My second-great grandpa, Andrew, was born in Missouri in 1844 to Ephraim Fox and his first wife whose identity and fate is unknown. By 1846 Ephraim married Lucy Wills or Wells and began a new family. George Fox was born in Missouri in 1849.

Ephraim’s 320 acre land claim in the Oregon Territory in 1852 was situated in the broad expanse between present-day Harrisburg and Peoria, in Linn County. James Marion Fox was born there in 1853 and William Madison Fox in 1855. Lucy passed away before autumn in 1870. By then the boys had four younger siblings; all of them sisters.

Andrew, my grandfather, left his family home as a young adult and established himself approximately 30 miles away in Albany, where he married in 1869 and started his own family. This relocation largely insulated him from the challenging circumstances that subsequently affected his younger brothers, which is a principal factor contributing to the longevity of the family line.

Andrew’s younger brothers were regarded by some as difficult individuals, with others expressing less favorable opinions. George, James Marion and William Madison Fox were living with their widowed father, Ephraim, and four sisters when the census was taken in 1870. A year later Ephraim remarried much younger Nancy Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Johnson, in 1871, and began a whole new family.

 George, James and William Fox disappeared after 1870, and I as well as many others have searched for them for many years. When I authored “Ephraim Fox, An Oregon Pioneer Story” their fate was unresolved. However, a lost but found cousin has discovered and revealed to me the fate of James Marion Fox, who it turns out was killed in May 1872 near Waitsburg, in Walla Walla County, in what at the time was the Washington Territory. This simple fact, though, does not tell the whole story.

Young James Marion Fox was with a group of young men in the northern Blue Mountains at the head of Patit Creek looking for water, when he sat down on a precipitous ledge. A shotgun had been laid down carelessly behind him and when one of the boys on the bluff behind him rolled a rock down the hill, it struck the hammer of the gun.

“The whole charge entering the leg of young Fox, shattering and lacerating it in a terrible manner.” the Albany Register reported from a letter they had received. “It seems that owing to some misunderstanding, the leg was not amputated till four or five days after the accident, when it had become so mortified that he survived the operation only some four or five days. These are the facts as near as I can learn them, as the accident occurred some eighteen miles from this place.”

Was James’ death an accident? Similar articles appeared around the northwest, but the names of the men he was with when he was mortally shot were never published. What was the misunderstanding that led to waiting to amputate his leg before it developed gangrene? We will never know the details, only the ultimate grisly fate of James Marion Fox.

As of now, the circumstances surrounding George Fox remain unknown. Recent findings, however, provide more information about William and his involvement in the shooting death of the Brownsville town bully in 1878. Further details will be covered tomorrow in The Fate of the Missing Fox Brothers, Part Two