Marriage records in Linn Co. Clerks office Vol A Pg 18. Information submitted by Dolores G Curtis, Great Great Granddaughter of Elijah and Marina Michael HC 81 Box 210 Union,Oregon,57883 Her father was Elijah Embree Smith and mother was Catherine Brown. I have another first name as Mary Ann Smith. She wrote her own obituary as follows- I, Marena Ann Smith, was born in Vermillion Co. Illinois, Jan 22 1837 and moved with my family to Iowa in 1838 and settled on the Skunk River, five miles from Richmond. ` The river bottom country in that early time was not healthful and in April 1852, my father Elijah E. Smith started to the Oregon country to find a more healthful climate. But while crossing the plains he was stricken with cholera and died and was buried July 4 on the Platte River As I remember this it seems to have been the saddest day of my life. But Mother, brothers and all were bound to go onward toward the West, leaving their loved one buried in the desert surrounded by wild animals and Indians. Each emigrant wagon carried a flag to indicate that the train had been stricken with cholera. The long trail over sandy desert and the Rocky Mountain was very tiresone, but we finially reahed the Dalles, where we crossed the Columbia by lashing our wagon beds together and using them for a raft or ferry, We camped a short time at Cascade Falls. What impressed me most and filled me with horror wa the large piles of Indian skulls which were there at the time. My older sisiter obtained work at Lewis Love's and I worked at Mr. Switzler's. I am compelled to spent a gold dollar, which my father had given me for a keepsake for calico to make me a calico dress before I could work out. Mr. Switzler paid me $3.00 a week and treated me as one of the family. Will Switzler knocked a soldier off the porch for winking at me, such was the gallantry of the early pioneer in protesting a fatherless 15 year old child. During the following winther my older sister was married to William Payne, it was he who furnished us a home during our first winter in Oregon. In the spring of 1853 we moved to Linn County near where relatives and friends had previously settled. There mother took up a piece of land which she afterwards sold to pay a debt she owed to a relative for bringing us across the plains after my father's death. I became so tired of working for other people that I concluded that I best marry and get a home for myself. The prospects were a doctor, a preacher and one or two fathers. I was uneducated, therefore I thought I would not be a suitable wife for a doctor or a minister but I could help a farmer make a home. So in 1853, I was married to E.G. Michael, a pioneer of 1847. I at almost 17 and he a boy of nearly 21 years. I had worked for his parents for several months previous to our marriage. After our marriage I put on long dresses and went with my husband to some land three miles south of Harrisburg, Or. and we soon had a log house built and a home of our own. The gold mines of California were then at their best and money was plentiful. Fifty dollar gold pieces or slugs, as they were called, were quite common. My husband helped to build the first sawmill and flour mill at Harrisburg and owned a partinterest in eah of them. After helping to operate the mills for a few years he traded them for cattle a part of which he sold and all but two of the remained died during the hard winter of 1861 and 1862. We then moved to a part of his father's donation land claim where he farmed and butchered beef. Some years later my husband felt that it was his duty to preach the gospil and entered the M.E. Church, South. This was the end of our making money. he spent 33 years in active work in which he covered all of western Oregon and parts of eastern Oregon, eastern Washington and Idaho either as a ciruit riding or presiding elder. He was clerical deligate to the general conference which was held at baltimore in 1888. He died in Spokane , Washington in 1902. During our lives we had 13 children born to us, five of whom have passed to the other side, one buried in Linn Co., one in Polk Co., One in Yamhill Co., One in Walla Walla and one in Eagle Valley. Of the living, three are in Portland, one near Brownsville, one near McMinnville, One near Junction City, one near Junction City, one at Baker City and onein Idaho. As the traveling ministers scatters seeds of truth, his family is scattered over the land where he has traveled. We forsook houses and lands for the sake of Christ and his gospel but we truly receive an hundred fold in this life even, as there is scarcely any place in Oregon in Oregon that I go without meeting freiends whose hearts and homes are open to me. ----------------------------------------------------------------- She died of dropsy AT THE AGE OF 76