland where the Doctors tried to do something for her, but when the baby was almost a year old, the mother died at the family home in the Tualatin Plains and was buried there in the family burying ground.  Grandmother Chambers, Fayette�s mother, took the motherless baby Jimmie to her heart and raised him as her own.   

Jimmie's boyhood was happy and full of well remembered incidents which he delightfully recounted to his children with consummate skill. Jimmie, the man, was a born story-teller!  Who of us will ever forget the stories of his dogs Bose and Rock, and the tight squeezes they so often helped him out of.  For instance, the time grandma had sent him to pick some blackberries out in the sheep pasture.  He had picked his little bucket full of berries and was starting back to the house when the old buck sheep appeared all primed for a scrap.  As the boy started to run for home, the buck charged, knocking him flat and spilling the berries, pluckily he got up and tried again and again but here came the old buck to knock him down each time.  Finally Jimmie thought of his dogs, so he lay still and began to call �here Bose, here Rock!  The dogs heard his cry and came on the run to his rescue.  At his command, they soon chased the old ram away, and he went tearfully home to explain to grandma how he had lost his berries.  Or the time he was dragging an old pack-saddle along the road in the dust along side a take-and �rider rail fence.  Suddenly an old sow with new baby pigs came charging oft of a fence corner right at him, with a bush-wush� which froze his blood.  But this time Bose and Rock were at his heels, so at his word they charged the wild mother pig and his troubles were over! And on down the lane dragged the pack-saddle in the dust behind the barefoot boy! 

Or the time Grandpa Chambers and a neighbor went out and killed a big black bear that had been killing their young calves and lambs.  They had skinned the bear and brought home his hide with the head attached, on one of their horses.  There was great excitement among the children of the household when they heard the dogs of the returning hunters, and Jimmie ran out to see, just as the men let the big bear-skin slide off the horse and it hit the ground with a mighty "whoomp" right close to him, a big pile of black hair with the bloody head and white shining teeth! It so startled the little boy that he fled, sprawling over the door-sill in his hast to get back inside the house.  The thrill of that story still tingles my spine! 

And the stories about "old Bob Blair" Who carried dad upstairs to bed on his shoulders; or made figure-four traps for him; or taught him to braid leather strings, or how to watch that his saddle-blanket was smooth, without wrinkles under his saddle, or his horse's bridle throat latch was never to tight, or how to tie the rope of his hackamore with a "bowling knot" that would not slip if the horse tugged on the rope.  All were put into stories made vivid by Dad"s magic story-telling.   

While Jimmie was growing up, his father Fayette was much away from home ----Mining in Douglas County, and many other scattered interests.  One of the big projects which proved quite successful for several years was a General Merchandise business which he operated at (*2) Springville, six miles below Portland, on the Willamette, where he handled all sorts of exchange goods, including cord wood which he sold to the steamboats plying the Columbia River, and wheat which was shipped to foreign countries. His brother-in-law, C.B. Comstock, was taken in as a partner as the business grew.  But calamity hit the partners.  A large ship loaded with wheat, and carrying no insurance, was lost at sea, and the firm of Scoggin and Comstock went into bankruptcy. Even property and holdings in Southern Oregon, which did not belong to the partnership, were sacrificed to pay creditors.  

During the mining excitement around Kootenay, Canada, Grandpa joined an expedition going to the country.  He went with Charles Beek to drive beef cattle to the mines.  They butchered the cattle after getting them to the mines, froze the meat, and sold it through out the winter to the miners.  They processed the tallow, molded it in big tubs, and sold it for making candles.  The Indians who came to buy, however, bought the tallow to eat, rather than to burn for light.  On the way up to Canada as they passed through the Wanatche country they discovered nuggets of gold in the sand of the grass roots where the cattle fed, but because there was no available water in the country to wash the gold, they thought it not worth trying to save.  

At one time before there was a railroad across the continent, Fayette Scoggin and three other men, one of whom was William Bigham decided to go to Kentucky and get some good breeding horses of racing stock.  The four men went by boat from Portland to San Francisco and on down the coast to the Isthmus of Panama, where they crossed, going part of the way by a little narrow gage railroad down the Shagarus river toward the East.  Grandpa recounted in later years how the little train moved so slowly and stopped so often that the men got off and walked a good deal of the time to help pass the tedious hours.  He also told of the beautiful birds they saw in Panama, so many different kinds, including many different colors of bright plumaged parrots.  The men tried to eat the little black wild turkeys, which were plentiful but they proved too tough for good eating.  Even the beef steaks in Panama were dark and tough.  It seems our Oregon-bred forefather found nothing in his travels that compared favorably with what he was used to in Oregon! 

Finally reaching Kentucky, the men bought four fine stallions and brought them back to Oregon.  One of these horses was called "Foster".  He was a good race-horse and won lots of money for his owners before being sold and taken to California for racing and breeding.  Another of the horses was "Dee Lindeey", a pretty bay, that didn't prove such a winner himself, but sired some colts that were good.  A third of the Kentucky stallions was a bright sorrel know as "Ophir" because of his golden color.  He too was a winner on the track, and sired many of Oregon's early racing horses.  The name of the fourth imported thorough-bred has been forgotten, but his progeny as well as that of those named, scattered every where horses were raised in Oregon and Washington.  

Since raising horses was not the chief business of LaFayette Scoggin, his son Jimmie, quite naturally, early became a rider.  Jimmie had a pony almost as soon as he could walk, and at the age of 10 years was riding races on the track.  In the next five years, the light, little young rider became an expert jockey for his father and Mr. Bigham .  His skill won many doubtful races for them, but as he got older and heavier his weight became too much for the fast stepping thoroughbreds to carry and he gave up riding the tracks. 

In about 1883 when the railroad was finished through to Oregon, the Railroad Company put on a great Pioneer Excursion back to Chicago.  John LaFayette took his mother, Grandma Chambers, on that excursion and on to her old home in Tennessee to see her people.  They visit her sister Nancy Belle in Arkansas, her brother William Green near Sedalia Missouri, and many others.  In memory Grandma Chambers had fancied that Tennessee was a wonderful place, and the crops much better than could possibly be grown out west or anywhere, the corn that grew so tall, the squashes so big, etc, etc!!  Well, on this trip back there, Fayette came to realize how absence, distance, and years had magnified realities.  "Why, the yallar corn grew no more than eighteen inches high!"  and he'd chuckle,  Tennessee? Bash! 

While visiting at Sedalina, MO. Fayette went with one of his cousins to country Fair, driving a fast high stepping trotter horse.  On the way they suddenly noticed a little cloud coming up on the horizon.  Grandpa could see no reason for concern over that cloud, but the cousin went into immediate action.  He hurried through a lane, stopped quickly and told grandpa  to help unhitch the frisky horse and tie him to a tree, while the cousin pushed the shaves of the light single buggy close up into a low spreading tree.  In minutes the cyclone struck, filling the air with dust and flying debris.  The wind was terrific, but they hugged and held on to their sheltering tree, and soon it was over.  They were only in the edge of the twister, and soon were able to control the frightened horse, so that they hitched him to the buggy and were again on their way to the fair.  About half a mile down the road from where the whirling wind hit them, they came to a place where a bunch of people were excitedly running everywhere about the house and from buildings.  The house had been moved about on its foundation, by the wind, but was not other wise damaged.  The people were frantically looking for an eight year old boy who did not showup as the family ran for the safety of the "storm cellar", when the cyclone struck.  Grandpa and his cousin joined the hunt, and the child was found.  He had been carried over a high fence and landed on his back in the blackberry briar patch and could not get up until rescued.  He was not hurt except for the briar scratches.  But Grandpa had had all he wanted of cyclone country and was glad to get started back for Oregon.

Photo copies of the original stories ware given to me, Ann Carraway, by my sister Marian Scoggin, and I retyped them into my computer so I would have them to share with who ever was interested.   

*1  Peter Skeen Ogden State Park is at the High Bridge north of Redmond Oregon.
*2 Springville is a suburb of Portland now and is called Johns Landing, it's really quite a historical place   [Comments added by Linda MacLean June 8, 2022:

“Springville Road is nowhere near Johns Landing. Springville Road now starts at Skyline Blvd and heads toward Hillsboro. Springville does also continue down the hill toward Portland and St. Johns but is now only a hiking trail - but that was the "road" at one time.

Originally Springville Road was part of the Sheridan Military Road that ran from the Hudson Bay Company fort in Vancouver to an area out by Hillsboro and continued to the Indian reservation in Yamhill County. It is the trail pioneers took in the 1840s and 1850s.”

My name is Stephenie Flora. Thanks for stopping by. Return to [ Home Page ] All [ Comments and Inquiries ] are welcome.