Black pioneer Letitia Carson would have been the widow of Irish immigrant David Carson, except that he had not been legally allowed to marry her. Not only was it illegal in the state of Kentucky for people of different races to marry, but she was legally a slave in that state. That was quite possibly one reason that they chose to move to the Oregon Territory, where the niceties of the law were not so closely observed, a fact which they may have hoped would work to their advantage. There came a day, though, when the looseness of Oregon Territorial law worked very much to Letitia’s disadvantage.
The Carsons had a daughter, Martha, on the Oregon Trail. They built a good life together north of Marysville (now Corvallis), on Soap Creek (not far from where Adair Village is now), staking a claim to 640 acres of land as a married couple and having another child, their son Adam. Letitia was one of the first African–Americans to live in the area which is now known as Corvallis.
On their land, the Carsons built up a large herd of cattle. Letitia had a way with cattle, and David was proud of it. But they were not, in fact, legally married, and eventually this was pointed out by someone, and half of their land claim was taken away. Still, they had 320 acres left, which was a sizable spread on which to run cattle in the Willamette Valley, even in an area where the water was bad enough that they gave it a name like “Soap Creek.” And at least Letitia was no longer enslaved. Possibly she would have remained so back home in Kentucky (the records are unclear whether she was “bought” or “leased” by David Carson, or simply left Kentucky with him because she was tired of being treated like livestock), but they were in the Oregon Territory, far away from anyone who might have made any attempt to claim they “owned” her. A few years later, when the State of Oregon was admitted to the Union, Letitia would have fallen under the infamous law which prohibited slavery but also barred African–Americans from living in the state — a clause which was, of course, never actually enforced, nor is there any record of Letitia ever paying her legal exclusion the slightest attention.
In spite of their diminished land claim, the Carsons prospered together for a few years, until 1852, when David suddenly took ill and died, without ever having written a will. When neighbor Greenberry Smith stepped and appointed himself executor of Carson’s estate, he was quick to declare that Letitia had no claim to any of it, not even the herd of cattle the couple had nurtured between them. He even went so far as to suggest that rather than having any claim to her husband’s property, it would be more appropriate to auction her and their children as David’s “property.” Pictures of Smith don’t indicate that he waxed his mustache, but it’s hard not to picture him twirling a waxed mustache-tip as he makes such a threat, after the fashion of Simon LeGree (think Snidely Whiplash if you’re of the younger generations).
According to historian Bob Zybach — who in 2016 wrote a feature article, “Strangely Absent from History”, about Letitia’s litigious history for the Oregon State Bar Bulletin — on Jan. 4, 1853, Smith auctioned off all of Carson’s property besides the land itself, including “half-acres of potatoes, David’s underwear, the family’s Bible, bedding, dishes and tableware, jars, farm tools and equipment, two yokes of oxen, a wagon, a velvet vest, a watch, a clock, a gun, a thermometer, 35 cattle, 26 hogs, and a 14-year-old horse,” bringing in a total of $1,538.80. $104.87 of that money came from Letitia herself, who was somehow able to keep hold of a stash which she had in her own name, enabling herself to buy back various household goods — including the marriage bed.
Letitia took her children and what remained of her worldly goods and moved south to Douglas County, to a place which must have sounded much more welcoming to her: Cow Creek. There, she found a lawyer who was also an anti-slavery activist. He took her case and sued for what was essentially back wages, arguing that David had promised Letitia that she would inherit his property as part of her compensation package, an arrangement which he had failed to put into writing but which had been understood between them and on the strength of which she had depended for the security of herself and her children. Letitia’s lawyer squared off against Smith’s lawyer, the notorious pro-slavery white supremacist John Kelsay, in a case with great symbolic significance in the Territory and beyond it.
It’s important to remember that in the 1850s, nobody knew that in 1861, the slavery issue would boil over into the worst war the country would ever see the first 250 years of its history, but everyone knew that the status quo couldn’t last. Slavery was the issue on which no one was allowed to not have an opinion. One person writing at the time compared the slavery issue to “the Egyptian plague of frogs: one sits down to supper, and frogs leap onto one’s plate. Music and theater are inaudible due to the frog chorus. The parlor grants no rest, the bed no sleep, even church grants no solace, for everywhere there are frogs, frogs, frogs….”
Even though Smith had high-powered representation, and even though the jury which heard the case was made up entirely of white male property owners who were neighbors and quite possibly friends of Smith’s, they ruled in Letitia’s favor, albeit not by a lot — they awarded her just $300. Smith kicked at paying even that much, but eventually Territorial Chief Justice George H. Williams himself told Smith to shut up and pay the lady.
Letitia probably saw very little of that money, after the Sheriff, witnesses and lawyers got their fees out of it, but she had beaten Greenberry Smith in court, and for a Black woman in the Oregon Territory in 1855, that was quite something.
Letitia was fortunate to have received her judgment when she did, on May 7, 1855. It might not have gone her way after the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which infamously declared that a person of African descent had “no rights which a white man is bound to respect.”
In 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, Letitia filed a claim under the Homestead Act for 154 acres on the even more euphoniously named Myrtle Creek. She may have been motivated by the Emancipation Proclamation, which had no legal bearing on her (it only freed slaves within the rebel states, of which Kentucky was not one, and Oregon was about as far from rebel territory as you could get and still be under the Stars and Stripes), but marked a tremendous symbolic event.
Under the Homestead Act, Letitia had to “prove up” her claim by building on her land and showing that she was using it to make money — and thus, was making the land taxable. That, she definitely did, with a house, a barn, granary, smokehouse, 100-tree orchard and a herd of cattle — with which she showed that she still knew her way around a cow.
In 2014, Letitia’s story became the inspiration for Jane Kirkpatrick’s novel A Light in the Wilderness. In 2021, Letitia’s name was given to Corvallis’ Wildcat Elementary School, previously known as Woodrow Wilson Elementary School.
By John M. Burt
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