NOTHING MEEK ABOUT HIM
The first time Ezra Meeker traveled the Oregon Trail, he was a new husband and father with no other reasonable route by which to reach Oregon by land. The next time he made the journey—backtracking in the era of railroads and early automobile travel—he was an old man, determined to commemorate the history of the emigrant trail. In so doing, he became something of a self-made celebrity.
Meeker was a man stalked by fame, though he also worked at stalking. Born on Dec. 29, 1830, in Butler County, Ohio, he descended from a paternal line that had settled the Hudson River burg of Elizabeth, N.J., and sent a score of its own to fight in the American Revolutionary War. His father, Jacob, was a miller and farmer, and Ezra was the fourth of Jacob and Phoebe Meeker’s six children. In 1839 the family moved from Ohio to Indiana, young Ezra walking behind the heavily laden wagon for 200 miles—a preview of his next eight decades. Though an eager learner, the boy disliked sitting still. He soon found work as a printer’s apprentice and delivery boy for The Indianapolis Journal. Among the subscribers along his route was the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, destined for future fame as an abolitionist.
Phoebe Meeker came from a reasonably well-to-do merchant’s family in Cincinnati, and in 1845 her father presented her with $1,000. The couple used the money to buy a farm, placing teenage Ezra in charge of working the land while Jacob labored at a local mill.
In May 1851 young Ezra married childhood sweetheart Eliza Jane Sumner, who’d also been raised on a farm. She had no objection to continuing that farming tradition, as long as it wasn’t on their families’ land—in other words, too close to home. That fall they
