Fort Wagner Remembered
[article featured in the
Historacle –
the newsletter for
Talent Historical SocietyJune 2003]
by Jan Wright
Gold
discoveries in the Rogue Valley brought an influx of fortune seekers.
Creek beds were panned, scraped, dug up, piled up and altered so much
that the Native Americans noticed a dramatic reduction in salmon
runs. The miners solution to starvation and isolation was to
encourage seasonal farming during the low water months and bring in
supplies with pack trains but the Native Americans had no such
network of supplies and depended on gathering food rather than
farming. Farmers and skilled workers followed the miners to create
small business interests and grow food to fuel the mining companies.
Clashes with the Indians increased with the encroachment of the
whites into their territory. It was inevitable when the camas fields
were plowed, the salmon and trout streams were redirected for mining
and irrigation purposes and when out and out attacks on villages were
made, that the Natives would fight back. Settlers built forts to band
together for protection from the problems they themselves helped
create. One such fort was located in what is now called Talent. The
fort was on the Donation Land Claim of Jacob Wagner, one of the
area’s first settlers and was named Fort Wagner in his honor. The
settlement itself was often referred to as Wagner Creek and wasn’t
called Talent for many years.
Jacob Wagner first
settled in Wagner Creek in 1852. He planted melons, tomatoes and
other crops and improved his land with a cabin and some fencing
before the 1853 train of covered wagons came into the Rogue Valley.
One of those pioneers, Welborn Beeson recorded in his diary that even
as he arrived on Wagner Creek, there was a fort that sheltered his
family and others. A number of the emigrants were attacked on their
first day in the valley and had no other shelter but their worn out
wagons. Martha & Mary Hill who also wrote about their settlement
experiences, remembered the fort as a sturdy log structure enclosing
about an acre of land surrounding Jacob’s cabin. The women and
children who forted up at Ft. Wagner, were instructed to listen for
the alarm and when they heard it, run for the shelter of the cabin in
the middle of the fort and let the men protect them within the walls
of the fort with their firearms. Gates were at each end of the
“stockade” and shut tight if the Natives were thought to be
nearby. A spring bubbled up on the property and was probably within
the walls of the fort. People risked venturing out during the day,
with their guns close by, but slept inside the fort at night. One can
imagine the whispered conversations during the night, the attention
to every sound and the strategies the men and women had to end the
conflict and get on with their wilderness taming. The threat was very
real and took courage. Without the protection of the fort, each
family would have to stand alone, isolated in unfamiliar territory;
outnumbered and outwitted by those who were trying to hold on to
their own way of life.
According to Welborn
Beeson, the fort wasn’t in every day use even at the war’s peak.
Once cabins were built, Beesons and other families frequently opted
to stay in their own homes rather than in the fort and they certainly
felt safe enough to farm and build and hunt as Welborn records in his
diaries. In 1855 when the Indian war flared up again, Beeson records
that “every body is forting up but Mr. Robison’s and us. We
intend to try it tonight, but the neighbors think we shall be killed.
I think two or three Indians will die before I do, however there is
no telling what will happen.” The next day he noted, “We did not
get killed nor hurt last night. I guess every body is more scared
than hurt.”
Though
there were closer mills to choose from, on 12th
of Oct 1855, just two days after hearing about an Indian uprising in
which whites were killed and cabins burned, Welborn went to get wheat
from a mill on the Rogue River ,“ the seat of war”. He and 12
other teams caravaned probably to see if they could locate the burned
buildings and hear more about the killings first hand. He arrived
home the next day unscathed with 26 bushels of wheat. The war
devastated the Indians but pioneer life continued without much
interruption.
After the treaty to end
the war, the fort was not mentioned much again. Jacob Wagner went
back east to Iowa to marry. In 1860 when he brought his new wife,
Ellen Hendrix, to the Wagner Creek settlement she did not include the
fort in her description of the Wagner home. “There we took
possession and set up housekeeping … My husband made all the
furniture. It seemed a little queer to me as well as his nephew. Our
windows were simply spaces sawed out from the logs and muslin put
in.” In 1884 a man visiting the Wagner Creek area went looking for
the remains of the fort. All he could find was the “the mound where
the old fire place of Jacob Wagner’s hospitable log cabin used to
stand.” The fort wasn’t needed and so the very practical pioneers
used the logs for other purposes until it was erased from view. It
had served as a place where the settlers could forge unforgettable
relationships with one another but was no longer needed.
In the 1970s, the
Talent Lions Club sponsored Al Grabher's research to locate the site of Ft.
Wagner. His research led him to pinpointed the site at 226 Talent Avenue. So
many changes have taken place on the old Donation Land Claim that it
is hard to even imagine what it once looked like. But the historical marker plaque on Talent Avenue reminds us of the spot from which our current community
was founded. We can follow the spirit of our town by continuing to
gather together for support, community and even protection. The
community center in town follows the same sense of tradition that
Wagner started so many years ago.
