The Porters - A Lesson in Manual Labor

Lavina Porter, wife of almost 20 and married for five years, was traveling with her husband toward

Pike's Peak and the hunt for gold in the 1860s.  Lavina had been raised as a southern belle and Mr. Porter was totally unfamiliar with manual labor.

"I've learned how to make a delicate cake or a fancy pudding but never before had I tried to cook a meal."

The trail was an education for both Mr. and Mrs. Porter.  Lavina sewed maternity gowns from a blue gingham cover off her feather bed, and another from a flowered dressing gown that her husband considered "too effiminate".

"We passed hundred of new made graves in this part of our route.  One day we overtook a belated team on its way to one of the distant forts with only a man and his wife.  The wife was quite ill in the little tent, having giving birth only one day.  The father put it in a rude box and laid it in a tiny grave by the wayside.  The poor mother was grieving her heart out at leaving it behind in the lonely plain with only a rude stone to mark its resting place."

The Porters brought no medicine with them so when dysentery struck them, Lavina wrote that she told her husband to "take me out and make my bed in the sand and let me die in peace."  Advised by another traveler to give her a big dose of castor oil, her husband, not having castor oil, administered hair tonic instead...and it worked!

"I would state here that the Sioux Indians were the finest looking warriors we had seen.  The braves were mostly naked and with one wearing a discarded hoop skirt.!"

Youth and a life of pampering did not prepare either Lavina or her husband for the pioneer life they sought but they survived - their child was born in California.

Next time...changes in the Overland Trail
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Today in Pioneer History:  On April 13, 1866, Butch Cassidy, the last of the great western train-robbers, is born on this day in Beaver, Utah Territory.