John D. Henderson, the third of twelve children born to Perman D. and Sarah Trapp Henderson of Tennessee, was born on December 30, 1828, in what is now downtown Kansas City, then farmland settled by his parents after their 1821 marriage in present Lafayette County, Missouri. After the family moved in 1835 to Rush Township, Buchanan County, Missouri, they lived near the family of James H. and Jane Hawkins Moody, whose daughter Mary Ann, born in Kentucky on May 6, 1835, married John Henderson on January 24, 1850, when both were not yet fifteen years old. A census taken later that year placed John and Mary near his parents in the household of millwright Newcomb J. Ireland, with John's occupation listed as laborer; he was recorded as twenty-one and Mary Ann as seventeen, though she was actually fifteen. During the heavy overland emigration of 1852, the Henderson family joined others from Buchanan County bound for Oregon or California, but family tradition holds that they turned back because of a cholera epidemic, and their thirteen-year-old daughter Mary Kathrina died at Weston, Missouri, on May 28, 1852, possibly prompting the journey's abandonment. The next year, on April 12, 1853, a wagon train of about sixty wagons led by Perman Henderson left Rush Township, crossed the Missouri River into Indian Territory, and headed for Oregon with the entire Henderson family, including John and Mary Ann. Near the Malheur River on August 9, 1853, John Henderson died during the journey under unknown circumstances, and although some later speculated that black measles or mountain fever caused his death, there is no evidence for either; his name and date of death were inscribed on a native rock beside his grave. The family continued to the Willamette Valley and settled near Wren in Benton County and later near Philomath, while Mary Ann Henderson married Isaac B. Justice in 1854 and died in 1918 at Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.