Emotional Time for Women

To women of the mid-1850s traveling on the Overland Trail, the decision to go west in the first place was an emotional one. 

Says Mary A Jones.
       "In the winter of 18 and 46 our neighbors got hold of Fremont's History of California and began
talking of moving to the New Country and brought the book to my husband to read and he was carried away with the idea too.  I said, 'Oh let us not go;  Our neighbors, some of them old men and women with large families but it made no difference.  They must go...We sold our home and what we could not take with us and what we could not sell, we gave away and on the 7th day of May 1846 we joined the camp for California."

(Ed note:  I do not correct spelling or punctuation in the diary accounts)

The decision to leave was never the wives' or the children's wishes - it was solely the husband's. 
A woman went with him because it was her duty to follow him.

As the grandmother of General George S Patton, Margaret Hereford Wilson, wrote in 1850:  "Dr. Wilson has determined to go to California.  I am going with him, as there is no other alternative.  I thought I felt bad the last time I wrote at Independence, but it was nothing like this."

Some women wrote years later in their memoirs and the emotions had not waned over the years.
Many families lost children during the long journey west...

Twenty years later, Abby E Fulkerath said "Agreeable to the wishes of my husband, I left all my relatives in Ohio and started on this long and perilous journey.  It proved a hard task to leave but still harder to leave my children in graveyards."



Next time:  The Broken Social Circle
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Today in Pioneer History: On June 30, 1876, after a two day walk, wounded soldiers are evacuated from Little Big Horn by Steamboat.

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.