Introduction to Volume VI

It appears we are destined for years to mingle in one common herd with the sap heads of every country and clime.

The above words were written by Elizabeth (Butler) Hutchinson in a letter to a relative in Monmouth, Illinois. She wrote the letter from a newly-settled farm near Monmouth, Oregon, on June 24, 1854.

This young woman was an example of many emigrants of 1853 who traveled overland to the Pacific coast as part of various groups devoted to religious principles. Elizabeth was one of a community of Disciples of Christ who sought a new country where they might practice their faith in their own way. The plan was to form a church, a town, and a school in the name of the Christian Church.

Of the seven wagon trains covered in this volume, four of them launched out over the western trails with such a purpose in mind. It was natural, of course, for Hannah King, a Mormon lady from England, to travel to the Utah promised land as a culmination of a deep devotion. Celinda Hines was one of a group of Methodists who traveled west to their new Canaan in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. They followed in the wake of the Reverend Jason Lee, who had formed a germ of a settlement and named it Salem as a mission station in work with the Indians. Rachel Taylor was a member of a Methodist “Preachers’ Wagon Train,” led by the Reverend William Royal and two sons and their families to southern Oregon.

The backdrop against which the American westward movement took place during 1853 and 1854 was the anticipation of the opening of the vast Indian territory beyond the Missouri River.

A bill to set up a Nebraska Territory failed in March 1853. It had passed the House of Representatives, but it was blocked by the Senate. Thus for the time being the vast Indian territory would continue to be unavailable for settlement by Americans. According to the “Indian Intercourse Act” of 1834, settlers were forbidden in that region, subject to removal by the military if necessary.1 Besides the fur-trading forts (Bridger, Laramie, Hall), there were only occasional trading posts set up by French Canadians or by Louisiana Frenchmen, or by American traders, who, with their Indian wives and half-breed children, were not subject to removal.

In the minds of most Americans the belief in a “Great American Desert” kept down interest in settling that part of the continent.2 They assumed that the Great Plains lacked water, wood, and communication with the outside world to be viable for farmers. This idea was re-enforced by those who traveled through the grassy lands of Nebraska and Kansas and on through the sage-brush country of the Great Basin. The land had to wait for the railroad, barbed wire, and irrigation for effective settlement to take place.3

The discussion about the extension of territories and states beyond the Missouri took place in Congress in the winter and spring of 1853–54. Talk and pressure continued, much of it centered around the person of that dynamic U. S. Senator from Illinois, Stephen A. Douglas, who had a vision of Chicago as the center of a huge railroad system in midcontinent. On December 14, 1853, a new bill was introduced which laid out the trans-Missouri extension into two territories: Kansas and Nebraska. Kansas, in effect, extended westward from a slave-holding state, Missouri; Nebraska extended west from the free state of Iowa. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill got the reluctant support of the southern legislators. It declared that “all questions pertaining to slavery are to be left to the decision of the people residing there.” It was signed into law by President Franklin Pierce on May 30, 1854, too late for the news to reach the overlanders of that year. Both of the new territories extended all the way to the Rocky Mountains, and Nebraska reached northward to the Canadian boundary.4

One interesting aspect of the 1853–1854 diaries is that the women, especially those of 1854, took notice of the increased presence of the occasional trading post or “grocery.” These were the first germs of settlement at such places as Wood River (Nebraska) and Green River (Wyoming). Real settlement in large numbers, however, had to await the laying of the railroad in the 1860’s.

 

For those who have not read the introduction to the first volume of this series, we reiterate some salient points which have been used to guide the editorial hand. It is a major purpose to let the writers tell their own story in their own words with as little scholarly trimming as possible. The intent in this publication of primary sources is to transcribe each word or phrase as accurately as possible, leaving misspellings and grammatical errors as written in the original.

Two gestures have been made for the sake of clarity:

1. We have added space where phrases or sentences ended and no punctuation appeared in the original.

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 writer’s shortage of paper.

There are numerous geographic references that are mentioned over and over again in the various accounts. The final volume in the series will include a geographical gazeteer, in addition to an index and bibliography to aid the reader.

The scarce and unusual in overland documents have been sought out. Readily available accounts are not included, but they will be referred to in the final volume along with the bibliography. If the reader knows of such accounts written while on the journey, please let us know. Our goal is to add to the knowledge of all regarding this portion of our history — the story of ordinary people embarked on an extraordinary experience.

KENNETH L. HOLMES

Monmouth, Oregon, 1986

1 Dorothy Weyer Creigh, Nebraska: A Bicentennial History (New York, 1977), pp. 46–50.

2 Everett Dick, Conquering the Great American Desert, Nebraska State Historical Society Publications, Vol. XXVII (Lincoln, 1975), passim; Ralph C. Morris, “The Notion of a Great American Desert East of the Rockies,” Mississippi Valley Hist. Rev., XXX, No. 2 (Sept., 1926), pp. 190–200.

3 Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (Boston, 1931), passim.

4 Creigh, op. cit., pp. 46–61; Roy F. Nichols, “The Kansas-Nebraska Act: A Century of Historiography,” Mississippi Valley Hist. Rev., XLIII, No. 2 (Sept., 1956), pp. 187–212