Introduction to Volume XI

In this eleventh and final volume of Covered Wagon Women, we bring to conclusion a long and happy journey during which we have shared the overland trails with a wide variety of westering women. Young and old, at times strong and self-assured or occasionally knocked down by the trials of trail, they shared a migration which captured the imagination not only of thousands in their own time, but that of their descendants, as well.

There are many who analyze this massive settlement process with detachment and intellectual curiosity, noting the wide-ranging effect of the westward movement on the land, our culture and the people swept up in its wide swath. Within this intellectual sphere a debate now swirls regarding the merits and accomplishments of the cultural and economic conquest which engulfed the wide lands across the Mississippi and the Missouri. This series of books was meant, in large part, to aid the study of that conquest by providing eyewitness testimony to the experience, a documentary study of life on the trail from the pens of women.

But the years spent collecting, researching and publishing these accounts have made vividly clear the visceral impact the migration has made on the every-day consciousness of a vast number of our contemporaries, now over a century removed from the trails. In the libraries, at conferences, in bookstores and on the street, we meet people whose ancestors traveled the trails, and these people are moved and inspired by the experience. It motivates them, it is a well-spring of inspiration at critical moments in their lives. It is a cultural memory which we share, a memory that has become a part of our dreamstock.

The overland experience has garnered a mythic place in our cultural heritage. The vision of the prairie schooner with a pioneer family moving to a land of opportunity, or the counter-image of an invading army of settlers seeking to reap the wealth of the land and displace the original inhabitants is reviewed over and over in print, in dialog, in visual media. It is a vision to which we bring our ancestral tales and our hidden hopes of new opportunities. Lost in this vision, all too often, is the reality of the experience.

It is the hope of the editor and the publisher that this collection of documents will aid in preserving that reality. That this series will serve as a point of departure for research, or as a reality check for those who have wrapped westering women in a romance, is the principal goal of our books. A quick review of the diaries and letters reminds us that walking twelve to twenty miles on a hot, dust path each day was more a source of pain than inspiration.

In completing the series, we have included five additional accounts of the trail. These are followed by a bibliography of sources used in the research and preparation of the documents for publication, an index to the entire eleven volumes, and a map of the major overland routes in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Though the previous volume included documents through the year 1883, we have returned to 1879 and 1881 for two of the accounts in this volume. The discovery of two parallel diaries for the same migration in 1879 was too tempting to overlook in this collection. Ada Colvin and Nellie Carpenter traveled from Wisconsin to eastern Nebraska with their families to take advantage of the Homestead Act. Both in their early twenties and good friends, their diaries provide us with an interesting juxtaposition of two vastly different personalities witnessing the same events and reporting them.

The short diary of Mary E. Bower in 1881 once again reminds us of the dangers faced by children and adults in their travels without medical care. Mrs. Bower was sick for much of the journey, and her baby is deathly ill at the close of her account.

The 1885 diary of Viola Springer’s journey from Missouri to eastern Oregon is not only a lively and vivid account, but an excellent comparative document to the similar journeys taken in the 1850s and ’60s.

H.A. Hampton’s two month overland adventure in 1888 is a classic example of the changes wrought in only four and a half decades of overland migration. After an extremely late start, the family spends two months on the trail, gives up and completes the journey with a two-day train trip!

Our final document over-reaches the cut-off date for the series (1890) by some thirteen years. Anna Hansberry’s two week trek from the Willamette Valley to eastern Oregon is testimony to the continued movement of families via covered wagons into the twentieth century. Her account is in many respects not dissimilar to those found in volume one of this series.

 

Our editor for this series, Dr. Kenneth L. Holmes, was forced to curtail much of his work for this final volume due to health. Dr. Holmes, professor emeritus of history at Western Oregon State College, Monmouth, turned over the responsibilities for completion of the introductions and editing to the publisher for all but the Bower document, and with humility we have assumed that task. Dr. Holmes provided the entries for the bibliography, while the index for the entire series has been compiled by Arthur H. Clark.

As in previous volumes, a word needs to be said regarding our editorial approach to the documents. It is our purpose to let the women tell their own story in their own words, with as little scholarly trimming as possible. It will be assumed that the intent has been to transcribe each word or phrase as accurately as possible. Misspellings and punctuation are retained as found in the diaries and letters. The flavor of the documents are thereby retained, as well as giving insights into the education and origins of the writer. We believe with Theodore C. Blegen that scholars and their editors have often shown “inverted provincialism” in “correcting” the literature of our folk culture.

In some cases we do not have the original document, but a hand-written copy or a typescript made by another party. It may not be a completely accurate transcript, but, as the original is no longer available, we use the copy as the best transcript available.

The only gestures we have made for the sake of the reader have been as follows:

1. We have added space where phrases or sentences ended and no punctuation was to be found in the original— just enough so that the words, phrases, clauses and sentences do not run together.

2. We have put the daily journals into diary format even though the original may have been written continuously line by line because of the original writer’s shortage of paper.

Thus the women tell their own story, just as it was happening, or immediately afterwards. “Immediacy” is the key word. These are primary documents of the first order. No fond recollections written years later can compare.

THE PUBLISHER