Women's Records on the Wagon Trail

I found a great book called Women's Diaries of the Western Journey by Lillian Schlissel at an antique book store here in Florida and thought it would make great blog discussions from a different perspective.  So for the next few months we will be looking at the long trek west through a woman's eyes - from the unmarried, to the wife, and even the elderly.  We don't realize how good our life is until we hear their stories!

Between 1840 and 1870, a quarter of a million Americans crossed the continental United States -

some twenty four hundred miles in one of the great migrations of "modern times".  They wanted free land in Oregon and California Territories, and they wanted to strike it rich by mining gold and silver. No other event, with the exception of the Civil War, evoked so many personal accounts as the overland passage to the West.   Diaries of young people and even children have become a part of the rich history of this United States.  Where so much of the life of women of that period has disappeared from us, these diaries provide us with records of what they went through, suffered, and overcame.

The westward movement was a major transplanting of young families.  All the kinfolk gathered together to make the perilous journey together.  Women were along because their husbands, fathers, brothers and uncles wanted to go.  They went because they was no choice not to go once the decision was made -  a woman could not stay home alone.

Most of these families had moved to "free land" before into Missouri, Illinois, Iowa and Indiana as had their parents and grandparents before them. They were a class of "peasant proprietors" who believed that better life tomorrow could be won by the hard work of today. 

Most of the guidebooks available to these travelers were wrong - depicting the journey as a summer's vacation.  The truth was a six to eight months of grueling travel in a wagon with no springs, under a canvas that heated up to 110 degrees by midday, through drenching rains and summer storms.  It meant swimming across rivers and living for months at a time in tents. 

Over 800 diaries and journals were kept by these women, black and white, who neither directed events nor affected the course of the journey. 

Next time...duties, disease, marriages and pregnancies on the trail.

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On this Day in Pioneer History:  On April 30, 1867, Burton Mossman, Arizona rancher was born. By age 30, Mossman not only had his own spread in New Mexico, but was also the superintendent of a two-million-acre ranch in northern Arizona, running 60,000 cattle.