Introduction to the Bison Books Edition

Elliott West

You just never know what you’ll find in an overland diary. Mary Riddle’s, the second document in this volume, begins in early May of 1878, as her family leaves their farm near Coon Grove, Iowa. You read of the usual tearful good-byes, first frosty mornings in camp, and crossing of the Missouri River. Then on May 22: “We drove through Grand Island—here Dr. Cropper sold his monkey—it made them too much trouble in camp” (26). We diary addicts mention this kind of journal moment to help explain our habit. After reading dozens of accounts, we feel like veterans of the trail ourselves. We know what landmarks to look for and what experiences lie ahead for the travelers. We learn to read their personalities during the first weeks; we make bets on how well they will hold up under the strain. The diary entries click off, metronomic and predictable in detail: Fort Kearny, Ash Hollow, Independence Rock, tired oxen, forage, cooking, sore throats, bison, antelope, and wolves. And then suddenly someone is selling a troublesome monkey.

Readers who have stayed with this splendid series of women’s accounts of the westward journey, thankfully republished by the University of Nebraska Press, qualify for the club of the diary-addicted. You understand the peculiar grip of these documents. For newcomers, this tenth volume of Covered Wagon Women is as good a place as any to step vicariously into one of American history’s most extraordinary experiences. Reading these accounts from 1875 to 1883, you can still get a vivid feel for those parts of the overland trek—part adventure, part grind—unchanged since the first companies set off from the Missouri River valley for the Pacific coast in the early 1840s. By following these old roads, you can also watch the western country during one of its most rapid and wrenching transitions. Across it all is the distinct perspective of westering women, itself both persistent and changing, that gives all these volumes so much of their illuminative power. It is this combination of the daily drive of ordinary people—a passage through an astonishing land, the marking of historical change, and the revelations of women’s work and thoughts—that draws new readers and keeps the rest of us coming back to these diaries and letters, volume after volume. That, plus the feeling that at any moment you might turn a page and hear about a monkey.

Among so much else, the documents in these ten volumes make for a marvelous study of continuity and change. Never in their history have Americans experienced more sweeping transformations than between 1845, the year of the trip Betsey Bayley describes at the start of the first volume of Covered Wagon Women, and 1875, when Angie Brigham Mitchell writes from the Arkansas River trail to open this tenth installment. Those three decades saw two wars, one foreign and one at home. The Mexican War (1846–48) along with the acquisitions of Texas (1845) and Oregon (1846) increased the nation’s size by a third, added resources almost beyond measure, and broadened the United States into a dual-oceanic empire. The Mexican War also made the United States the bully of the Western Hemisphere and deepened its own divisions between North and South, which led to the American Civil War. The Civil War was far and away the bloodiest in the nation’s history. Military occupation of the defeated Confederacy was ending in 1875, but the war’s human and physical devastation was still much in evidence, as were the potentially revolutionary questions of citizenship and human rights emerging from the national trauma. With unquestioned dominance, the federal government was wrestling with the political and economic shape of what was, in effect, a new United States. It was also wallowing in some of the deepest and most blatant corruption that would ever be added to its frequently stained record.

Yet throughout the unparalleled changes of 1845–75, companies of wagons continued to snake their way across the continent. The movement had peaked during the westward flood of 1849–52, and it slowed during the cataclysm of rebellion and war, but the overland migration was nonetheless continual between the eve of the Mexican War and the end of Reconstruction (and remarkable for that, for continuity in anything was rare during this period). If nothing else the movement is a reminder that for many persons the shimmering possibility of a better life in the West blotted out differences of section and politics.

The original lure for overlanders—the legendary fertility of Oregon’s valleys—persisted. In the pages of this volume we see Mary Matilda Surfus drawn there from Kansas, Mary Riddle from Iowa, Laura Wright from Missouri. The years since 1845 had opened a slew of new opportunities. Reeling from several crop failures in Minnesota, Lucy and Allison Allen and their eight children set off in 1881 for Helena, Montana, as it drew on the gold and silver fields of the northern Rocky Mountains to become one of the West’s wealthiest cities. The twenty-one-year-old Angie Brigham Mitchell writes the opening letter on her way to Prescott, Arizona, where the silver mines must have seemed especially attractive in 1875, two years deep into one of the century’s worst depressions. Other families, including that of the future New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, would follow the Mitchells to find a future in the desert mountains. Their journeys and those recorded in previous volumes serve as a catalogue of east-to-west longing. Their routes trace a succession of American dream-chasing.

The pursuit also shows the steady smothering of the lives and dreams of others. As you read the accounts in this last volume, ask yourself what you don’t see. Where are the bison? The women who wrote earlier diaries had marveled at the great herds, and their husbands and brothers had jumped at the chance to hunt (usually unsuccessfully) the beasts that to many Americans symbolized the exotic West. Long before 1875, however, bison had become rare sights along the main overland roads. They had not so much been frightened away, as many observers thought (although they surely had learned to avoid the emigrants); rather, as the years passed, the bison had less and less reason to be near the trails, where travelers had cut the trees and their animals had devoured the pasture that had once sheltered and fed the wild herds. Additionally, much more of the bison’s habitat had been preempted by farming and ranching, which the traffic along the trails had helped to usher in. By 1875 the annihilation had begun, as professional hunters slammed away at the herds with their buffalo guns and shipped the green hides east on new rail lines running roughly parallel to the overland ruts.

And where are the Indians? As earlier volumes attest, overland travel had once provided the occasion for the first (and often only) contact with Indian peoples for thousands of white Americans. Emigrants had approached the Plains expecting the worst from Indian marauders. Growing up with a folklore of kidnapping and rape, many women were especially fearful. A few cut their daughters’ hair to reduce the temptation of scalping and hid poison tablets in lockets in case of capture by lustful savages. They discovered instead that Pawnees and Cheyennes usually approached, not with blood in their eyes but with curiosity and often growling stomachs. Contact was almost always peaceful and frequently friendly. Whites traded bacon and sugar for moccasins and bison robes. Indians and emigrants sometimes held footraces and sang to one another. At worst most overlanders had only to worry about theft of their stock and requests for more food. The vast majority of exchanges left the travelers with temporary irritation, bemused memories, and glimpses into another world.

By the time this tenth volume opens, however, even this limited contact between the cultures had nearly ceased. Mary Riddle set off for Oregon in the year following the final defeat of the powerful western Sioux (Lakotas) and Northern Cheyennes. Tribes that once had dominated the southern Plains—the Comanches, Kiowas, and Southern Cheyennes—had been militarily broken several years earlier. Only in the far Southwest, well away from any overland route, did Indian peoples sustain anything close to genuine independence and significant military resistance. Along the main roads were only the occasional rumors of nearby Indians. When Lucy Ide heard of Indians a mile away from her camp in southern Idaho, she slipped immediately into the familiar panic, writing of being stranded “in the midst of Indians” and speculating on her imminent death (85). As usual, she and others had nothing to fear. (Over the previous thirty years barely 350 whites, about one tenth of one percent of the emigrants, had died at the hands of Indians. By comparison about 425 Indians were killed by whites, a number that took a much more significant toll on their small communities.)

The only diarist here to see native peoples in significant numbers is Lucy Clark Allen, who crosses not via the traditional routes but through central Montana, where the northern Plains tribes were being corralled onto reservations. Her party loses some horses to Indian raiders. Otherwise she was disgusted by the “horrid beggars” who visited her camp and an “immense herd” of families she saw entering a reservation: “oh! ugh! augh! terrible, awful, ” she wrote (157, 160). For women along the Oregon-California trail, Indians had mostly receded into the nostalgic haze of modem myth. A housekeeper on a Wyoming ranch tells Virginia Belle Benton’s father and sister “the romantic history” of her employer’s marriage to a Lakota descendant “and showed them the oil paintings of the daughters who were away at boarding school” (182).

Indians disappear, from the diaries, volume by volume, not so much because they have been defeated militarily but because their material world was progressively more controlled by others, leaving the Indians no option but to conform to the new order. The observations of these women illustrate these transformations. Plains natives, for example, had relied on resources that had flourished along the trails. For example, the route over Bridger Pass ascended Pole (or Lodgepole) Creek, named for the vast stands of lodgepole pine that the Indians used to make and repair tipis. Back in the spring of 1848 a government agent reported that for twenty miles Sioux and Cheyennes were camped along this stream, fattening their horses and cutting timber. But as along every trail, thousands of pioneers were soon felling the trees for fuel. By 1878 the stream’s name puzzled Mary Riddle: “I don’t know why they call it Pole Creek for I’m sure there is not a pole on it large enough to pole one hill of lima beans” (32). Grasslands along the trails had helped feed Indian ponies, but the emigrants’ oxen ate much of the streamside swards, and by the 1870s most diaries mention the great herds of cattle dominating the region. So unavoidable were these domestic grazers that they created a minor crisis in Lucy Ide’s party when a man shot at but missed a rabbit. The ricochet broke a steer’s leg, and the man was arrested and fined $12.50 for his recklessness (69).

Fines levied for potshots, and cattle so numerous they were hit by errant bullets—this part of the West was fully in the grip of the economy and institutions of the expanding nation. Peppered throughout this volume is more evidence of a new culture transplanted. Virginia Belle Benton’s family attended a prayer meeting in Cheyenne (a “nice bright lively western city, ” Lucy Ide thought), and then church services and a Young People’s gathering in Laramie City (181, 183). Where emigrants twenty years earlier wrote of the loneliness and disorientation of great empty spaces, they now mention restaurants, cattle roundups, mercantile stores, hog farms, and hayfields. One party remarked casually on their camp neighbors: college students from Princeton collecting “minerals & fossil petrified woods… and having a good time generally” (77).

By then the most powerful force of conquest and change, the railroad, was reaching out over more and more of the western country. At Bismarck, North Dakota, Lucy Clark Allen’s company loaded their wagons and horses into cars of the Northern Pacific, still under construction across the northern Plains. The group clattered westward to the railroad’s farthest point at Glendive, Montana, and then unloaded (appropriately using telegraph poles for a ramp, props from another transforming force) and proceeded to Helena. Earlier transcontinentals had followed the same natural contours that had inspired the overland trails (the new favorite stopping place along the Oregon-California road, the town of Cheyenne, had been born as a railroad camp and supply center), so steel rails were a familiar sight to travelers of this volume. When Lucy Ide caught sight of the railroad at Green River, Wyoming, she thought “it looks like an old friend” (78). As Angie Mitchell followed the road to Santa Fe, where freight wagons had lumbered along in the 1820s, she passed between the Arkansas River on one side and the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe on the other. In Nebraska passenger cars speeded past Emily Towell’s party every few minutes, the occupants waving and “pointing westward to show how much faster they could travel than we” (204).

It’s quite an image: a smoke-belching locomotive chugging past a column of emigrant wagons. As Mitchell, Towell, and Ide wave from the rutted trails, we can picture cigar-smoking passengers looking languidly up from their newspapers at the plodding oxen and the women walking beside them. Animals and pioneers slip quickly out of sight, a brief memory for the passenger, and for us an image of a persistent past in a changing America.

Within these concurrent experiences of older and newer travel modes were vastly different perceptions of the West and westering. Railroads introduced the now-familiar “flyover” view of mid-America. Four months after completion of the first transcontinental, a North Carolinian speeding across the Plains dismissed the region with a single notation: “Passing a poor, sandy & stoney country.” These diaries, by contrast, show a West revealing itself to those forced to see it at a walking pace. Sometimes the view is enchanting. Listen to Emily Towell’s rhapsodic salute to the country’s “startling beauty” beyond Cheyenne, its red earth and sage-covered hills, aspen-lined streams, and vivid wildflowers: “No brush could paint the glories that met our eyes … Truly, we were viewing the fingerprints of God!” (209).

And, as had been the case since the first overlanders reached their destination, the difficulties, dislocation, pain, and drudge of the trip gave its wagoneers a sense of earned passage lost to the rail passengers speeding past and waving to Towell—and still lost to automobile and airline travelers of today. “Such a fearful Storm I never Saw, ” Laura Wright tells her diary in this volume. Sophia Lois Goodridge, crossing in 1850, would have understood after enduring storms that killed one fellow passenger and several oxen and flooded their camp, as would have Patty Sessions, buffeted by “dreadful” winds that nearly toppled their wagons in 1847 (vol. 2, 217; vol. 1, 175). Lucy Ide’s isolation and cultural dispossession suddenly surfaces with the sight of “tumbling tombstones” in a desolate graveyard near an abandoned post on Bridger Pass: “I [would] rather be laid to rest nearer the friends of my youth and near to Civilization” (76). Laura Wright’s lament—“plenty of mosketoes hear”—had been written in variants thousands of times before she passed through in 1879, as had been complaints of dust, sleet, kiln-hot sand, mudholes, alkali, and howling wolves.

Through all this runs another continuity—one that largely inspired this entire series of overland documents. Perhaps the most striking feature of the ten volumes, in fact, is the consistency of a distinctly women’s perspective and experience across these decades of upheaval and transformation.

Dip into one of the present diaries, for instance, and you will find their authors working at much the same tasks and responsibilities shouldered by their sisters (a more appropriate identifier would be mothers) along the trails in the early 1840s. Emily Towell puts her situation more explicitly than most: “Even though we are not in our homes, a great many of the home tasks and duties of the housewife must be performed as usual” (201). Floor-mopping and gardening might have been left behind but much of the female’s working world came with them: washing, mending, caring for the young and ill, cooking, gathering wild plants, laying out bedding and putting it away, and a good bit more. Conditions of travel made this work especially difficult in 1840, and not much had changed by the 1880s. Lucy Clark Allen described her technique of baking “light bread” in a Dutch oven buried in coals, so her family might have a break from relentless meals of “hot bread called Flapjacks” (144–45). As on the earliest overland trips, stopping over for a day of “rest” often found the men and animals lying about while women caught up with baking, repairing clothing, and rearranging the wagons. Allen summed it up with a terse entry while her company paused in hopes of recovering some horses: “cook sew and work” (167).

So it was too with women’s work in healing the sick, or trying to. For all the other changes during the previous thirty or forty years, the understanding of illnesses was not much more advanced in 1875 than in 1846, when Anna Marie King wrote that out of the two families in her party eight persons “have gone to their long home” (vol. 1, 42). Throughout these years prevention of disease remained a matter of trial and error and treatment mostly blind luck, which was especially unfortunate, for on the overland passage the trails were in many ways an ideal ground for contracting and passing on contact diseases. Travelers converged from throughout the country; they camped in the same filthy spots amid each others’ garbage; they (and their animals) drank from the same fouled water sources. By the time they crossed the Continental Divide the emigrants were exhausted, depleted, and especially susceptible to infections. Some years took heavier tolls than others, but a reading of these ten volumes shows with terrible vividness the tenacity of disease from the earliest crossings to the last.

Because women were assumed to be the natural caretakers of all who fell to illness or injury, their accounts are our clearest reminders of this grimmest aspect of the trek. Virtually every diary and letter contains reference to companions down with congestion, dysentery, or some vaguely named malady. The entries of caretaking—bedding changed, fevers cooled, fears consoled—resonate with duty and fatigue. Most often these ministrations carried the ill through their difficulties, but when they did not women stepped into another of their roles, that of preparer of the dead for final rest. The responsibility extended to strangers, as when Lucy Ide’s company meets a wagon carrying a desperately ill woman. When she dies the women of Ide’s party wash the corpse (“she was a nice looking lady”) and clothe it in her best dress. They sit beside her all night, occasionally wetting her face (79).

The tasks of healing and the rituals of departure and consolation took on even greater weight when their objects were children. Childbearing and child care were symbolic of westering itself; all were gestures toward the future. Watching over the young in this sense might be seen as the most vital responsibility of pioneering, and as with the drudgery and care of the. sick generally, the difficulties did not appreciably abate during the four decades covered by this series. Except for its mention of confining the ill child in a section house, Emily Towell’s account of the losing five-day effort to save young Frank McCloud might have been written forty years before she paused beside the Platte River in 1881. Her dramatic description of one of those nights, with its assault of lightning and wind shrieks “like wild and fearful demons, ” is a projection of motherhood’s worst nightmare (204–5).

Accounts of dying children, appearing all too often throughout these ten volumes, are among the most affecting in the folk literature of our national experience. Some of the diaries take us step by terrible step through the first hints of danger and growing concern, the deepening alarm, the frantic efforts, the sense of helplessness, and the final severance. Briefer passages have their own power, as when Lucenda Parsons writes of burying one child on the morning of June 21, 1850, another that evening, and three more the next morning. A few days later a mother died after losing five of her children over several days (vol. 2, 241–43). Whether laconic or laid out in painful detail, such accounts pull us into what must have been, for these westering women, the ultimate ordeal.

None is more heartbreaking than the passage that concludes this volume. High in the Cascade Mountains, almost to Oregon, Mary Matilda “Till” Surfus’s seven-year-old daughter Ina refuses apples and huckleberries because of a sore throat. Soon it is clear that she is sick with one of that era’s most terrifying diseases, diphtheria. Her fever rises, her nose bleeds for hours, and her throat’s lining swells until she is strangling. Wandering in and out of consciousness, Ina reassures her mother (“… why Jesus is here … and will take me from here as easy as from Oregon City.”). She takes her last breaths as Till sits by: “oh the anguish of that, our god alone knows” (269–71).

How this suffering finally weighs in the balance of these exceptional lives, of course, is not for us to say. What is clear, however, is the accomplishment represented by the documents in this volume and in the nine before it. Till Surfus, after burying Ina, nursed her two other children through their horror of diphtheria. One of them, Ona, years later transcribed the diary we have with us now. This daughter’s act of respect was part of a wider effort to preserve the words and memories from among the tens of thousands of women who made the journey across the continent. We, too, take part in this preservation as we read through the ten volumes of Covered Wagon Women, reaching back and touching for a moment the sacrifices, pleasures, surprises, and ordinary moments of this remarkable American drama.