On the Oregon Trail with ‘Little Belle’

An audience was introduced to these women and told about life on the Oregon Trail during Anderson’s presentation, titled “Little Belle Crosses the Oregon Trail,” held at the Seaside Public Library July 16.

Anderson, a Gearhart resident and the Knappton Cove Heritage Center director, presented the story as told in Arvazena’s journals, which were passed down to Anderson. In 1901, Arvazena wrote down her recollections of the westward journey, Anderson said.

The story begins with 16-year-old Arvazena, a seamstress and her husband Daniel Jackson Cooper, who were married in 1861. Two years later, Missouri was overrun with disruption, discord and devastation because of the Civil War — or the War of the Great Rebellion, as Arvazena called it.

“There was some real unrest going on in the land, which is a little hard for us to realize now,” Anderson said. “Certainly in other countries we have this going on, but it’s hard to believe we had that right here.”

Deciding it was not a safe place to raise a family, the young Cooper couple traded their land for a few head of stock and some wagons and started West with their 16-month-old daughter Little Belle, Daniel’s parents and his five siblings.

With all the preparation, Arvazena wrote, she “was too bewildered to think much of the partings.” She was beginning to realize “the little backwoodsy corner of Missouri was all the world to me,” and that she was not only leaving her native land but her loved ones, as well.

“I had not the remotest idea I would see any of my kindred again,” she wrote.

Arvazena’s detailed account of the five-month trip includes stories of interactions with other families traveling the trail, their dealings with members of the Cherokee tribe, surviving a cattle stampede and the monotony of crossing the plains in the Midwest.

Somewhere along the way, Arvazena gave birth to a second child. The anonymous location made it difficult for her son to later obtain a birth certificate, which was not an uncommon ordeal for children born on the plains and mountains along the Oregon Trail, Anderson said.

When they arrived in Oregon, they settled about 10 miles northwest of Salem in a community named Spring Valley that was established in 1858. The newly arrived pioneers renamed the community Zena, after Arvazena and her sister, Melzena Spillman Cooper, who also was Daniel Cooper’s brother’s wife. The community now is considered a ghost town, although it remains home to the historic Spring Valley Presbyterian Church.

“Their new life in Oregon was everything they had hoped for,” Anderson said.

Arvazena eventually had 13 more children. Her daughter Prudence was Anderson’s maternal grandmother by way of Anderson’s mother, Katharine.

The Little Belle character in the story also is an interesting one, Anderson said. She grew up and married Dr. Willard Rinehart. One of their sons founded the Rinehart Clinic in Wheeler.

After her husband died in 1984, she took up the study of medicine, eventually receiving her medical degree from the University of Oregon in 1897 and doing post-graduate work in New York. She moved back to Oregon to practice and co-founded the Dalles Hospital with her second husband, Dr. E.E. Ferguson.

Emily “Little Belle” Rinehart Ferguson eventually moved to Seaside after her career winded down. In her journal, she wrote, “after a period of strenuous work, ministering as best I could to the illness of humanity, I have retired to this ideal ocean resort on the northwest coast of Oregon.”

During the presentation, Anderson displayed her ancestors’ photographs and artifacts, which she preserved. The items included an instruction book for seamstresses, published in 1855, and a toddler dress made by Arvazena.

Anderson’s daughter, Heather Henry, created and published a children’s picture book in 2014 with the help of her family. Henry used photographs of clothespin dolls and dioramas to illustrate the Coopers’ Oregon Trail stories. The photographs are overlaid with direct quotes taken from both Arvazena’s and Little Belle’s journals. The purpose, she said, was to preserve the family legacy in written form.

Copies of the book are available at the Seaside Museum, 570 Necanicum Drive and the Knappton Cove Heritage Center in Naselle, Wash.