Introduction to the Bison Books Edition

Lillian Schlissel

When Ken Holmes began collecting the journals and diaries of overland women, there were few such writings in print. A quarter of a million men and women moved west between 1845 and 1860 knowing they were part of a historic adventure, and there was an outpouring of narratives, but women's observations were not considered significant to the historical process and their writings were largely overlooked.

A few historians, though, recognized gems of historical evidence when they found them, and Ken Holmes was one. A diary like Margaret Frink's brought the excitement of a great discovery. This diary, he wrote, is “one of the real rarities of historical publication.” Holmes loved this project and shared his unabashed pride, telling his readers the thrill he felt when he “held the actual book in [his] hands.”

And Frink's 1850 diary is certainly one of the best accounts we have of the westward journey. A clear-eyed woman, Frink wrote that she “hired a seamstress to make up a fully supply of clothing,” but though she might have been well-suited, she and her husband “knew nothing of frontier life.” She traveled with an “india rubber mattress that could be filled with air or water” and a feather bed and pillows. She was well provided with “plenty of hams and bacon, ... apples, peaches, ... rice, coffee, tea, beans, flour, com-meal, crackers, sea-biscuit, butter, and lard” (61), and her husband shipped enough lumber for a house by flatboat down the Wabash and Ohio rivers, down the Mississippi to New Orleans, round Cape Horn and up the coast of South America and found it waiting for them in Sacramento.

During the peak years of 1850-53, the overland journey was a rare spectacle. Margaret Frink wrote, “I had never seen so many human beings in all my life before .... in all manner of vehicles and conveyances, on horseback and on foot, all eagerly driving and hurrying forward, I thought, in my excitement, that if one-tenth of these teams and people got ahead of us, there would be nothing left for us in California worth picking up” (85-86). Like a demonic driver on a freeway, “some careless person ... drove his team up too close behind, and the pole of his wagon ran into [our] stove, smashing and ruining it” (97).

That crowded road could also turn treacherous-“a safe ford today might be a dangerous one tomorrow,” Frink wrote. “Our horses could sometimes be in water no more than a foot deep; then, in a moment, they would go down up to their collars” as quicksand sucked down both drivers and oxen (91-92). Sometimes nature itself seemed in raw opposition to the travellers: “I stood in the sleet and held four horses for two hours, till I thought my feet were frozen” (67).

Indians followed the progression of wagons, sometimes from the safety of distance, sometimes at close hand. Frink was careful to name the tribes whose lands she crossed-the Cheyennes, Blackfeet, Snakes, Arapohoes, Oglallah Sioux, Pawnees, and Crows. In June, her wagon party passed a large encampment of Sioux. They “were quite friendly. The squaws were much pleased to see the 'white squaw' in our party, as they called me. I had brought a supply of needles and thread, some of which I gave them. We also had some small mirrors in gilt frames, ... with which we could buy fish and fresh buffalo, deer, and antelope meat” (94). Social encounters with Indians are often described in women's diaries. Anna Morris, wife of Major Gouverneur Morris, a lady who traveled with her maid, noted that she too visited an Indian “house” in Kansas. The mistress of the tent “spoke french [and] ... was making mockasins” (23). A young squaw “took a great fancy to my diamond ring” (30). Sarah Davis, a young wife traveling with an infant, told that “the Indians swarmed a round” her wagon train and that “their was one Indian come to us for his diner” (188). All along the trail, overlanders and Indians negotiated a peaceful commerce. Sophia Goodridge, daughter of a large Mormon family, noted that “Aunt Hattie sent a blanket shawl” for the special purpose of its being bartered with the Indians. En route, travelers watched attentively while 300 Shoshone warriors with about 1,000 horses were preparing to war with the Cheyennes (230).

These casual observations of Margaret Frink, Anna Morris, Sophia Goodridge, Sarah Davis, and dozens of others provide extraordinary evidence of the ways in which the tribes along the overland route participated in the lives of the travelers. Dozens of diarists note that Indians were usually paid fifty cents a wagon for assisting at river crossings and Indians routinely traded salmon and buffalo with travelers whose supplies were dwindling. Sometimes understanding broke down; it seems clear that tribes expected tribute from people moving through their lands-women wrote of Indians who came “begging.” Overlanders, for their part, had not the least sense that the land “belonged” to anyone. But it is also clear that women were not afraid and that they bartered with Indians who moved freely among the wagon trains. The daily exchanges were part of the day's routine, and women wrote to relatives back home to include extra shirts and coffee and trinkets for trade when they prepared for the journey. The women's diaries show that, for better or worse, Indians and overlanders came together out of need and out of curiosity, and that they wove an imperfect understanding each of the other.

Lucena Parsons, on her honeymoon, was more horrified by tales of Mormons than she was of Indians. The Mormons, she wrote, were “an unprincipled sect. ... They live like the brute creation more than like white folks .... These demons marry some girls at 10 years of age” (273). In Mormon homes women “have not as much liberty as common slaves in the South” (274). Indians, by comparison, seemed quite civilized: “[A]n Indian chief visited my tent to day. I gave him some dinner & he gave me a knife” (240).

If anything, the tribes were at risk from the overlanders who brought diseases for which Indians held no immunity. Small pox, whooping cough, measles, and cholera wiped out whole tribes along the way. As cholera spread and springs were contaminated, Lucena Parsons noted that “many [overlanders] have lost nearly all their teams by letting them drink the water” (261).

At the South Pass of the Rockies, travelers often stopped for a “grand frolic” with “music from a violin with tin-pan accompaniment.” Margaret Frink wrote that someone planted an American flag and it seemed a good omen. By midsummer, however, the Blue Mountains made travel agonizing. The terrain was so rugged that the wagons were lowered down ravines with ropes. Some guidebooks showed that the Great Salt Lake emptied into the Pacific Ocean though travelers were still a thousand miles from California. Tempers flared as the danger of being caught by an early snow made late summer travel risky. Arguments broke out over detours and “cut-offs,” and orderly wagon parties splintered and went their separate ways.

Sometimes a road held signs no one could read. Margaret Frink recounted that a group of packers crossed the path of her wagon party. They were traveling east as fast as they could go, not stopping to talk, shouting words over their shoulders as they fled something unspeakable behind them.

And there were unspeakable things on the road. Cholera was an apocalyptic nightmare between 1851 and 1853. Women, who were caretakers of the sick and the dying, meticulously recorded the toll of the disease. Lucena Parsons wrote that they passed graves from morn until night: “Passt 8 graves to day .... Passt 13 graves.... Passt 18 graves to day .... We have passt some 12 graves & I am told there is a burying ground near here of 300 graves.” A man in the next wagon buried his wife and quickly baptized his three children, hoping to ward off the disease. The same dismal records fill the pages of the diary kept by Sarah Davis. “I saw twelve graves to day it semed like a grave yard almost to me .... we have past six graves to day we past twe[l]ve more and one grave that they had not put the body in yet. ... I saw thirten graves to day” (177-78). Travelers who had only laudanum and kitchen remedies such as tabasco to ward off disease sat behind their oxen, covering ten or fifteen miles a day, desperate to outrace cholera as it spread all around them. People who went west dreaming of wealth and prosperity sometimes met death on a lonely landscape.

Reading the diaries is not always a straightforward task, for nineteenth-century women concealed almost as much as they revealed. When Margaret Frink wrote that “there was no other woman” in her wagon party, one needs to hear the anxiety, one needs to recognize that a woman alone in a company of men faced difficulties in matters of privacy and personal hygiene. The simplest regimen of bodily functions entailed tactical provisions, and the bare prairie landscape offered little to accommodate a woman's desire for modesty or shelter.

Information about personal matters is never offered and never volunteered. I wondered for years why overland women persisted in wearing the long, full skirts and petticoats that were heavy with mud and stiff with dust long before the journey ended. In a classroom a student whose grandparents made the journey raised her hand to ask, as if I were a slow-learning child: hadn't I guessed? Two women together could hold out their skirts to raise a curtain for a third. It was a simple strategem. But a woman alone had to find some other way to outwit her circumstances.

Relations between husbands and wives may have been infrequent, since pregnancy made a woman a less useful working member of the family. When sex did join couples, it was probably far from the wagons, which groaned at every movement. Childbirth made every woman a midwife, and illness made every woman a nurse.

Diaries keep their “deep” meaning hidden, and even statistical data can be misleading. Census records, for example, note only living children and give no idea of failed pregnancies, of the number of infants buried under headstones marked “S. B.” for stillborn, or of those who died in infancy. Ken Holmes once sent me a photograph of a ring and a lock of hair he found between the pages of an 1851 diary kept by Mary Bowers. “Baby dreadful sick all night, had to carry him all night.” The infant died two days later. Migration caught women during their childbearing years, and although they rarely wrote about it, labor in a wagon wet with rain, or birth by the side of a road, was precarious. A woman who died in childbirth left an infant likely to die slowly if no other nursing mother could be found, and burial on the trail meant a grave with no marker. The historian who would read women's diaries must “hear” what is not written, and understand what is spoken only by allusion and indirection.

Given the trials of the early years of travel, it is surprising so many emigrants made it through. Margaret Frink and her husband reached Sacramento, rented a house and put up a sign that announced Frink's Hotel, but they abandoned the hotel when cholera emptied the mining camps. The following season, they found the lumber they shipped around Cape Horn waiting for them and they built a new house, bought twelve cows, and operated a dairy. She wrote, “We never had occasion to regret the prolonged hardships of the toilsome journey” (167).

Although there were few women panning for gold in the mining camps, Lucena Parsons was a young woman with a bold heart-"I went out this morning, with my men folks & the rest” (290). And then she went out again. “We again went to the canion to find that bewitching ore that is called gold” (291). Lucena and her husband made sixteen dollars in gold dust, and bought themselves two cows.

Mary Colby was brimming with optimism and assurance. “I think with good health and good economy we shall get along verry well .... I have got two of the prettiest children in the whole family .... I have got a first rate husband .... we have about 140 acres of our land under fence.... give my love to all your children and pleas to accept a good share your selfe” (50-53).

The young nation could hardly hope to plant the western territories with better citizens.

 

Twenty years ago I was writing Women's Diaries o/the Westward Journey about the same time Ken Holmes was working on Covered Wagon Women. It seemed to most of us that the ideology we called the “Cult of Domesticity” defined the attitudes of the women whose histories we were writing. The idea of “True Womanhood” filled the writings of all classes of women, although it sometimes seemed stubbornly wrongheaded to adapt the prescriptions of domestic ideology to life on the frontier. Sophia Goodridge's diary is filled with details of the ways in which overland women imposed a domestic routine on that long, dirty, dusty road. “Did our washing. Did our ironing and picked some goosberries.” They rolled out pie dough on buckboard seats, collected buffalo chips, killed rattlesnakes, and made sentimental notes about the “beautiful day.”

The Cult of True Womanhood was a powerful impulse in concealing parts of a woman's life. A true lady did not speak of fatigue or the burdens of caring for infants and children. Sarah Davis, who traveled with a year-old infant, only hinted at her relief at the journey's end. “I feel that I [will] never want anything more for now I have a chair and a table and a roof over my head” (206).

As I reread the diaries today, it seems we were perhaps too eager to see that the idea of “separate spheres” or the “cult of domesticity” answered for all the evidence before us. The diaries reveal countless occasions when separate spheres were breached in everyday life. Men in mining camps cooked and washed for themselves and Lucena Parsons knew all about panning for gold: “They take a pan nearly full of sand & stones & shake it & in the meantime pore off the water & the stones till they get it all pored off but the gold; this sinks below. I washed a little & got a little gold .... Came home tired to night. ... It is very hard work to dig & wash sand” (290-91).

Women shared the work of the trail and of the first settlements. They drove the teams of oxen, and cared for the livestock. Moreover, they were surrogates during the extended period when their men left to look for new land or to work in the towns for the winter, or to sell crops. Linda Peavey and Ursula Smith in their book The Gold Rush Widows of Little Falls (1990) document the lives of the women in Minnesota who stayed behind while their husbands went off to the Gold Rush. When James Fergus was absent for periods that stretched into years, his wife Pamela raised their four children, managed the small farm, took over the family's failing business, hired and fired men to help her, sold crops, and bought supplies. Men did not expect to sacrifice their stake in the land when they went off to explore new opportunities, and communities recognized women's authority when the men were gone.

Listen to the voices of the women in this volume, to the timbre and the assertiveness of their judgments. Sharp-eyed Sarah Davis noted that “we have past some of the handsomest pine trees I ever saw in my life” and driven through “some pleasant valeys of grass and a handsome creeke runing through the valey plenty of grass to for the catle all a rounde” (202). Margaret Frink was literate, capable, and in her judgments of the journey, she yielded to no man. Domestic ideology was a driving force but it was also only part of the life of women on the frontier, who took up the chores and the authority of their men when need demanded, and then relinquished that authority when, in the cycles of frontier life, their men came home.

 

Collecting and publishing the women's diaries began as a modest impulse; the idea was simply to add sources that had been lacking. Ken Holmes intended the volumes of Covered Wagon Women to document the story “of ordinary people embarked on an extraordinary experience.” But the diaries changed the way in which Western history was written. The history of the West had been framed as national myth, the saga of men engaged in nothing less than the conquest of nature; heroes and outlaws became legends. But women did not write of “conquering the wilderness.” They wrote about Indians who helped them cross rivers that hid quicksand, they wrote about cholera and death on the open road. Though the women were stalwart and stoical, they had a profound sense of the fragility of life and of the great blessings of survival.

In their simple and unassuming details, women's diaries were revolutionary because they offered a vision different from the one that had prevailed for so long, and they reminded historians of Henry Adams's cautionary word in The Education: "Where [one historian] saw sequence, other men saw something quite different, and no one saw the same unit of measure.” Historians began to write about Native Americans, and African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics and Chicanos, and, of course, Henry Adams was right-"no one saw the same unit of measure.” And western history has again been rewritten as the ecological and environmental history of the land. Stories of the Old West have been transformed; the “New” West has become a complex heritage.

Larry McMurtry wrote that “On the rim of the West-and perhaps, in America, only there-one can still know for a moment the frontier emotion, the loneliness and the excitement and the sense of an openness so vast that it still challenges-in Gatsbian phrase-our capacity for wonder” (In A Narrow Grave, 108). But we have learned over time, and first from the diaries of women, that our “capacity for wonder” is a prism compounded of the vision of many different eyes, the lives of many different people, the natural history of different sections of this vast land.