Williams, Velina Stearns

From Lane Co Oregon

Velina Williams was the sister of Charlotte Emily Pengra

Quite a different type of story comes from the "rendezvous country" of the early mountain men, western Wyoming. The wagon train to which Mrs. Velina A. Williams and her nephew O.A. Stearns belonged passed through this country in the summer of 1853. On August 3, Mrs. Williams noted in her diary that on that day they had "Passed 'Quaking Asp Grove' and three miles farther a fir and pine grove, where we met a crazy man who asked for food. . ."

Her nephew, a boy at the time of the trip, added his adult recollections of this encounter years later. "The crazy man was a very ragged, dirty-looking person," he wrote, who "had a sort of bag or sack in which he deposited the food and other articles given him by members of the train." Although the man could and did make sounds, "No intelligent reply could be elicited from him." Curious, Stearns and his equally youthful companions followed the "crazy man" when "he started off into the woods at right angles to the road." The recipient of the wagon train's largesse "did not go far; when coming to an opening among the trees he paced back and forth from one end of the open space to the other, alternately eating from his sack and talking to himself gesticulating the while as though addressing an audience." "Of his fare or how he came to be in that condition we never hears," Stearns concluded, but "His was doubtless one of the many tragedies of the plains." What would have driven a man to such extremes? Might he have one day "come out of it" and lived a normal life or did he die alone and alienated in the wilderness. I wonder?

[[1]]SOME TALES OF THE TRAIL REMAIN UNEXPLAINED:ONLY CONCLUSION. . ."I WONDER WHAT HAPPENED [The National Tombstone Epitaph, April, 1990]