Introduction to the Bison Books Edition

Shirley A. Leckie

By 1852 information about overland travel had become so widely known that a ten year old in Monroe, Michigan, recorded advice in her diary. Elizabeth (Libbie) Bacon, the future wife of George Armstrong Custer, overheard a neighbor tell her parents that on the Overland Trail “the plains were … a burying place of the dead.” The neighbor also noted that “the emigrants feel so burdened with baggage they throw it away, so that the plains are covered with clothes.”¹ The message was clear; overlanders should pack as lightly as possible.

By 1854, when Sarah Sutton made her journey to Oregon Territory and Anna Maria Goodell and Elizabeth Austin traveled to Washington Territory, the tide of emigration, after a falling off, had resumed more heavily than ever. In addition to wider dissemination of knowledge, travelers benefited from the organized relief efforts now spearheaded by California and Oregon newspapers intent upon assuring the continual flow of new settlers to the Pacific coast. Moreover, trading posts, often run by former trappers with Indian wives and métis children, were more abundant. Those heading for California found Salt Lake City a comfortable way station, although prices for labor and supplies were generally high. Perhaps most important to the majority of covered wagon women, who were young and in their childbearing years, the nearly two-thousand-mile trek across the continent could be completed in about five months rather than the six or so required a decade earlier.² Nonetheless, whether one describes a diary from the 1840s or 1850s, the most frequent and important notation referred to the miles traveled each day.

How an individual woman experienced emigration, however, depended largely on her age, health, and circumstances beyond her control. Pregnancy, childbirth, nursing children, the death of oxen, the disappearance of cattle, the spread of disease, accidents, or unseasonably cold, hot, wet, or dry weather were factors that often rendered covered wagon travel arduous and dangerous. Moreover, new trails, such as the one residents of Washington Territory carved out in 1853 over the Cascades to connect Fort Walla Walla with Puget Sound, might still prove extraordinarily difficult.³ Diarists Anna Maria Goodell and Elizabeth Austin experienced that fact a year later.

Forty-eight-year-old Sarah Sutton from western Illinois was older than most covered wagon women. Undoubtedly, she represented a valued source of wisdom and experience for the younger members of her party. Moreover, by moving with her children and their families she avoided the alternative of saying good-bye to them, probably forever. And if Oregon land was as fertile as her husband reported, not only would the couple benefit but their children would probably stay in the region. That meant that the larger extended family would remain relatively intact, something that no longer held true in many places. In New England, for example, family holdings were often too small to parcel out among heirs and the soil was far less fertile.⁴

Harriet Augusta Stewart, Sarah’s sixteen-year-old daughter by a former marriage, welcomed the move to Oregon for other reasons. Earlier her mother had described her as “not well,” but poor health was no reason to stay home. Oregon was viewed as a healthier climate when compared with the ague- and fever-ridden Mississippi River Valley.⁵ In addition to her extended family, Stewart noted that neighbors from the area of Beardstown, Illinois, were accompanying them, “all pleased with the Idea of going to oregon” (24).⁶ Personally she wanted “to see the curiositys and get gold for sewing & to see the buffalo and to hear the wolves howl” (24). In other words, in addition to an exciting adventure, she looked forward to living where female labor brought greater remuneration. Within a year, however, like so many other young women who arrived in Oregon, she was married.

If the trail had become, on the whole, safer for emigrants, it had become more dangerous in one important respect. Although the Native peoples were never the threat portrayed in later Hollywood sagas or even in the reminiscences of pioneers, the emigration westward brought them new hardships. Between 1840 and 1880 the buffalo herds, on which the Plains Indians depended, almost disappeared. Although changes in tribal relationships, new patterns of trade, and periods of drought played a role in this catastrophe, emigrants contributed their share. The overland trains of the 1840s and the smaller parties a decade later included oxen, horses, mules, and other livestock that spread diseases to the buffalo herds. Moreover, the emigrants’ livestock consumed much of the pasturage that sustained the bison. That, along with the diminishing of other game, such as the elk mentioned in Sutton’s diary, exacted a heavy toll on the food supply and material well-being of Native peoples.⁷

Moreover, tribal people suffered severely from cholera and other diseases the emigrants brought westward. When Sarah Sutton’s diary is read carefully, it is obvious that the Native peoples her party encountered along the Platte River and in the area of Independence Rock were in dire straits. A kind woman, Sutton commiserated with them, but she had no inkling that she and her family were contributing to their calamity.

In addition to their misunderstanding of the hardships facing Native peoples, covered wagon women such as Sutton and Goodell disdained the Euro-American traders (often of French ancestry) and their Indian wives whom they met along the trail. They referred to these women as “squaws,” an ethnocentric term that conveyed the idea that Indian women were “beasts of burden” without honor among their own people and subject to maltreatment from husbands, whether Native or white.

More recent historical investigation reveals, however, that fur traders who turned to merchandizing or ranching after both the large supply of beaver and the European market for beaver pelts disappeared enjoyed marriages with Native women that were similar to those of other Americans in stability, number of children, and presumably degree of affection. Moreover, given the role Indian wives had played in helping these men forge crucial alliances with various tribes, they were important assets as well as companions.⁸

Finally, of course, the long accepted idea that Indian women were “beasts of burden” has been challenged. Catherine Price, for example, notes that among the Oglala gender roles were “complementary with women and men performing quite different but equally valuable roles (okicicupi).” By serving as seers, curers, members of the Medicine Society, or preparers of medicine for war or by becoming expert craftswomen and artisans, Oglala women achieved honor and distinction among their people.⁹

Families on the Overland Trail, having little comprehension of any of these realities, clung to their prejudices, in part because those prejudices justified their migration. Sutton, for example, saw herself and her family as similar to the Chosen People of the Old Testament. Her belief that God had laid out the trails to lead her family to the Promised Land gave her an unfailing sense of their right to settle in Oregon Territory.

Moreover, she and other overlanders believed that they would use the land more productively than the original inhabitants. When Indians arrived to trade salmon for a shirt, as she and her party were camped on the Boise River on August 2, 1854, she penned a notation in her diary. Noting that the river bottomland around her was fertile and well treed, she dismissed it as “to far away in an uncivilized land among the savage indians who know no more about work than the grasshoppers and never saw such thing as a garden vegetable grow here” (70).

Yet despite evidence of deeply rooted ethnocentrism, diaries of the covered wagon women tell us that once they came in contact with the individuals of various tribes, they often saw them as people rather than stereotypes. Sarah Mousley, for example, was immensely comforted when the Sioux, both adults and children, visited her younger sisters, Martha and Wilhelmina, after they were injured during a cattle stampede. When the Indians kept watch all night by her suffering sisters’ bedside, she wrote the next day, “Oh how I love their society and although so ignorant of their language I love to behold them” (179).

Overall, covered wagon women were a hardy lot. Who can forget Ellen Hundley’s description of her hardships during her family’s trip from Utah to Texas. “I suffered a heap of fatigue walking and carrying my child and trying to catch the waggons” (138). Days later she wrote, “we started again and traveled over bad road sometimes having to make it as we went crossed several dry creeks and deep ravines still a barren sandy desert; we traveled on 30 miles and not a drop of water for our horses we still come on till 11 oclock at night and still no water” (140). Overall during that twenty-four-hour period, she covered fifty miles with her seven-month-old son, another two year old, and six children from her former marriage.

In part, women such as Sutton, Hundley, and Mousley were steeled by religious fervor, an outcome of the earlier Second Great Awakening. That evangelical movement of the nineteenth century had brought many unchurched Americans into religious denominations. At the same time, it had lifted female self-esteem, since clergymen turned to women as conduits of grace. Once converted they could be relied on to encourage their husbands and children to join the Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, or Presbyterians or the more recently established Disciples of Christ or Seventh-Day Adventists.¹⁰

In one instance, however, a denomination had appeared that affected female converts in a singular fashion. For members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, one scholar notes that “the highest degree of glory in the celestial kingdom, the attainment of Godhood, was reserved for those who had entered into polygamous relationships.”¹¹ Moreover, although the majority of men did not take multiple wives, such unions were the ideal for Mormon leaders by the 1850s.

That ideal, according to Lawrence Foster, should be placed in the context of an America in which the market revolution had left many individuals disoriented and cut off from older traditions and social relationships. Thus the adoption of polygamy was “part of a larger effort to reestablish social cohesion and kinship ties in a socially and intellectually disordered environment.”¹² Certainly, in nineteenth-century America, those who entered into plural marriages cut themselves off irrevocably from the larger society. In the process they tied themselves more securely to the Mormon faith.¹³

But polygamy served another function as well. Among their religious duties, prominent men were expected to serve as teachers, missionaries, and members of the priesthood. In that light, marriage to more than one woman weakened the intense bond between husband and wife and threw plural wives on their own resources, emotional and otherwise. Not surprisingly, many became more independent, especially if they were part of a truly extended family, which often included sisters.¹⁴ (As Kenneth Holmes notes, Sarah Mousley later became the first wife of Angus Munn Cannon, the same day that he married her sister, Ann Amanda Mousley.)

The impact of polygamy on Mormon women is not easily summarized, although one diarist in this volume, the feisty and assertive Hannah Keziah Clapp, was certain she knew. She characterized them as “miserable slaves.” She had no inkling that many of them, given their husbands’ long absences in service to the church, managed farms and businesses with ingenuity and skill. Nor did she see the advances women had achieved in Utah. The territorial university, established as the University of Deseret, admitted females as soon as it opened its doors in 1850. At that time, Oberlin College was the only coeducational institution of higher education in the United States.¹⁵ Moreover, in Utah unhappily married wives could win divorces more easily than in the East, since Brigham Young and other leaders saw affection as the only means by which a marriage could be sealed for “time and eternity.”¹⁶ Although these advantages did not give Mormon women equality, they tell us that the status of women in Utah was not as “degraded” as eastern critics maintained.

The economic and social changes in the United States during the 1840s and 1850s raised many questions about the role and status of women. Only a small minority of women and men supported the woman’s rights movement emanating from Seneca Falls in July 1848, but American views on female potentiality were slowly changing. As Glenda Riley observes, although the “capable” woman had appeared in literature several decades earlier, she was a more popular figure in works published in the decade before the Civil War.¹⁷

Julia Archibald Holmes, like Hannah Clapp, had internalized a sense of herself as innately competent, largely as a result of her involvement in the woman’s rights movement. Influenced by transcendentalists, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, who stressed self-reliance, and wearing her bloomer costume despite criticism from both sexes, Archibald Holmes, like other young, childless women in this volume, experienced her trip to the Colorado mining camps as an exhilarating adventure. Imbued with the common belief that contact with nature improved health, she saw the trip as an opportunity to test her stamina and improve her endurance levels. In that sense, her ascent to the top of Pike’s Peak on August 5, 1859, as the first woman on record, was simply the culmination of her trail experience.

Six months after the diarist Martha Missouri Moore arrived in the Honey Lake Valley of northern California in October, 1860, the United States was involved in the Civil War. Although the war ended in 1865, sectional reconciliation was not complete until the turn of the century. Here the West played a significant role since Americans, both North and South, celebrated their common pioneering heritage in this region.¹⁸

The odyssey of families migrating westward in covered wagons emerged as a valued but often mythologized part of that shared heritage. Unfortunately, Native peoples were often presented as bloodthirsty savages and a barrier to be removed as intrepid male pioneers protected the weaker sex and carved out a home for themselves in a western Eden. Today, thanks to historians such as John Mack Faragher, Lillian Schlissel, and the late John D. Unruh, among others, historians have a far more realistic view of those who emigrated on the various trails between 1840 and 1860. The late Kenneth Holmes added immeasurably to that understanding by searching for obscure diaries of women and reprinting them as close to their original form as possible. With female voices telling their story from their viewpoint, the record is now fuller, although the history that emerges is far more complicated than the earlier version.

One day perhaps it will become even richer and more complicated. The Native peoples have their own oral traditions and accounts of how the arrival of these emigrants affected their lives. Although they had made a world together with trappers and traders earlier, largely because these Euro-Americans had found it necessary to adapt to their customs in order to succeed in their ventures, the permanent settlement of Euro-American women and their families altered that world irrevocably.¹⁹

Somewhere, one hopes, another pioneer, in the spirit of Kenneth Holmes, is compiling Native traditions and oral history accounts. If their voices can become part of the historical narrative, all will gain a truly panoramic view of what migration meant to families, both those who crossed the continent in covered wagons to Oregon, Utah, and California and those who were already there and called the land their home.

NOTES

1. Elizabeth Clift Bacon journal, 8 April 1852 to 31 December 1860, gift of Marguerite Merington to Western Americana collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Quotes from entry for 8 September 1852.

2. John D. Unruh, The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 79–85, 307; Lillian Schlissel, Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey (New York: Schocken, 1982), 118.

3. Unruh, Plains Across, 351.

4. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 17–19.

5. John Mack Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 17.

6. Virginia Scharff has noted that Euro-Americans moving westward were, in one important respect, similar to the Native peoples they were replacing; both groups were often “traveling villages.” “Gender and Western History: Is Anybody Home on the Range?” Montana, The Magazine of Western History 41 (spring 1991): 62.

7. Elliot West, The Way West: Essays on the Central Plains (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 52–83.

8. William R. Swagerty, “Marriage and Settlement Patterns of Rocky Mountain Trappers and Traders,” Western Historical Quarterly 11 (April 1980): 159–80.

9. Catherine Price, The Oglala People, 1841–1879: A Political History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 19.

10. Glenna Matthews, The Rise of Public Woman: Woman’s Power and Woman’s Place in the United States, 1630–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 103–19; Sellers, Market Revolution, 227–29.

11. Klaus J. Hansen, Mormonism and the American Experience. Chicago History of American Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 165.

12. Quoted by Hansen, Mormonism, 161.

13. Hansen, Mormonism, 157–58.

14. Lawrence Foster, “Polygamy and the Frontier: Mormon Women in Early Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 50 (summer 1982): 268–89. For a discussion on “sister wives,” see page 279.

15. Foster, “Polygamy and the Frontier,” 280–81. By contrast, the University of Michigan barred women for another twenty years, until state lawmakers, determined to save the state the expense of establishing a separate institution for women, demanded their admittance. See Rosalind Rosenberg, “The Limits of Access: The History of Coeducation in America,” in Women and Higher Education in American History: Essays from the Mount Holyoke College Sesquicentennial Symposia, ed. Jack Mack Faragher and Florence Howe (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 110.

16. Foster, “Polygamy and the Frontier,” 284–85; Carole Cornwall Madsen, ‘“At Their Peril’: Utah Law and the Case of Plural Wives, 1850–1900,” Western Historical Quarterly 21 (November 1990): 430–32.

17. Glenda Riley, Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1825–1915 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 27.

18. Robert Athern, The Mythic West in Twentieth Century America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986), 165.

19. Robin Fisher, “The Northwest from the Beginning of Trade with Europeans to the 1880s,” The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas vol. 1, pt. 2, ed. Bruce G. Trigger and Wilcomb E. Washburn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 148–51.