Matilda Sager

Born in 1839, Matilda J. Sager Delaney was one of the Sager children whose family joined the Oregon Trail after the deaths of their parents on the journey west. She later became closely linked with one of the most remembered episodes of the overland migration era: the Whitman massacre of 1847, which she survived as a child.

She is best known as the author of A Survivor's Recollections of the Whitman Massacre, a memoir that preserves her memories of the event and of pioneer life in the Pacific Northwest. Because she wrote from direct experience, her work remains an important personal record of a traumatic moment in western American history.

Matilda Sager lived from 1839 to 1928. Remembered both as a pioneer child and as a memoirist, she left behind a voice that helps modern readers understand the human side of life on the trail and in the early Oregon Country.