The Sager Children

The photographs on this page, brought to life.

The mission at Waiilatpu as it stood in 1847, drawn from memory by a survivor. Drawing by Nancy A. Osborn Jacobs; Washington State Localities Photographs, via Wikimedia Commons.

Seven children crossed the plains in 1844. In twenty-six days they lost both parents, and the wagon train raised them the rest of the way. Henry and Naomi Sager left for Oregon in the spring of 1844 with six children. The seventh, Henrietta, was born on the trail on the thirtieth of May. Henry died of typhus in August, after the crossing at the Green River, and was buried on its bank. Naomi died twenty-six days later. Catherine, the middle daughter, wrote afterwards that the company carried them on: there was not one but that would share their bread with us. Dr. Theophilus Dagon drove the children the rest of the way, and in October 1844 they reached the Whitman Mission at Waiilatpu. Marcus and Narcissa Whitman never formally adopted them. What the record shows is a court order Marcus obtained in July 1845 giving him legal custody of all seven, and the National Park Service quotes its limiting clause exactly: until further arrangements could be made. The children called them mother and father anyway. On the twenty-ninth of November 1847 the mission was attacked. John and Francis, the two boys, were killed. The five girls survived and were held captive; Hannah Louise, who was six, died of measles on the fifth of December. The rest were ransomed by Peter Skene Ogden of the Hudson's Bay Company and sent down to the Willamette Valley, where they were split up among different families. Catherine married Clark Pringle in 1851, farmed near Salem, raised eight children, and about ten years after she arrived wrote down the whole journey. Across the Plains in 1844 is still one of the most cited first-hand accounts of the overland migration. She died in 1910. Elizabeth died in 1925 at eighty-eight, Matilda in 1928 at eighty-nine. Henrietta died at twenty-six, shot in a gunfight by a man aiming at her husband. Sources disagree on where Naomi died. Wikipedia and the Park Service place it near present-day Twin Falls, Idaho; Catherine's own account names Fort Bridger as where her mother took ill and gives no place of death, only a headboard with her name cut into it. If the Sagers, the Pringles or the Helms are in your family, add what you know below. Compiled by MyHistoryStone from published reference sources, August 2026. Corrections welcome.