How a dead man led a wagon train to Oregon

By Finn J.D. John
April 7, 2024

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is a rewritten and re-researched version of a much shorter article published July 19, 2010, which you can find here.

THE YOUNG U.S. Cavalry captain was getting a little frustrated. He was explaining to the short, fireplug-shaped German man with the serious mouth and commanding eyes why he really, really should turn around.

It was the spring of 1855, you see, and the Oregon Trail had been going full steam for about a decade. The Sioux tribes, along with other Plains Indian tribes, had been nonplussed at first by the torrent of travelers, but by now they were really alarmed, and they had started attacking wagon trains.

The German man was Dr. Wilhelm Keil, and he was the leader of a particularly large wagon train.

Well, actually that wasn’t quite true — the man who was leading the wagon train was Dr. Keil’s 19-year-old son, Willie.

But Willie was dead.

Willie had been very excited about the journey, and Dr. Keil had promised him that he would lead the train. But then he’d died of what was probably malaria just four days before the group set out on the journey. Still, a promise was a promise; so, Willie had been laid to rest in a lead-lined, leak-proof coffin filled with whiskey, and the coffin was placed in the lead wagon before the group set out. Dr. Keil planned to bury him with proper ceremony when they arrived in the Oregon country.

And of course that made the Cavalry captain’s suggestion impossible. Dr. Keil was not going to wait a whole year to bury his boy, and he sure wasn’t going to bury the lad in the malaria-blighted land that had cut his life so unnaturally short.

So Dr. Keil listened politely as the young officer delivered his pitch, urging the group to go home and try again in 1856. Then he smiled and shook his head.

“Gott vill take care uff His own,” he said, in his thick German accent.

And with young Willie’s alcohol-soaked corpse in the vanguard, the Keil party was on its way the very next morning.

Dr. Wilhelm Keil may not have been at the front of the wagon train, but he was the beloved and unquestioned leader of the people in it. They were an advance party from Keil’s religious commune, called Bethel. In part because of the sickness that had killed young Willie, Keil had decided to move his flock to healthier pastures out in the Oregon Territory.

DR. WILHELM KEIL was born in 1812, the son of a linen weaver in Bleicherode, a town about halfway between Leipzig and Hanover in Saxony, near the western edge of what was until recently the German Democratic Republic. He trained in his father’s business and also became trained as a healer — what we would today call an herbalist.

In 1836, he married Louisa Reiter, and the young couple emigrated to America the next year.

In America, Keil set up a medical practice. Sources differ on what exactly that was, ranging from “owned a drugstore” to “no ordinary doctor, but a mystic who used animal magnetism and a book of prescriptions said to be written in human blood.”

If the blood-book rumor was true, it didn’t survive Keil’s conversion to Methodist Christianity; before that, he was probably a Pietistic Lutheran. Much of Keil’s brand of Methodism throughout his life showed a strong influence of pietism and Christian Theosophy.

Keil became friends with members of George Rapp’s Pietistic and Christian Theosophic religious colony, the Harmony Society; but he didn’t join. After becoming a Methodist, he felt a strong call to the ministry — but he objected to the Methodists paying their ministers. He felt that pastors should be unpaid, like Jesus.

Nonetheless, Keil started attracting followers. He was charismatic, masterful, and incorruptible, and his sermons and lectures were riveting and inspiring — or at any rate, many native German speakers found them so.

In 1844, the Keil family, now the nucleus of a small and devoted group of like-minded German families, moved to Shelby County, Missouri, and established its Christian communal colony there, calling it Bethel.

Bethel was the back of beyond in 1844, basically the outer limits of the American pale of settlement. But that was about to change drastically as the Oregon Trail got under way. Missouri was, of course, the departure point for emigrants on the trail. By 1850 the traffic was terrific, and the colony was making a great deal of money selling goods and supplies to emigrants as they prepared to set out on the Trail. Like the Quakers, the Bethel colony had a great reputation for square dealing, so their goods and services were much prized.

But by the early 1850s, Keil was already thinking about moving on from Missouri. It was getting very crowded, and many of the newcomers there spoke German; so keeping his flock from the corruptions of the world was getting harder to do. Also, malaria was, in those pre-swampland-reclamation days in the Mississippi Valley, a real problem.

Accordingly, Keil decided to put together a wagon train, head west, and find a new home for the colony in the clean air of the Pacific Northwest.

Which, of course, led directly to that conversation with the young Cavalry officer — the first of several to urge him to turn his flock back and try another year.

THE JOURNEY WEST was a remarkable one. Keil and his followers met many Indians — the captain had not been wrong about that; but mostly they wanted to pay their respects to Willie, who lay in state in the hearse wagon at the front.

Party after party of armed Sioux and other Plains Indians came to see, as word spread that this particularly large wagon train was being led by a dead man. The Indians would look respectfully at the coffin, make gestures of friendship, listen to a few hymns in German, and be on their way.

And the Indians didn’t just leave the Bethel party alone — many were actively helpful. At one point, when some of the party’s livestock escaped, a group of Yakima tribe members actually drove the animals back to the wagon train.

The party passed the charred remains of at least one less fortunate wagon train along the way. In the discolored iron bands and burned corpses, they saw what probably would have happened to them if not for the protective presence of young Willie. They stopped to bury and pray for the dead, and moved on.

WHEN THE PARTY arrived on the West Coast, they headed straight for the spot that Keil’s scouts had found and staked out for him. It was a beautiful spot on the banks of the Willapa River, about 20 miles inland from Willapa Bay in what today is Pacific County, Washington.

Dr. Keil was not impressed. The site was certainly very remote, so it would be easy enough to prevent corrupting influences from slithering in amongst his flock; but by the same token the nearest major settlement the commune could trade with would be many arduous miles away, so there would be few opportunities to make any money.

Plus, Dr. Keil found the area’s frequent gray and misty weather tiresome. His scouts had arrived during one of the area’s comparatively rare and beautiful sunny spells; now, with the wagon train in tow, he was seeing a whole different side to the place.

The colonists promptly and ceremoniously laid Willie to rest in his coffin full of whiskey, and then, weary and footsore though they were, they set out immediately for a second spot that Keil’s scouts had identified as a possibility: a lovely patch of land alongside the Pudding River, with a working flour mill on it, about 10 miles southwest of Oregon City.

Dr. Keil liked this spot much better. He named the new Christian commune Aurora, after his daughter.

The Aurora Colony would become, on balance, possibly the most successful Christian communal experiment of the 19th century. We’ll explore more of the Aurora story in next week's column.

(Sources: Heavens On Earth, a book by Mark Holloway published in 1951 by Turnstile Press; “Wilhelm Keil,” an article by Jim Kopp published July 15, 2022, by The Oregon Encyclopedia; auroracolony.org/history2)