Helen Clark's Music on the Journey

Discovery of silver in Nevada drew more adventurous pioneers along with the beginning of the Pony Express between St. Joseph, Missouri and Placerville, California. 

Helen Clark, who we've met before, kept a journal filled with self-confident and optimistic entries.  She was young and wrote of lively things. 

"A fiddler comes down from the other camp to see if a dance on the turf cannot be started.  Mr. Upton
got down his melodeon and played some - we danced a while before bed."

Three nights the violins provided the music:  "Dora and Mary danced the polka. Mother had a headache and is trying to be real sick but I hear music in another tent."

Life on the trail would have been difficult enough without something to lighten the mood!  The young carried the music to the West with them in their souls, thank goodness!! 

Next time...Learning the meaning of Manual Labor

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On this Day in Pioneer History: "On April 8, 1842, Elizabeth Bacon Custer, a significant chronicler of the West and the wife of George Custer, is born in Monroe, Michigan..

Reflections of a Pioneer Woman in Later Life

Nancy Hembree Snow Bogart...

In remembering the days of her journey on the Overland Trail, Nancy "Matilda" Bogart described family  life on the frontier:

"I've often been asked if we did not suffer with fear in those days but I've said no, we did not have
sense enough to realize our danger, we   others, I often wonder how they really made it through it all and retained their reason.

Crossing the Deschutes River, the women took their places in the boats, feeling they were facing death.  the frail craft would get caught in a whirlpool and the water dashing over and drenching them through and through.  The men would then plunge in the cold stream and draw the half drowned women and children ashore, build fires and partly dry them and the bedding and then start on again.  The women preferring to try it on foot, but that was no pleasure trip, carrying a small child in arms whilst another one or two clung to her skirts whilst they climbed over fallen trees and rocks.

There were both deaths and births on the way.  The dead were laid away in packing boxes but could not be covered so deep but prowling savage would exhume them to get the clothes they were buried in, then leave the body for hungry wolfe  that left bones to be gathered up and reintered by the next group that passed along.  All these things sorely taxes their powers of endurance."

Next time:  10 years after the first families went west, did it get easier? 

Today in Pioneer History:  On September 1, 1836,  Narcissa Whitman arrives in Walla Walla, Washington, becoming one of the first Anglo women to settle west of the Rocky Mountains.

Meanwhile on the Way to Oregon

Those bound for Oregon found the trail ran along the steep ledges of the Snake River.  Reaching Fort Boise, they followed the edge of the desert until they came face to face with the Blue Mountains.

Raising wagons by ropes as their California counterparts did, blocking the wheels with rocks as they
inched their up and over the mountains was a time-consuming task with the winter weather closing in fast.

Helen Marnie Stewart wrote that "the hills were dreadfully steep, locking both wheels and coming down was slow.  Got down safe, oh dear me, the desert is very hard on the poor animals, going without grass or water for 1 1/2 days.

The train reached the "Dalles" (an 'evil branch of the Columbia River' as on journal put it), in the next 200 miles where the cliff walls were too high to cross, so most pioneers ferried the last 100 miles down the Columbia River into the Willamette Valley.  For those who couldn't afford the cost of the ferry, they loaded their possessions into canoes and hired Indians to paddle them across.  For others they simply tied their possessions on pack mules or just left everything behind and walked the last miles into Oregon territory.  One journal said, "The Oregon Trail was not a trip for the fainthearted, perhaps only for the foolhardy."

Next time...time out for some interesting statistics!

Today in Pioneer History:  On June 22, 1876, the once mighty Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna dies in Mexico City embittered and impoverished

I Promise to Work Myself to Death

Family dimensions, emotional balances, and work roles along with daily life stress on the Overland Trail in the 1800s can be found in women's journals.  From journals kept during westward migration, it is clear that women were the shapers of the family and the key to the internal dynamics of these pioneer families.

Even though marriages were the acceptable norm, male marriage structure was considerably less constrictive.  Men could go west leaving their family behind without a blink of the eye.  Women were left to care for the children alone.  Women, however, seldom traveled west outside the family.

Marriage was entered into with the recognition that farming and the working of a frontier farm required a large family to succeed.  Men were the heads of the household, yet women were commonly called on to perform men's work.

Women on the trail were not whiners or complainers, but accepted their role in starting this new life out west.  Their domestic daily chores included preparing meals, washing clothes, caring for the children, driving the oxen, collecting buffalo chips, collecting berries, rolling dough on a wagon seat, and baking pies over hot rocks to add variety to the mundane meals of beans and coffee.

I don't know about you but I am already exhausted! Time for a nap...Next time - Parenting on the Trail.

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Today in Pioneer History: On May 3, 1874, John B. Jones begins his adventurous career as a lawman with an appointment as a major in the Texas Rangers.

Just a Few Thoughts

There are very few journals written by women on the frontier.  Pioneer women were just too busy "making history to write it" as one Indiana pioneer put it.  Elizabeth Greer wrote "I could have written a great deal more if I had had the opportunity. Sometimes I would not have the chance to write for 2 or 3 days and then would have to rise in the night when my babe and all hands were asleep, light a candle, and write."

Women's diaries focused on family and friends back home.  "Nothing can atone for the loss of society and friends" wrote on pioneer woman.  "Our hearts are torn out at the loss of loved ones".

Keeping journals served as a legitimate release of tension and a place for cataloging grievances.  "All out of humor" one women simply wrote.

A simple poem from a woman's journal gives her hope for better times:
Day by day we wend our way
Through sage and sand
In hope to find
To please our mind
A home in a happy land.

Next time...Only the Lonely

Today texting is as big as  "journaling"  was in the pioneer days.  Get a phone plan with free unlimited texting