NOTES:
BIOGRAPHICAL:
"Eneas Entz and his wife Catherine Rosenburg were born in France. Catherine was a Catholic as to her faith and late in life the husband espoused the same religion.
After several children blessed their modest home and four little lads had been laid beneath the sod of France, this family set sail for America, via the Mississippi river to St. Louis, Missouri.
If it had been possible for these good folk to have looked through their life horoscope and to have seen what was on ahead of them, we fear they would not have taken this journey. It is well no such thing was possible, so these sturdy old country people turned their faces to the promised land with no misgivings, believing all would be well and with hearts for any fate.
In due season they reached St. Louis and after a short time they made settlement not far from Jefferson City, Missouri, where they at once set about building a permanent home.
When the gold mines were discovered in California in 1849 the eldest son, Eneas, Jr., was among the many to pack his horse and leave for the land of sunshine and gold. Word came back to Missouri from the son of some success in the gold fields, so the lure of this yellow metal caused the father to go west in 1851. The father and son found each other among the many miners and together they prospected with only fair success. Becoming rather discouraged, they decided to try farming and again started north to the Oregon country, where they had heard of the land to be had for the filing and all ready for the plow. In time they took up land on Thomas creek in Linn county, Oregon.
It was decided between them that the son should go back to Missouri to get the mother and the rest of the children who were being looked after by the father's brother, also living near Jefferson City, Missouri. While the son made this trip, there and back, the father planned to make rails and fence his claim and get a cabin built and have a real home with which to welcome his wife and children.
Eneas, Jr., the son, made the trip back to Missouri, without more than ordinary hardships, and while the family were preparing for the long journey on the Oregon trail, Eneas sickened and died within three weeks after his arrival. The mother was almost heartbroken. She was already in a new, strange country, with her husband in the Oregon country that would take six months to make the trip to find him, her eldest son dead and a family of five children left. She did not know what to do. It would take one year to write to her husband and get a reply. After talking it over with her brother-in-law, who had so kindly befriended her, they decided that a trip to Oregon, overland, was not to be considered. This good woman had braved the seas to come to America, so she thought best to make the trip to Oregon by water, via the Isthmus of Panama. The brother-in-law harvested the crop and then took the little family to New Orleans by boat on the Mississippi, where they were to take a larger one for Panama.
While waiting here for passage they took rooms on the top floor of a tall building, a kind of apartment house, where many families were living. Their rooms were on about the fifth floor as near as they remembered and the mother told the little daughter Catherine, who in after life became Mrs. W. D. Pugh and gave me this story, to go down the many flights of steps to see what the little brother John was doing down on the nearby wharf. Catherine was about eleven years old, and after looking for a time for the little brother, she found she did not know where the building was in which they lived. She was lost in a big city, with dark coming on. She walked and walked, finally to come to a building that looked familiar but to find the iron grill-work gates closed for the night.
By this time it was dark. The child did not know where to go. She began to cry, and two waitresses, standing in the door of a restaurant near by, saw her tears and asked her trouble. One of these waitresses was a very black negro woman, while the other was a white girl. There was nothing to do but take the child into the restaurant, where she could sit by the stove, as it was chilly weather. Poor little Catherine was irreconcilable. She sobbed until she made herself too ill to eat the supper the kind-hearted proprietor offered her. In relating this story to me, she said she just thought she would never see her mother and the family again. The family had already had so many hardships, with father gone and the brother dead and the rest among strangers, they were a sad lot at best.
When night came she was put to bed in the same bed with the negro woman and white girl. She cried so much that finally the negro woman, who took the lead in looking after her, almost lost patience, because she said they needed their sleep, as they had to work next day. The poor little lost girl finally sobbed herself to sleep and when morning came she was asked to eat breakfast with these folks and then look again for her building. While standing by the stove, who should come into the store (the restaurant was back of the store) for some coffee but Catherine's mother. Of course it was a happy meeting and it developed that the family were in the same building, but the entrance was on another street. The mother in the meanwhile was frantic over the loss of the child but was a stranger and in the darkness she did not dare to go out on the streets to look for the child, for fear she would get lost from the other little ones, so she just had to wait until morning light,hoping in the meanwhile that little Catherine would be found in the same building where they lived and had just mistaken the room.
After a few days the family set sail for the Isthmus of Panama. Arriving at Aspinwall, they found but ten miles of the new railroad completed. This railroad was not entirely completed until 1855. At the end of this ten miles, they found the Chagres river and spent the night in a bamboo hut built up from the ground on stilts. There were four beds in this hut, one in each corner, all on the floor. Mrs. Entz carried her bedding with her, as in those days and for many years later no provision was made for the traveling public in the way of bed covers or mattresses. She made a bed for the whole family of six upon the feather bed among her possessions. In one corner of the room were three men in one bed who had much ammunition with them and the other two beds were occupied by strangers as well.
In the night a terrible storm came up-a regular cloudburst. It thundered and lightened and a bolt struck the corner of the hut where the men and the powder lay and killed one man outright, put out the eyes of another and slightly injured the third. Other occupants of this "hotel" met with minor injuries, while the poor Frenchwoman and her little flock in their corner barely escaped with their lives. One of the little girls, Victoria, carried a scar on her thigh the rest of her days as a souvenir of that terrible night.
The next day this unhappy woman hired boats to convey what few possessions she had left further up the river. Three natives bargained to man the boats. The storm had caused the river to overflow its banks and the whole country seemed under water. Ordinarily two men would walk along the dike on the Chagres river, one pulling, the other pushing, and the third wielding the paddles, but with the flooded condition, this was not possible. The natives had to row the boat all along through the trees to keep out of the current.
At the time Mrs. Pugh related this story she could not remember the names of the places this poor family had to stay in turn, but she said at the end of the first day on this perilous boat trip the natives tied the boat to a tree when night came and swam ashore and spent the night in some huts. The poor mother and her family were afraid to leave the boat, so sat there all night in the open, out under the stars. Unless nature kindly closed this woman's eyes, from sheer fatigue, we doubt if she slept the long night through. There were more anxious hours of this boat trip and when this was ended a long overland trip by mule-back awaited them. There were other folk making this trip, as many passengers on the boat from New Orleans were routed for the Isthmus and when the party all had to go on mule-back, many were afraid to ride at all. One woman had to have a native lead her mule the whole way, while one poor invalid man had to be strapped in a chair and have the chair strapped to an Indian's back and ride backward the whole way. Some walked, and after many hardships they finally reached the city of Panama on the western coast.
When the family came to the place where they had to take the mule-back trip, they were compelled to leave all their household goods, bedding, etc., behind. They sold it for just what the natives would offer, which was not much, so when they reached Panama city, they only had what clothes they had on and just what they could barely get along with. The delays along the way had made them too late to catch the boat for San Francisco they had hoped to take, so they had to wait for a week longer to get another. In the meanwhile the family stayed at some sort of an inn. Can the reader picture the plight of this unfortunate little group? Mother and the five children, almost without money, alone in this strange land not knowing what would happen next. They had almost lost heart as it was, when the mother was suddenly stricken with the Panama (yellow) fever one day, and that night death called her. Kind women ministered to her in her last hours and she was only dead a very short time, possibly an hour, when some one came and got her body and the poor little children never heard what became of her remains. She was so weary, heartsore and homesick that she fell an easy victim to disease.
Now we see the motherless children adrift, not knowing what to do or where to go. A kind-hearted man, that Mrs. Pugh in later years said she remembered as a large man with grey beard, took the children under his care, and after questioning the eldest child, a lad of 15 years, and finding out where they wanted to go, bought passage for them on the next boat bound for San Francisco. She said when it came time to board the boat the man made arrangements for each child to be carried up the rope ladder by a sailor, but when the sailors saw they were just little children, they said, "Oh, they can climb up the ladder like rats; no use to carry them," and they did do their own climbing.
Their benefactor put them in charge of the captain of the boat, telling him their history and where they wanted to go and of their hardships, sorrow, etc., and at San Francisco they were transferred to the Bennett, a boat whose owner was the captain. Captain Bennett had his wife along with him and they were very kind to the motherless children. Captain Bennett owned a hotel at Salem, Oregon, and made arrangements for them to go there, after they reached Salem.
During this trip up the coast from San Francisco all of the children were very ill. When they arrived at Portland (Mrs. Pugh said it was just a mud hole all around the little village), they were all so sick that a two-wheeled dray was brought into use to take them to the miserable place called a hotel. There were no beds for them, so they let them sleep on the floor. In the meanwhile they broke out with measles, and when the boat came to take them to Oregon City they were all loaded onto a dray again, measles and all, and taken to the boat. At Oregon City they were transferred to another boat by the same sort of dray and finally landed at Salem, and, according to instructions, were taken to the Bennett House, where they found it in charge of John S. Hunt and wife (the writer's grandparents), with a young man named George Smith as steward.
As in all other places these poor children found all the beds full, and their poor, aching, feverish bodies had again to rest upon pallets made on the floor. Motherless and out of money, nothing but the clothes on their backs, all ill with measles, they were in a sorry plight.
By this time they had almost forgotten where their father was when they last heard of him, but they still knew his name. George Smith did all in his power to send out word far and near to find the father. In the meanwhile little Rachel, one of the girls, was gravely ill. On the boat she had been so feverish she had opened her port-hole for air and had taken cold from the draught and the measles did not break out on her, as it did on the others. It was five long weeks after the children arrived at the Bennett House when a man came to Salem for supplies from Linn county, and by that time the news of the children's arrival and their illness was the talk of the village streets. This man came up to the hotel for dinner and saw the children and after talking with them, felt sure their father was his near neighbor on Thomas creek in Linn county. He only stopped long enough to get the most necessary articles, when he started back for the father. Upon his arrival he found Mr. Entz not inclined to believe his story. He said his wife and family were coming overland and he knew his wife would never undertake such a journey as the Isthmus route and if she did she would have first sent him word. It took much coaxing upon the part of the neighbor to get him to leave his rail-making long enough to go to Salem, as he felt it a foolish trip and just a loss of time. When he did get to the hotel in Salem, he found the story all too true and his grief was tragic. The little daughter Rachel died that night, but not before she recognized her father. The little girl was tenderly laid to rest in the Lee Mission cemetery at Salem. Thus were four little lads buried in France, the big, capable brother in Missouri, the dear, heartsick mother in Panama, and lastly the little sister Rachel in Salem.
Kind-hearted folk placed the little girls in different homes. Captain Bennett, of the Bennett Hotel, and a relative by the same name, living at Corvallis, took the two youngest girls, aged four and two years, while Catherine, after passing through the hands of several families, finally made her home for several years with the John Thomas family of Stayton. She later on came to Salem, where she lived for eight years in the home of A. W. Ferguson. While with this family she was able to attend school for the first time at the Willamette Institute. After two years at this school and when the public schools were opened, she began to attend the old Central school, as Mr. Ferguson had quite heavy taxes to pay to keep up the schools and felt he should get the benefits there from.
It was while living in the Ferguson home that Catherine Entz met and married David Hall Pugh and settled just north of Salem, near Che- mawa, where they lived and reared a large family.
We will return to the grief-stricken father. After the death and burial of little Rachel, the father too, the oldest son John with him to his claim on Thomas creek. After about two years or less time the father sold his claim and went with his son to southern Oregon, to look after a ranch for some one in that part of the country. Mr. Entz returned to near Corvallis to clear a piece of land and set out an orchard for some pioneer, leaving John to care for the wagons and oxen he had taken with him to southern Oregon, saying when he got the orchard set out he would return and the two of them would find a ranch in that part of Oregon and make their home there.
Time went on and the father's work took him much longer than he planned. In the meanwhile the poor, forlorn boy, holding down the lonely claim, got discouraged and no doubt thought disaster had overtaken the family again, as he did not hear from his father. About this time some miners on the way to California came along and found him and overpersuaded the boy to sell the stock and wagons and go with them to the mines. The boy had been so starved for the companionship of other folk that he did this, not realizing, as he said afterward, that he was doing wrong, and for eight years the family did not hear a word from him. After a time the father went south as he had planned, only to find all trace of the boy, wagons and oxen gone, so he returned to the Salem country a discouraged, broken man. The children of the Entz family were: Eneas, who died in Missouri.
John, who settled in Linn county, Oregon.
Catherine, who married David Hall Pugh.
Rachel, who died at the Bennett Hotel in Salem, Oregon.
Mary, who made her home with Captain Bennett, later with the Eades family, and married Charles Uzafovage. Victoria, who lived with the Bennetts at Corvallis and married Bowerline.
And the four little boys buried in France.
Mr. Entz lived in Salem until his death at about forty-five.
This is the life story of what Eneas and Catherine Entz would have seen through their horoscope, had that been possible, when they left the shores of sunny France for the "Promised Land" in 1840. Would they have had the courage to have faced all this?"
Steeves, Sarah Hunt, Book Of Remembrance of Marion County, Oregon Pioneers, 1840 - 1860, Portland, Oregon, The Berncliff Press, 1927, pp 233-234 (Source: Catherine Entz Pugh, Salem, Oregon, 1926).
SEE ALSO - Biographical sketch for David Hall Pugh.
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