Introduction to the Bison Books Edition

Susan Armitage

One of the earliest and most evocative portraits of the overland pioneers was penned by Francis Parkman in The Overland Trail (serialized in 1847, published in book form in 1849). Observing a group of overlanders as they reached Fort Laramie, Parkman wrote:

A crowd of broad-brimmed hats, thin visages, and staring eyes, appeared suddenly at the gate. Tall awkward men, in brown homespun; women with cadaverous faces and long lank figures, came thronging in together, and, as if inspired by the very demon of curiosity, ransacked every nook and comer of the fort.

This remarkable vignette, which captures the moment when the pioneers made their last contact with organized American society before moving farther west into the unknown, provokes our curiosity to know more about them. Parkman, whose real interest lay with Indians and mountain men, tells us little more. To get closer, we must turn to the diaries the overlanders wrote about their westward journeys.

Until about twenty years ago, the Overland Trail story was generally understood as a male adventure epic. The vast majority of known diaries were by men “rushing” to California after gold was discovered in 1848. Because of the preponderance of these Gold Rush accounts, the smaller Oregon migration was neglected, and so was the family nature of it. In contrast to the temporary intent of California-bound travelers, families went to Oregon to settle, to farm, and to stay. Family migration, as opposed to the individual urge to get to California quickly, was a minor theme in most accounts of the Overland Trail.

As women’s history developed as an academic specialty in the 1970s, women’s trail diaries were rediscovered, and two historians, John Mack Faragher in Women and Men on the Overland Trail (1979) and Lillian Schlissel in Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey (1982), made important contributions to their interpretation. Their most important finding was simply that the trail experience, like every other kind of life experience, was gendered. Women’s feelings about the westward journey differed from men’s in small but vital ways. For men, the trail experience was a break from customary farm routines. Planning and safely executing the trip posed a significant challenge and there was adventure in meeting the challenge. For women occupied with the customary female activities of feeding their families and caring for young children, a significant part of the trail experience was the struggle to maintain customary family household patterns under difficult circumstances. In the female experience of the westward journey, endurance rather than adventure predominated.

At first, this gendered analysis of the trail diaries was resisted by many western historians, who tended to defend older, well-documented interpretations. Today, however, postmodern scholarship and women’s history alike direct our attention not to unifying myths but to the complexity and variety of individual accounts, in which gender is one important (but not exclusive) variable. Furthermore, the decidedly antiheroic tenor of contemporary thought has affected the interpretation of the Overland Trail as much as it has other national icons. John Unruh’s monumental The Plains Across (1979) emphasized not the adventure but the overwhelming tedium of the four- to six-month westward trip to California, Oregon, or Salt Lake City, an emphasis fully corroborated in women’s diaries. The Covered Wagon Women series contributes to this antimythic spirit by publishing hitherto unknown women’s accounts in all their variety. The diaries in this particular volume, of women travelers in 1851, add new information to the historical record. As Kenneth Holmes’s story of their acquisition makes clear, new diaries are still being discovered today, almost 150 years after their recording. Taken together and separately, the seven diaries in this volume tell us some things about general trail conditions in 1851, about the particular circumstances of individual trains, and about the experience of the women diarists themselves.

The approximately seven thousand people who ventured west in 1851 found it was a good year to travel the Oregon Trail. The dramatic decrease in numbers from 1850 eased the competition for good camping spots (those with adequate grass, water, and fuel) and decreased the chance of a recurrence of the deadly scourge of 1850, cholera, which was caused by contaminated drinking water. Because of the vast numbers of gold rushers in 1849 and 1850, the trail was now clearly marked in wagon ruts that remain in some places today. Guidebooks were more reliable, and an ever-increasing number of trading posts and ferries—in addition to the major Mormon settlement in Salt Lake City—had sprung up along the route.

For all of its improvements, the overland journey tested each of the seven very different diarists, as it doubtless did the other approximately three thousand westering women of 1851 who did not leave accounts of their journey. What can we learn about the 1851 journey from these seven women? Who were they, and what do their diaries tell us about the female trail experience?

First, the matter of identification. Women’s historians have found that identifying women by age and social class (the criteria by which we generally distinguish men) is inadequate for women. Family status is a crucial additional variable, and this is abundantly clear in this volume’s diaries. Three accounts are by young, unmarried women: Harriet Buckingham (age nineteen), Elizabeth Wood (twenty-three) and Eugenia Zeiber (eighteen). Buckingham and Zeiber traveled with family parties and had at least partial responsibility for younger kin and probably assisted with cooking. Elizabeth Wood apparently traveled with others who were not kin and seemed to have no childcare responsibilities. All three of these young women offer cheerful accounts of their largely enjoyable trips. Two other young women, Amelia Hadley and Susan Cranston, married but childless, write rather more somber diaries. Cranston’s diary in particular, with its obsessive grave-counting, can only be described as depressed. The two oldest women, Lucia Williams (age thirty-five) and Jean Rio Baker (forty-one) each suffered the death of a child during the journey and their accounts reflect this loss. Thus even within this small sample, the range of experience and attitude is enormous.

All of the diaries map the general contours of the journey: the gradual ascent to South Pass along the Platte River, the long dry stretch across present-day Idaho and eastern Oregon populated by “our old friends Sage and Sand” (as Harriet Buckingham called them), and the final difficult and exhausting transit of the Cascade Mountains. In this common western journey, the wagon trains represented by these diarists shared some difficulties, such as the ferocious rains and “tornados” that struck in the earliest stages of their journeys, upsetting carriages and soaking everyone. Similarly, the end of the journey was a desperate struggle for all of them. Few diarists of any year can match Lucia Williams’s account of the hellishly miserable struggle over the Cascades summed up in her simple phrase, “I cannot describe these mountains.”

Another common experience involved encounters with American Indians. The frequency and variety of these encounters deserves our attention, as does the range of responses from the first meetings with the Omahas (described as “beggarly” by Lucia Williams and “filthy” by Amelia Hadley) to friendly visits with the “Soo” (Hadley’s spelling) and the highly regarded Nez Perce in Oregon. Universally loathed and feared were the Shoshone Bannock and Paiute of eastern Oregon who stole horses and cattle from weakened trains late in their journeys. As Elizabeth Wood remarked, “The Indians we have met with here are more savage, cunning and treacherous than any we have yet seen,” but she went on to comment, “It is not always the Indians that are the aggressors.”

There were important differences between trains. The critical difference lay in train organization and management. Harriet Buckingham traveled west in relative ease and comfort because her uncle, Hiram Smith, was an experienced and skilled leader. But other trains were not so lucky. Elizabeth Woods describes a miserable train riven by dissension. When its unnamed leader ordered all the dogs to be shot in an effort to end recurrent stock stampedes, he faced open rebellion and eventual replacement as leader. Jean Rio Baker, the Mormon widow from England whose diary is included here, describes an entirely different experience. Although the beginning of the American part of her journey began badly with dreary daily struggles against rain and spring floods, the minute she became part of an organized Mormon train in early July most of her troubles were ended. The journey to Salt Lake City had physical rough spots, but the organization and communication that linked trains together on the Mormon Trail made the trip easier for everyone. Baker must have received a psychological boost from knowing that the closer she got to her goal the more help she would receive from organized parties sent out from Salt Lake City.

Another common controversy that few trains escaped concerned rates of travel. One train took too long in the early stages of the journey and was pressed for time toward the end, while others who moved more swiftly found themselves with exhausted stock at the same late point in the journey. The question of pacing could also raise religious issues. Many devout Christians (including Susan Cranston and Eugenia Zeiber) wished to lay over on Sunday to observe the Sabbath, but others within the same train disagreed. Clearly, this issue provided endless opportunities for contentious discussion, as in Eugenia Zeiber’s train, where the rival parties split, rejoined, and squabbled over the loyalty of uncommitted members of the party.

For all of the things the diaries tell us, there are many silences in them. Some of the omissions are puzzling. Why, for example, does Harriet Buckingham refer to her niece (with whom she nightly shared a tent) only as “the young girl”? Why don’t married women mention their husbands? And why do mothers so infrequently write about their children? A more general lack is emotional reticence: few deeply personal thoughts are recorded here.

Some of the silences can be explained by physical factors. Most diaries were very small, the size of a 3 × 5 card, so there simply was not room for extensive entries. Writing time was limited as well, for pen(wo)manship was impossible in a moving wagon, and the daily tasks of cooking, cleaning, and child-tending occupied the vast majority of the remaining time. But these seven diarists rarely mention their routine daily tasks. Only the occasional allusion to the use of buffalo chips for cooking, to a stop long enough for washing clothes, and to the discovery of saleratus (carbonate of potash, the forerunner of modern baking powder) suggests women’s daily routines. And only the horrifying death of young John Williams, “lively as a lark” (his mother wrote) moments before he was thrown from a wagon and crushed, remind us of the constant anxiety mothers must have felt for the safety of their children. Nor do these diaries provide full descriptions of the social life that developed on many wagon trains. We can infer the sociability from occasional details like Amelia Hadley’s accordian playing, appreciated by a “merry crowd,” and Lucia Williams’s vivid glimpse of the five horsemen who serenade her with “Araby’s Daughter.” But the complex relationships between strangers in the same train and even the stresses and strains that developed between kin and spouses are rarely mentioned. Again, we have to infer from sparse clues. Susan Cranston’s grave-counting becomes significant when we realize that only a few graves were new. They were almost all several years old, dating from earlier cholera epidemics. Her obsessive count was not therefore an expression of current fear of epidemic and death, but perhaps an expression of lost hopes and of a deeper unvoiced resistance to her husband’s westward urgings. But perhaps not. There are permanent mysteries in these simple-seeming diaries.

If they are not accounts of daily or collective life or repositories of true confidences, what are these accounts? They are, it seems to me, goal-directed accounts in which each day’s miles and each night’s camping place serve as markers of the remaining distance to the desired goal. Along the way, unusual sights and occurrences are noted, just as in any travelogue, but the real topic is distance and how much of it remains. The daily mileage notation is a count, very much like crossing off the days on a calendar. And perhaps the campsite descriptions functioned in the same way that we sometimes take travel photographs not to show others but to remind ourselves afterwards of the complex interpersonal reality, which cannot be fully captured on film or in a diary.

Nevertheless, each diary, in its own way, traces a trajectory from east to west, from early ignorance and optimism to understanding and endurance. Few diarists, in any year, trace the trajectory as clearly as just-married Amelia Hadley. She begins in exuberance: “It is amuseing and delightful to travel over these plains, and is not such a task as many imagine.” Early in June she confidently remarks, “It is true that a great deal suffer during this long journey, but It is one half owing to carelessness and Mismanagement, little or no sickness as yet….I for one never enjoyed myself better and never had better health.” But just a few days later she complains of “this abominable mountain sage, which I have got so tired of that I cant bear to smell it.” By mid-July, she says, “It seems the nearer we approach Oregon the worse roads we have, and a worse more rough looking country.” Three days later her brother-in- law is shot by an Indian during an attempted horse theft. She fears for his life and the safety of the party: “This is a wretched place to camp…. I can hardly lay down to sleep without It seems as though The Indians stood all around me ready to masacree me.” Then she herself comes down with dysentery and is unable to write in her diary for two weeks. As she revives, the party comes to the Columbia River, and after a final struggle through the Cascade Mountains reaches Portland on August 23. Hadley’s final entry brings her travel trajectory to rest: “This is the end of a long and tedious journey.”

And so, indeed, it was for everyone—long and tedious, but a journey to look back on with pride of accomplishment, intermixed with other feelings, some of them captured in these seven diaries, some kept only in the personal memories of the women who made the covered-wagon journey west.