America Waldo was born in Missouri on June 2, 1844. Her mother is believed to have been a slave of Missouri farmer John Waldo (1796–1849), and her father was a white man, probably either John Waldo or his brother Joseph (1805–1871). In 1854 America traveled by wagon train to Oregon with John Waldo's widow, Avarilla, and several other African Americans. They spent the winter with Avarilla's brother-in-law, Daniel Waldo, at his farm east of Salem. In the spring of 1855 they moved south to Douglas County where Avarilla established a Donation Land claim near Roseburg, Oregon. America remained in the Roseburg area for the next five years, during which time she met her future husband, Richard Arthur Bogle, a barber in Roseburg. In 1861 she returned with Avarilla to Salem where she lived with the Daniel Waldo family until her marriage. Daniel Waldo, a former legislator in the Provisional Government of Oregon, who had arrived in Oregon with the Great Migration of 1843, "may have taken responsibility for raising her and thus acted as a father figure." In 1862 Richard Bogle left Roseburg and settled in Walla Walla, Washington, but returned to Oregon briefly at the end of that year to prepare for his marriage to America.
