Even during the Civil War he fought for their rights.
I am afraid Father will have to leave this country. Public opinion is so strong against him, some would as leave kill him as an Indian, just because he has spoken the truth out bold [sic] against the rascality of this Indian war, or rather the butchery of the Indians.
On May 24, 1856, the day after teenager Welborn Beeson wrote the above in his diary, he ran an errand to southern Oregon’s gold-rush town of Jacksonville, in the Rogue Valley, where he overheard people threatening to tar and feather or even lynch his father, John Beeson. The elder Beeson was one of the few whites in Oregon Territory to speak out for American Indian rights, and because of his convictions, he was forced to leave his home and family.
In the winter of 1855–56 John wrote numerous letters to newspaper editors throughout Oregon and California, saying that Indians should be compensated for their lands, that the Rogue River War being waged against them was unjust, and that the militia and volunteers fighting in that war should not be paid. Not one of his letters was published. Postal clerks suppressed some; others the editors flatly refused.
On Friday evening, May 23, 1856, irate Jackson County residents crowded into Eden School on Bear Creek to make and hear accusations against Beeson for his stand on behalf of the local Indians. The Table Rock Sentinel described it as “an indignation meeting.” Beeson showed up, but when its chairman refused to let him speak, John left.
The following evening the Beeson family learned of a group of unruly militia camped near their home, and John knew he must leave. Just before midnight he kissed wife Ann goodbye and rode into the rainy night. Welborn rode with him some 15 miles to Fort Lane at the northern end of the valley. Father and son bid farewell early the next morning. Lieutenant Edmund Underwood furnished an escort of dragoons to accompany John north to the Willamette Valley.
A naturalized American citizen, John Beeson was born on September 15, 1803, in Stoke Rochford, England. On December 9, 1828, he married Ann Welborn. Soon after, they immigrated to America, settling first in Ithaca, N.Y., where a daughter, Frances, was born. The baby died before her first birthday. In 1834 or ’35, the Beesons moved to LaSalle County, Ill., where son Welborn was born in 1836.
Ann didn’t like Illinois. She missed the green hills of England, and the flat country and incessant wind of America’s Midwest made her lonely. By the late 1840s stories about Oregon’s rich farmland, verdant valleys and evergreen-cloaked mountains enticed those looking for a better life. In March 1853 the Beesons sold their farm and headed west.
Welborn, who had begun to keep a diary on his 15th birthday, wrote detailed accounts of events on the Oregon Trail. The young man wrote of steep grades, muddy roads, death and disease. Meanwhile, his father took note of the injustices against the natives. “A company of emigrants having a sick cow, which was unable to travel further, abandoned the poor animal,” wrote John. “The Indians, seeing she was given up, killed her for their own use. The emigrants, hearing of this, reported at Fort Laramie that the Indians had stolen and killed some of their cattle, upon which an officer, with a detachment of 30 men, was sent to demand the thief.”
When the wagon train descended the Cascade Mountains into the Rogue Valley on August 30, 1853, John was thrilled with the panorama. “It was a picture varied with shadow and sunshine, lofty mountains and little hills, meadows, groves and silvery streams, altogether more beautiful than a painter could portray or even imagine,” he recalled. Welborn described a different scene: “We passed several houses and farms, but they were all deserted, [people] having fled to the fort for protection from the Indians.…All the citizens of this part of the valley are collected in it. It is not safe to go far away from it.”
It was a turbulent time in southern Oregon. An 1851 gold strike in the Rogue Valley had attracted thousands of miners, many of whom viewed Indians as an obstacle to be eliminated. The Donation Land Claim Act of 1850 had granted eager settlers 320-acre parcels of land that had been seized from local tribes. The new arrivals had thinned out local game and plowed over fields of camas, whose edible bulb was a food staple among local Indians. The Rogue River Indians (or Takelmas, as they called themselves) were in a life-and-death struggle to retain their ancestral lands, maintain their way of life and avoid extermination.
The Beesons settled on what had been a Donation Land Claim on Wagner Creek near the present-day town of Talent, Ore. John was soon reminded they were intruders. “Having located my family on one of the principal tributaries of Rogue River, which had been a favorite resort or residence of the natives, there were still remaining the excavations, the poles, bark and coverings of their wigwams, and the fresh ashes of their fires,” he wrote. “I was constantly reminded of being an interloper or usurper of homes which others ought to possess, or for which they ought to be paid. This feeling made me sensitive to the daily reports, and perhaps helped to give a bias to views not generally entertained, so that when I heard of hostilities and bloody strife, it was natural to attribute the whole to the aggressive spirit of our people.” Such views incurred the hatred of his fellow settlers.
When Beeson fled Oregon in 1856, he did so alone. He landed first in San Francisco, where sympathetic citizens booked his passage on a ship to New York City that September. The foremost argument of the day was between pro-slavery states and abolitionists, leaving little sympathy for Indians. But within weeks of his arrival in New York, Beeson had circulated 3,000 copies of a pamphlet on the plight of Indians and also met with several influential people, including orator and statesman Edward Everett and reformer and abolitionist Wendell Phillips.
Beeson’s book, A Plea for the Indians: With Facts and Features of the Late War in Oregon, self-published in New York in 1857, brought him some notoriety and the opportunity to meet with newspapermen, magazine editors and clergy. Two years later he launched The Calumet, a newspaper to advocate for Indian rights, but he quickly ran out of money, publishing just one issue.
Beeson lectured throughout the East on Indian rights. He met Larooqua, an Indian soprano whom the press dubbed the “aboriginal Jenny Lind,” after the Swedish opera singer. Beeson included Larooqua as a guest entertainer on his tours. She sang while Beeson collected donations and handed out pamphlets.
President-elect Abraham Lincoln encountered Beeson and Larooqua while traveling through Buffalo, N.Y., en route to his 1861 inauguration. Impressed by their exhibition, Lincoln invited them to the White House. During their subsequent visit, Lincoln vowed, “If we get through this war, and I live, this Indian system shall be reformed.” Until his 1865 assassination Lincoln remained accessible to Beeson and Larooqua and even terminated payment to the volunteer militia in Oregon for its actions in the Rogue River War.
Always in need of funds, Beeson wrote home periodically asking for money from Ann and Welborn, who remained on the family farm in Oregon. He also received contributions from philanthropists.
John Beeson continued to lobby for Indian rights through the Civil War. In 1863 he sought appointment to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. But Oregon Senators Benjamin F. Harding and James W. Nesmith both opposed him, and John remained a government outsider.
John and Ann probably never saw each other again after they kissed goodbye that fateful night in May 1856. She died of cancer on June 30, 1866. In 1887 John retired to his Rogue Valley farm to be close to Welborn, who had married at age 30 and had eight children. On April 21, 1889, John died and was buried beside Ann in Stearns Cemetery, on a hill overlooking their farm.
The Southern Oregon Pioneer Association wrote that John Beeson “labored for the elevation of the whole human family, and particularly for the American Indian.” In 1850s Oregon his was often a lone voice among the white settlers. “I think he lived 120 years ahead of his time,” said Lewis Beeson of his great-grandfather, John. “We are just now coming around to his thinking.”
Originally published in the February 2013 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.