Introduction to the Bison Books Edition

Katherine G. Morrissey

To stop by a drugstore to pick up peppermint lozenges is a commonplace errand—as familiar to readers today perhaps as it was to a woman named Huldah, who bought some of the flavored drops more than a century ago. Such an event seems hardly worth mentioning. But a Mrs. Hampton includes the task in her 1888 diary. What makes this errand worthy of note and somewhat incongruous is that a covered wagon woman purchased the lozenges while traveling overland to Oregon. Part of a ten-person family caravan headed from south-central Kansas to Portland, Oregon, Mrs. Hampton, who never indicates her first name, includes other curious details in her diary. In Cheyenne, Wyoming, for example, she sends out the group’s dirty clothes to a laundry. And after the family members reach Fossil, Wyoming, and encounter snow, they decide to take the passenger train, loading “horses, wagons everything into a freight car” (162). Whatever your expectations of the activities of female overland travelers, I suspect that picking up peppermint lozenges and availing oneself of laundry and train services were not among them.

You will encounter a number of such moments—where expectations are mismatched with experiences—in this engaging collection of late nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-century diaries, the eleventh and final volume of the chronologically arranged Covered Wagon Women series. Unlike many of the earlier volumes, which include accounts of trips that took place within a single calendar year or a brief span of years, this set of diaries ranges over a twenty-five-year period, from 1879 to 1903. The time frame helps explain some of the seeming oddities. The West of the 1880s and 1890s differed in many ways from that of the 1840s and 1850s. By the time these diary writers undertook their excursions, the region through which they passed had undergone a dramatic transformation.

The presence of towns with handy drugstores and laundries was only one manifestation of larger economic and political developments in the late nineteenth-century West. As you read through the diaries you will come across other such markers of change: train sounds, irrigation ditches, telegraph news, and Indian reservation schoolchildren, to name a few. The diary of twenty-year-old Viola Springer, who is making her second trip across, offers a guide to new developments; she frequently records comparative remarks. Returning west in 1885, the Springers retrace parts of the trail they had taken six years earlier. Springer finds the familiarity of campsites welcome, but there are also noteworthy differences. One site “where freighters used to camp” is no longer in use because freight teams have been replaced by the Oregon Short Line, a railroad line from Granger, Wyoming, to Portland built by the Union Pacific in the early 1880s (120). New railroad construction also affects their trip in more direct ways. When their party reaches the Nebraska border, for example, they meet a railroad labor agent who offers them free train transportation in exchange for some work at a Kearney track construction site. So they hop on the “iron horse” to speed their way across at least a third of the state.

Although only the Springer and Hampton parties combine train and trail travel, railroads had an impact on many of the later overland trips included in this volume. Along with numerous local and branch lines, transcontinental railroads snaked across the country, with the Northern Pacific and Great Northern joining the Union Pacific by the late 1880s. Customary trail routes sometimes paralleled train tracks, allowing brief waving exchanges between Pullman passengers and wagon women. “If we wasn’t in sight when the cars went along we could hear them,” notes Springer (94). For homesick and discouraged party members, such as Viola’s sister-in-law, Martha Springer, the cars held the possibility of an escape route back home. Other individuals, such as John Ball, took advantage of the transportation to take side trips to visit relatives, rejoining the caravan farther down the trail. The freight trains brought supplies to the towns through which the travelers passed, linking them directly to the nation’s market economy. Mrs. Hampton and her companions did a lot of shopping on the trail, buying provisions from merchants, farmers, and fellow travelers. Their purchases included basics, such as flour, butter, milk and feed, but also merchant goods, such as gingham and a sheet-iron stove. While we might find the ready availability of stores and supplies surprising, it was not so odd to the travelers. In fact, Mrs. Hampton considers the absence of stores in some sections of the country remarkable.

Despite the influence of the railroad, there are days when the landscape of the trail as recorded in these diaries seems indistinguishable from that faced by westering women twenty-five years earlier. Readers of the previous volumes in this series will find familiar landmarks, activities, and concerns. Sod houses and prairie dogs still evoke interest along the Platte River road. Sandy ravines impede wagons’ progress across the Snake River plain. Reports on illnesses, discussions of personalities, and constant references to weather conditions, whether sunshine or clouds, thunderstorms or dust storms, fill the pages. “We are wet and sassy and nasty” is Ada Colvin’s description one day (24). “It seems as if the rains follow us,” complains Mary Bower at the end of May 1881, after several weeks of muddy trails and almost daily comments on the wet weather (68). And the gendered everyday tasks— women cooking and washing, men hunting and guiding; women caring for children, men caring for stock—remain the same. Among these groups of travelers, however, only three parties—the Springer, Hampton, and Bower caravans—follow what might be considered the “traditional” route, leaving from Missouri and Kansas, bound for Oregon. The first two diarists, Ada Colvin and Nellie Carpenter, are Wisconsinites moving to Nebraska in order to take up land fifty-three-year-old Anna Hansberry makes a two-week trip from western to eastern Oregon.

All these trails were crowded in the final decades of the century, or at least that is the impression given by these writers. With the preponderance of trails, destinations, and modes of transportation, it is difficult to determine the numbers of late century overlanders with any accuracy. Historians have generally limited their estimates to the peak 1840–60 period, when some three hundred thousand migrants traveled in clearly defined streams to Oregon, California, and Utah. Mobility still characterizes the 1880s and 1890s, but the directions and means of travel are much more diverse, and usage is almost impossible to measure. Whatever their routes or destinations, the diarists meet up with, cross paths with, or accompany other parties that are heading in every conceivable direction—from Texas to Wyoming, from California to Washington, from Kentucky to Oregon, from Oregon to Ohio. And the trail is not just crowded with other “movers”—the term the travelers use to refer to others moving their households to Oregon, Kansas, Colorado, or another western state. A varied and colorful parade of groups and individuals get mentioned in these accounts: local residents camping out on their way to town, an old prospector riding a mule, a group of Indians transporting a corpse, and a tubercular man seeking health, to name a few. Herds of cattle, horses, and sheep, freight wagon trains, and stagecoaches also share the trails with the migrants.

These various encounters with other trail users provide opportunities to exchange gossip and stories. As parties overtake one another, passing and repassing, they meet travelers headed in the opposite direction with whom they share information about routes and trail conditions. Camping with five other wagons in Idaho, Viola Springer conveys a sense of the diversity and camaraderie; “one of the women come over to our camp while we was washing dishes after dinner. Some of them is from Kansas, some from Nebraska, some from Colorado, and is talking of going on the Malheur, and the rest is going to Grand Ronde, Oregon” (122). Although sometimes it is an exercise in frustration, as when “they couldn’t find two men that would tell them the same story” (95), most, like Nellie Carpenter, welcome the sociability of “hosts of company after supper” (29). Campfire conversations ranged in subject, including discussions of religious beliefs and of national news, such as President James Garfield’s 1881 assassination or former President Ulysses S. Grant’s 1885 death.

The trails were crowded in another sense as well. The stories told along the way join a cacophony of tales, histories, facts, and myths about the overland trail. These diarists embarked on their journeys with their heads filled with such voices. And as they encounter graves, abandoned forts, buffalo bones, and arrowheads, they delight in coming across evidence of the trail’s history. Anna Hansberry eagerly reports reaching the site “where Branton and Green murdered Linn and burned his body” (169) and stops by a rock formation to see the carved names of earlier travelers. Gruesome or illustrative, these evocative sites resonate with the emigrants’ expectations. The specified places along with the stories work to orient and sustain their passage through the West. The epic trip across the country by determined pioneers to the fabled fertile lands of Oregon is firmly placed in cultural memory, especially by the 1880s. The sight of a prairie schooner or Conestoga wagon connotes the Oregon Trail, even if its owners intend a different destination. Although her party is headed for Nebraska, “everyone wants to know if we are Oregon hunters,” a bemused Ada Colvin notes in her diary (22). Today a covered wagon still symbolizes that particular historical moment, serving as the logo of the Oregon-California Trails Association, for example.

Writing a trail diary was a classic part of the overland emigration experience. As self-conscious historical actors, involved in momentous personal change and a cultural event, many migrants who had never before, and would never again, keep a daily log did so on the trail. The individualistic diaries, like others of their genre, reveal the personalities of their authors, from the laconic Mary Bower to the expressive Viola Springer. You will find the entries of Nellie Carpenter and Ada Colvin paired by date, enabling an intriguing comparison of these friends who are on the same 1879 journey. As young single women, likely in their twenties, they report on shared experiences, but their mixed reactions to trail life can be explained in part by their different circumstances. Carpenter, who is traveling with her parents, marries one of the party, Tom “Tommie” Northey, in September. Colvin, on the other hand, who misses her parents back in Wisconsin and mourns the recent death of her brother, is often melancholy, and she returns home that same month. The diaries provide a place for their writers to deal with the emotional ups and downs of the trip: a place for Mary Bower to record moments of terror when “my eyes are spread so wide I fear I cant shut them” (69); for Viola Springer to vent her frustrations over the petty squabbles of camp life; for Mrs. Hampton to celebrate the joy of reaching the “veritable Paradise” of Portland (162).

While unique and distinctive, each diary performs a peculiar dual role as a collective and personal record. When Ada Colvin sits down each day to write in her journal, for example, she is involved in a private revelatory activity, but in doing so amidst a close-knit group of family and friends, her writing also becomes public. You get a sense of the participatory nature of shared storytelling through such entries as, “John Ball said this morning to write down that he was homesick” (122). Writing for an anticipatory audience and at times directly addressing readers—“I hope whoever reads this will excuse me,” Nellie Carpenter quips in apology for her prose—the diarists leave intimate details and other issues unexplored, and they assume a familiarity with people and places (26). Some references remain puzzling to readers more than a century later. What story lies behind Mary Bower’s cryptic comment, “lots of dissatisfaction in camp” (68)? The final account in this volume is the most conscious of its audience, in part because it was compiled three years after the journey. Anna Hansberry revisits her “hurriedly scribbled notes, often written when the wagon was on the move,” editing and augmenting them to send as a letter to amuse her ill brother (164).

Certain vignettes included in these accounts have the feel of stories that will be told and retold among the emigrants: the toll dispute in which guns were drawn; the sharply bargained sale of a lame colt; the time when John Seaweard killed a porcupine that “he thought… was a young bear” (109). All these specific tales fit into the broader outline of the by-now-familiar cultural narrative of the trail experience. The Oregon Trail story, as retold through these diaries, is largely an Anglo one, in which Chinese, Indians, Mexicans, Mennonites, Mormons, and gypsies play roles as colorful bit characters. The middle-class participants on the journey often critically assess the different peoples and places they encounter, by focusing on their appearances, whether “miserable looking” or “awful cute.” Their opinions, sometimes sharp, sometimes generous, reflect common late-nineteenth-century racial prejudices, anxieties about social status, and class attitudes about proper behavior. “Don’t see what there is to hinder people from knowing something,” acerbically remarks Ada Colvin, “for there is a school house every little ways” (31).

Like earlier migrants, they remain fascinated by Indians. But the native peoples they encounter do not fit easily into their expected models. When Mrs. Hampton’s wagon train passes a family on foot she is quite surprised and perhaps disappointed that “I did not know until afterwards that they were Indians.” In the 1880s and 1890s emigrants meet up with Indians in reservations and schools rather than in confrontations and camps. Reflecting the changed circumstances, in these diaries Indians are usually described by their involvements in western commercial enterprises—selling fish, running a twenty-seven-wagon freight train, and trailing ponies—rather than characterized as perceived threats. On the trail, Indian peoples (the writers rarely distinguish tribal affiliations) are part of the general scene in ways that sometime astonish the diarists. When Anna Hansberry’s party stops at a farm looking for accommodations, for example, the best shelter available has already been taken by Indians, and the proprietor, much to Hansberry’s apparent chagrin, provides her group only a small shed.

Powerful cultural expectations influenced Hansberry’s reaction, and they guide our interpretations of these diaries as well. Cultural expectations also had a role in shaping the entire Covered Wagon Women series. Gathered from descendants, libraries, and archives by editor Kenneth L. Holmes, the diaries and letters included in the eleven volumes compose not so much a comprehensive as a selective and somewhat eclectic collection. Holmes and the series’ initial publisher, Robert A. Clark, of the Arthur H. Clark Company, decided to reproduce unpublished accounts or those that were “extremely scarce.” As Clark explains in a 1997 Western Historical Quarterly article, they chose diaries that contained “unique information” or offered “a nice variation to the usual overland trail” story (vol. 28: 551). Literary merit and entertainment were two other criteria by which they judged the first-person accounts. Although Holmes died before completing all the introductions to this final volume, his influence can be seen in the selection of its seven accounts, each one “a nice variation to the usual overland trail” story.

To read these diaries is to participate, in a sense, in the journey: to go along with Ada Colvin as she negotiates steep ravines with her wagon, to join Viola Springer in “tormenting” and teasing the young men of her caravan, and to fret with Mary Bower over her baby’s illnesses. As you travel across the late-nineteenth-century West with these diarists as your guides, bring your expectations along, but be prepared for some surprises.