University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Beyond the plains: migration to the Pacific and the reconfiguration of America, 1820s-1900s

(USC Thesis Other)

Beyond the plains: migration to the Pacific and the reconfiguration of America, 1820s-1900s

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content

BEYOND THE PLAINS:
MIGRATION TO THE PACIFIC AND THE RECONFIGURATION OF AMERICA,
1820s-1900s

by

Sarah Keyes

________________________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(HISTORY)

August 2012

Copyright 2012 Sarah Keyes
ii

Dedication

For my parents
iii

Acknowledgements
There is perhaps no greater pleasure than to be able to express my gratitude for all
of the people and institutions that have made this dissertation possible. While my
dissertation is organized thematically, my acknowledgments follow a rough
chronological order.
As an undergraduate at Pomona College my teachers, especially Helena Wall,
introduced me to the very best examples of historical writing and analysis. Perhaps most
importantly, they also encouraged me to develop my own interpretations. For a student
who had quietly assumed she would become an attorney like her father the opportunity to
research and write history was eye opening. During the summer of 2003 when I began
working on my undergraduate thesis I realized that history was not just an interest but
also a passion.
For the past six years the University of Southern California has provided me with
unparalleled intellectual and financial support. The faculty, staff, and graduate students in
the history department have helped to ensure my success. My advisor, William Deverell,
is the reason I came to USC and he has been a major force in propelling me to the finish
line. Bill made it so that I never worried about failing, and helped me to find a viable
work-life balance. Although Peter Mancall may regret that I am not an Early
Americanist, I am thankful for his ability to enthusiastically and critically engage with a
topic that extends well beyond 1800. So too has Richard Fox helped to foster a project
that lies outside of his central intellectual interests. Richard is unrelenting in his
insistence that I think harder and push further. I can't think of better advice for history or
iv

for life. Michael Block, Jessica Kim, and Andie Reid are some of the best colleagues and
friends I have ever had.
From the beginning of my graduate school career I have been privileged to have
access to The Huntington Library. Peter Blodgett's vast knowledge led me to many
sources that have enriched this dissertation immeasurably, while his tireless enthusiasm
helped to keep me going. Roy Ritchie has served as an unofficial mentor to countless
young scholars. I am privileged to count myself among those who have benefited from
his advice. I am grateful for funding from the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies
Institute that allowed me to spend an entire year at The Huntington. That year I not only
made invaluable research progress but also connected with some of the most wonderful
colleagues. Lindsay O'Neill helped to draw me into the Huntington lunch crowd and is a
true friend. Jennifer Vanore read so much of my work in the final months leading up to
completing this dissertation that I cannot imagine I would be here without her.
I am incredibly grateful and honored for the wonderful opportunities and
colleagues I have met at the many additional institutions that have provided funding for
this project. At the Autry National Center Liza Posas, Kim Walters, and Marva Felchlin
helped me to find sources and survive the frigid temperatures at the Braun Library.
Conrad Wright, Peter Drummey, and Elaine Grublin of the Massachusetts Historical
Society were all excellent lunch companions, cheerleaders for the project, and reservoirs
of knowledge. At the American Antiquarian Society Paul Erickson and the rest of the
staff fostered an incredibly collegial atmosphere. I would like to thank all of my
housemates, but especially Jess Collier for starting the tofu fire. At the Newberry Library
v

Diane Dillon was incredibly welcoming and John Aubrey took the time for long talks
about the trail and the benefits of Southern California living. I would also like to give
special thanks to Jeffrey Ostler for his support and many stimulating lunchtime
conversations. My co-advisors at the Smithsonian, Rayna Green and Doug Herman, made
Washington, D.C. seem like a home away from home. Rayna, especially, overwhelmed
me with her goodwill, humor, and intellectual generosity. Winterthur provided a bucolic
respite from the nation's capital as well as a fruitful research trip. To Rosemary Krill,
Jeanne Solensky, and all of my housemates and lunch mates—thank you for everything.
At my last official research stop at the Oregon Historical Society Scott Daniels and the
rest of the staff made it possible for me to spend extra hours in the library and made sure
I had ample space to work. I would also like to acknowledge generous financial support
from the Western Association of Women Historians and the American Historical
Association. The sum of these experiences surveyed above—manuscripts uncovered,
lunch conversations pursued, and lifelong friendships born from coast to coast—have
shaped this project in myriad and countless ways.
My family made this dissertation possible in ways large and small. My parents
encouraged me to follow my intellectual dreams and passions, took me to see historical
sites around the world, and helped me develop a work ethic without which I may never
have lasted to closing in the archives. They have raised not only one but two PhDs in a
family that had none. To my younger brother who, I must acknowledge, finished months
before me, Congratulations. I realized my now husband was special when we spent one
of our first dates discussing my undergraduate thesis. Little did he know that that would
vi

be the first of many of our conversations about history. His intellectual interests are far
different from mine, but that only makes our relationship all the richer.
vii

Table of Contents

Dedication ii

Acknowledgements iii

List of Figures viii

Abstract ix

Preface xiii

Introduction 1

Chapter One: The Great Medicine Road 25
of the Whites

Chapter Two: Contesting Slavery on the 64
Plains and the Pacific

Chapter Three: Mobilizing Domesticity 110

Chapter Four: Burying Race, 161
Resurrecting Americans

Chapter Five: Pioneer Identity and 202
the Nature of Historical Authority

Bibliography 240

viii

List of Figures

Figure 1: National Trails System Map and Guide 3
Figure 2: Westward the course of empire takes its way 102
Figure 3: Leaving the Old Homestead 117
Figure 4: Old-fashioned Schooner Wagon 145
Figure 5: Indians Attacking a Wagon Train 153
Figure 6: A Desperate Situation 168
Figure 7: A Grave on the Santa Cruz Road 188
Figure 8: American Progress 217
ix

Abstract

From roughly the 1830s through the 1860s as many as 500,000 EuroAmericans
followed multiple wagon routes westward across the continent to Oregon and California.
Beyond the Plains examines the experiences and meanings of this migration for those
who traveled and read of the journey in countless letters, diaries, journals, and published
accounts. It describes how this migration put a distinct twist on some of the major issues
of the nineteenth-century United States: economic dependency, slavery, domesticity,
death, and memory.
The overland trail, the term commonly used to describe this migration, helped to
mark the moment that America fulfilled its imagined destiny to span the continent from
the Atlantic to the Pacific. Emigrants understood themselves to be participating in a
movement of personal as well as national significance. The great length of the journey
also set this migration apart: most travelers, known as "overlanders," spent five to six
months traversing the approximately two thousand mile route.
If migration across the trail helped to bring the nation's expansion into focus so
too did this movement sharpen the need to solve the "Indian problem" long deferred to
the West. This dissertation asserts that cross-cultural encounters along the trail,
particularly those between Native and EuroAmericans, were central not only to the trail
experience but also to the meanings and significance of this travel and migration for
American history. Once on the plains overlanders traveled alongside and across well-trod
roads of Indians such as the Pawnee, Cheyenne, and Sioux as well as those of
x

EuroAmerican fur traders. Emigrants frequently claimed that they were only "passing
through." To some extent they were travelers, visiting famous landmarks and seeking out
Indians in an attempt to have a real "western adventure." But this migration was also
incredibly invasive and destructive. Emigrants polluted water sources, destroyed life-
giving grasses, and incited violence across the region.
This dissertation reconceives the trail as both an experience driven by cross-
cultural encounters between Indians and whites as well as a journey that places major
themes of nineteenth-century United States history in a new light. It takes the story of
westward expansion down to the level of interactions between ordinary people. This is a
story of both egregious racial violence and startling compassion. It is a story whose
outcomes turned on contingencies, such as a bolting pony or a firearm accidentally
discharged. It is a history that brings together Indian and white, slave and free and places
the West at the center of nineteenth-century United States history. This dissertation
suggests that the trail was not a curious interlude but rather an important moment in
United States history. Overlanders not only wrote of their own triumphs and tribulations
on the difficult western journey, they inevitably wrote about, worried about, and thought
long and hard about wider American issues and instances in a period of lasting social and
political change.
When EuroAmericans back home asked for stories and descriptions of their
journeys emigrants knew that above all else they wanted to know about Native
Americans. Notwithstanding this evident interest, many of the most loquacious stories
follow generic trajectories of noble, stoic Indians or hostile savages. Others are brief
xi

notes of passing encounters with little explanation or reflection. This dissertation moves
beyond these terse anecdotes and triangulate these encounters against government
documents, newspapers, anthropology, and EuroAmerican culture to give them their
proper analytic weight.
The chapters that follow take up major themes that emerged in the sources as
central to both the trail story and to nineteenth-century United States history. They are, in
order, economic dependency, slavery, mobility, improper attendance to care of the dying
and the dead, and a melancholic nostalgia for the past. This dissertation begins with
comparing the cultural symbolism of the trail to everyday emigrant experience or
westering practice. The trail's cultural meaning was as expansive as its geographic scope.
It was at once a path to romantic adventure and economic freedom as well as one towards
fulfillment of the Nation's imagined—promised—destiny. So too does this chapter
examine themes of dependency, relations between labor and capital, and ideas of religion
to understand the significance of the journey. The second chapter situates the trail at the
center of the keystone debate over national destiny—would the United States remain a
country of slavery or become one of freedom? Overlanders traveled through territories
whose status as slave or free became the question of the era. These questions are
inextricably connected with attempts to draw racial boundaries, a process that worked in
different ways along the trail than it did in the settled United States. Emigrants'
movement was entirely political, even as they attempted to attend to the quotidian
business of traveling.
xii

The next chapter addresses this problem of mobility head-on. EuroAmericans
were moving to all cardinal points across the continent (as well as outside of the country)
in this period. The trail by virtue of its vast distance and unfamiliar territory presented an
extreme manifestation of such mobility. Yet the trail also helped to move families west,
especially to the open lands of Oregon.
Chapter Four examines the cessation of this mobility: what happened and what
did it mean when overlanders had to leave loved ones along the way, buried in shallow
graves hastily dug? Although mortality rates on the trail more or less mirrored those in
the settled United States, the challenges of the journey severely constrained emigrant
ability to attend to the dying and dead. Of these concerns the greatest was for the bodies
left behind along the trail—concerns revelatory in their cultural meaning and practice.
The final chapter looks at the ways that overlanders, their families, and
EuroAmericans at large remembered the trail in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. It was in this period that EuroAmericans cement the significance of a migration
that had been touted and transformed since the first EuroAmerican wagon rolled over the
South Pass of the Rocky Mountains in the 1820s. Dynamic and alive with movement and
meaning as it was being trampled, the trail remained so even as time passed, as wagons
stilled, and as grass grew over the ruts carved in the earth. This thesis closes with a close
look at the memory of the trail and the cultural work those many memories were
expected to perform, as the nineteenth century became the twentieth.
xiii

Preface

The seeds of this dissertation were planted as far back as 1989. That summer my
parents took my brother and me to Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico. Walking
amidst the remains and learning about the Pueblo people gave me a new perspective on
the history of the region of the United States that I called home. Western historic sites
like Chaco may not be as highly trafficked or visible as, say, the Freedom Trail in
Boston. Yet, history in seemingly out-of-the-way places like Chaco or vast stretches of
the overland trail should not be confined to the margins of our collective memory. Raised
in a family whose west coast roots run deep, relatives from both sides of my family
traveled across the overland trail, I never doubted the importance of the western past. But
growing up in a town full of recent transplants from the East also inspired me to think
about my own western identity and western history not as the norm but rather as
something singular worth exploring.
While most of the emigrants in my study spent over five months on the trail I
have spent only three. In the gap period between college and beginning at USC I spent a
summer working at Fort Caspar in Casper, Wyoming. The fort dates to the Civil War era,
but during the 1850s a group of Mormons had operated a ferry across the Platte River that
runs through town. It was there in Wyoming that I first began to think about the overland
trail. What follows is a story that I lived in the landscape before I ever examined it in text.
1

Introduction

From roughly the 1830s through the 1860s as many as 500,000 EuroAmericans
followed multiple wagon routes westward across the continent to Oregon and California.
The overland trail, the term generally used to refer to this migration, stretched over 2,000
miles from the western edge of the settled United States to the Pacific coast. During the
five to six months it took to cross the continent EuroAmerican emigrants moved over
rolling plains, steep mountains, and dry deserts.
1

Beginning in early April these would-be EuroAmerican emigrants known as
"overlanders" descended on a few, burgeoning cities along the western edge of the settled
United States: St. Louis and St. Joseph (“St. Joe”) in Missouri, and Council Bluffs and
Kanesville in Iowa as well as border settlements to the south including Fort Smith in
Arkansas. There they converged with Native Americans from the plains and regions
farther west as well as Mexican traders from Santa Fé and, after Salt Lake City was
established in 1847, traders and company leaders from the Mormon settlement.
2

1
The more conservative estimate of trail travelers is 250,000. For the estimate of the
number of travelers across the trail see, John David Unruh, The Plains Across: the
Overland Emigrants and the trans-Mississippi West, 1840-60 (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1979), 119–20. Unruh based his estimates on statistics provided in
newpapers, estimates made by westbound and eastbound emigrants, and government
sources including the emigrant registers kept at Forts Kearny and Laramie during the
peak years of the gold rush as well as statistical information in secondary works such as
Louise Barry, The Beginning of the West; Annals of the Kansas Gateway to the American
West, 1540-1854 (Topeka: Kansas State Historical Society, 1972).
2
This dissertation does not examine the Mormon emigrant experience in depth. The
Mormon trail ran parallel with the overland trail through the Platte River Valley.
Mormons and gentiles sometimes came into conflict but they also cooperated on the
2

Overlanders themselves were also a diverse group, one that included men, women, and
children from rural farming regions and new urban centers in the north, south, and west
as well as European emigrants fresh from a voyage across the Atlantic.
3
Entering the
multiracial, cultural, and national milieu of these western border towns gave emigrants
their first flavor of the social world in which they would spend the next five to six months
as they rode, walked, waded, and crawled their way across the continent.
Before heading west and crossing the line between "civilization" and "savagery,"
overlanders could pass weeks or even months living in these border cities or camping on
the prairie lands just to the west. If the season was late, prudent emigrants delayed
departing to allow the grass time to grow so they would have feed for their oxen, cattle,
horses, and mules. Others waited for provisions shipped by steamboat or belated
company members to arrive, passing the time breaking in new horses and mules, cleaning
firearms, often recently purchased in anticipation of potential Indians attacks on the
journey, and writing breathless letters home full of anticipation as well as concern for the
long journey ahead.

journey. There is a vast historiography on the Mormon migration to Salt Lake City. A
few, pertinent works are, LeRoy R. Hafen and Ann W. Hafen, Handcarts to Zion, the
Story of a Unique Western Migration, 1856-1860, with Contemporary Journals,
Accounts, Reports; and Rosters of Members of the Ten Handcart Companies, The Far
West and the Rockies Historical Series, 1820-1875, V. 14; (Glendale: Calif., A. H. Clark
Co., 1960); and Wallace Stegner, The gathering of Zion: the Story of the Mormon Trail
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992). The historian William Hartley is currently
working on a new book on the Mormon overland trail experience.
3
More research needs to be done to determine approximately how many recent European
immigrants may have traveled the trail.
3

Figure 1. National Trails System Map and Guide, National Park Service. This map captures the variety of routes
and trails across the continent. The thick line in the middle along the Platte River designates where the Oregon,
California, and Mormon trails run together. This was the most heavily traveled route during the period of cross-
continental migration by wagon. (Courtesy, National Park Service.)

For the first portion of their journey emigrants traveled west over rolling plains
through Iowa, Nebraska, and Wyoming along the Platte River. The Platte often earned
criticism from emigrants for its muddy, slow-moving waters. The human waste, goods,
and other debris overlanders dumped into the stream made this river even less palatable.
4

At other points the river moved swiftly, creating crossings that were hazardous to goods
and travelers, many of whom had no idea how to swim. Once they emerged from the
Platte River Valley overlanders began to make their way toward the Rocky Mountains.
Once there they pulled their wagons up the steep passes with ropes, then let them down
with the same in an effort to prevent them from capsizing. But capsize many did. With
the mountains crossed, wagon trains pulled slowly (most companies only traveled an
average of twenty miles per day, some traveled much less) ahead in a quest to reach the
Pacific.
Overlanders often did not decide on their final destination until reaching the
California and Oregon Trail split in Idaho. After choosing their destination they faced
either the deserts of Eastern Oregon or Nevada before they could reach the Pacific.
Others, primarily emigrants from the southern states, traveled across Texas, and dipped
down into Mexico before heading north through southern California. At some points the
emigrant road stretched over a mile wide. The way west was marked by trampled grass,
impacted earth and deep ruts that had been cut and compacted not only by previous
emigrants but also by the hooves of buffalo, the passage of Native Americans, their
horses and travois, and EuroAmerican fur traders, all of whom continued to travel these
and other adjacent routes with overlanders.
It was these EuroAmerican traders who had first demonstrated the feasibility of
taking wagons across the continent. In 1824, a company of fur traders led by William
Ashley became the first party to drive a wagon over the South Pass of the Rocky
Mountains. That same spring, Jim Bridger, another fur trader who would become an
5

iconic fixture of the overland trail, successfully navigated a wagon party through the
Sierra Nevada and into California. Almost immediately, American newspapers took up
the call for EuroAmericans to make their way westward over a grade that they asserted
was no steeper than that of the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian Mountains (through
which EuroAmericans had passed to settle the Trans-Appalachian frontier).
4
In keeping
with the booster tradition, these reporters made geography bend to the will of the nation's
imagined destiny.
Hopeful declarations of boosters and politicians aside, more than a decade would
pass before the first overland emigrants crossed the continent. In 1836 the Spalding and
Whitman missionary companies traveled westward over the Oregon Trail to establish
outposts in Oregon territory. Not longer after, the Joel Walker party of emigrants arrived
in Oregon in 1840. The following year, John Bidwell and John Bartelson organized the
first overland emigrant wagon train to California. That trickle would become the
proverbial flood very quickly: during the next two decades over two hundred and fifty
thousand and as many as five hundred thousand EuroAmerican emigrants, in wagons, on

4
Newspapers reporting on General William Ashley’s discovery of the South Pass road in
the 1820s compared the difficulties of the new route and with those of the Cumberland
road: “From all that we can learn the elevation is exceedingly small where the passage of
the mountain was effected—so small as hardly to affect the rate of going of the caravan,
and forming at the most, an angle of three degrees, being two degrees less than the
steepest ascent on the Cumberland road.” Donald McKay Frost, Notes on General
Ashley, the Overland Trail and South Pass (Barre, Mass., 1960), 138.
6

horseback, and on foot (and leading countless livestock), would make their way west
across the overland trail.
5

For the majority of travelers this was not the first time they had packed their
earthly possessions in a covered wagon and turned their footsteps westward. Farmers
who left homes behind in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois had often been born in New York,
Massachusetts, and other places farther east. At the same time overlanders were moving
west to the Pacific, other EuroAmericans chose different new homes in places like
Minnesota, Iowa, and, eventually, Colorado. Although historians frequently refer to the
quarter of a million figure to demonstrate the trail's significance, this figure pales in
comparison to these collective, contemporaneous westward movements and is rendered
even smaller in the context of great immigration from Europe.
6
Yet the trail created a vast
archive of knowledge about a portion of the continent that while nominally claimed by
the United States existed largely outside of its political control and cultural purview.

5
Many historians have written on the establishment of the overland trail. Two excellent
studies that explore the beginning of this migration in depth are, Bernard Augustine De
Voto, The Year of Decision, 1846 (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1984); and George
Rippey Stewart, The California Trail, an Epic with Many Heroes (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1962).
6
In the 1850s the populations of Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas increased by 1.7
million people West, Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the
Rush to Colorado (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 8. Even the highest
estimate of overland trail travelers, 500,000 pales in comparison to emigration from
Europe. During the years of the overland trail, as many as double the number of
immigrants may have entered the United States from Europe. Raymond L. Cohn,
"Immigration to the United States," Economic History Association,
(http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/cohn.immigration.us), Accessed June 29, 2012.
7

Moreover, for EuroAmericans the trail helped to mark the moment that America fulfilled
its imagined destiny to span the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
If the migration across the trail helped to bring the nation's expansion into focus
so too did this movement sharpen the need to solve the "Indian problem" long deferred to
the West. Once on the plains overlanders traveled alongside and across well-trod roads of
the traders' wagon caravans as well as Indians such as the Pawnee, Cheyenne, and Sioux.
Overlanders passed missions founded by the Presbyterians hopeful of converting the
Pawnee, army forts established to attend to both passing emigrants and Native
Americans, and Native American villages some populated, others emptied for the season,
and still more destroyed by a dearth of resources or an indigenous or EuroAmerican
attack—both of which situations overlanders had a hand in.
Emigrants, however, frequently claimed that they were only "passing through."
To some extent they were tourists, visiting famous landmarks and seeking out Indians in
an attempt to have a real "western adventure." Although western historians have tended
to date the beginning of western tourism to the late nineteenth-century, the overland trail
provided an avenue for travel and tourism long before the railroads spanned the
continent.
7
Furthermore, scholars of tourism have shown how travelers helped to advance
knowledge of the lands and peoples through which they passed. Emigrants commented
on the fertility of the soil and other questions important to the possibility of determining

7
On assertions of western tourism as a late nineteenth-century phenomenon see, for
example, Anne F. Hyde, An American Vision: Far Western Landscape and National
Culture, 1820-1920 (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 107; and Hal K
Rothman, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West
(Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1998), 39.
8

future settlement at the same time that they frequently spoke and wrote of Native
Americans as bound to disappear.
8

The violence of the trail cannot be underestimated. Much of the recent work on
the trail has downplayed this violence. Part of this downplaying is a direct result of some
historians' attempts to move beyond the old paradigm of "violent savages." Multiple
historians have demonstrated that emigrants fabricated accounts of Indian attacks. To
further strength their analysis some of catalog moments of friendship and cooperation
between "emigrants" and "Indians." Yet, as I have argued previously, violence was a
central feature of the overland trail experience. Understanding this violence requires
looking beyond environmental destruction, homicide, rape, and other physical violence to
overlanders' self-styled "sonic conquest." Overlanders speculated about the aural impact
of their wagon trains on the indigenous peoples and lands of the western wilderness and
they portrayed their sounds as having the power to subdue the savage wilds and help
transform the West into American territory. EuroAmericans and Native Americans came
together to make music and shared other aural experiences, but in the writings of
overlanders sound ultimately became a way to describe how a transitory migration helped
to lay claim to a vast expanse of American territory.
9

8
On tourists as complicit in colonial projects see, Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes:
Travel Writing and Transculturation (London; New York: Routledge, 1992); Inderpal
Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); and David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire:
Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial administration (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1993).
9
Sarah Keyes, “‘Like a Roaring Lion’: The Overland Trail as a Sonic Conquest,” Journal
of American History 96, no. 1 (June 2009): 19-43. For recent studies that examine the
9

This dissertation seeks to build on my previous work by placing relationships and
encounters between Indians and whites at the center of the trail experience. More often
than not overlanders' assessment of the trail and their experiences during their journey
depended on their perception of Indian action—real, imagined, and reinterpreted.
Emigrants considered themselves to be spectators to indigenous culture and society at the
same time that they imagined an indigenous audience for their treks. Overlanders liked to
speculate about indigenous people—their thoughts, beliefs, actions, and, in particular,
their perceptions of the emigrants and the overland trail. Indigenous voices are
tantalizingly sparse, especially when compared to the vast documentary record of
emigrant accounts, but they are preserved in government records and their own writings,
such as the autobiographies of Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins and Luther Standing Bear.
Moreover, it is possible to read emigrants' descriptions of indigenous people against the
grain. Unfortunately, while the EuroAmerican record of the trail is expansive it is often
frustratingly terse or misleading about cross-cultural encounters. This dissertation aspires
to move beyond these terse anecdotes and triangulate these encounters against
government documents, newspapers, anthropology, and EuroAmerican culture to give
them their proper analytic weight.
10

trail as one of cross-cultural encounters see, Michael Tate, Indians and Emigrants:
Encounters on the Overland Trails (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006).
10
Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Life among the Piutes, their wrong and claims. (Boston:
Cupples, Upham, 1883); and Luther Standing Bear, My people, the Sioux (Lincoln, Neb.:
University of Nebraska Press, 1975).
10

This dissertation reconceives of the trail as both an experience driven by cross-
cultural encounters between Indians and whites as well as a journey that places major
themes of nineteenth-century United States history in a new light. It takes the story of
westward expansion down to the level of interactions between ordinary people. This is a
story of both egregious racial violence and startling compassion. It is a story whose
outcomes turned on contingencies, such as a bolting pony or a firearm accidentally
discharged. It is a history that brings together Indian and white, slave and free and places
the West at the center of nineteenth-century United States history. This dissertation
suggests that the trail was not a curious interlude but rather an important moment in
American history. Overlanders not only wrote of their own triumphs and tribulations on
the difficult western journey, they inevitably wrote about, worried about, and thought
long and hard about wider American issues and instances in a period of lasting social and
political change.
The same interest in and perceived necessity of seizing additional lands and
resources that pulled overlanders west had also drawn Europeans to America over two
centuries earlier. America began as a British colony, and it remained fundamentally
shaped by competing demands and actions of Native Americans and other imperial
powers. For centuries the Pacific Coast on which overlanders set their sights had fueled
inter-imperial contests. Accessing the Pacific promised an open path to trade with nations
of the Far East and, particularly, China. In the Early Republic, Oregon and California
were primarily stopping places and launching pads for trading expeditions that
crisscrossed the Pacific basin. While these China traders set sail from Boston and New
11

York, other EuroAmericans infiltrated economic networks across the middle of the
continent. Here, men traveled westward to join fur-trading companies based in western
outposts like St. Louis. Overlanders liked to portray themselves as breaking new ground
but they traversed landscapes and met Native Americans for whom the sight of
Europeans was routine rather than exceptional. Some of these Indians had migrated
westward only recently, seizing the opportunity to live a new life on the plains. Others
had been forced to remove westward at the point of a gun.
11

Overlanders, in contrast, marked the most recent voluntary EuroAmerican
migration westward across the continent. One of the earliest emigrant highways began in
southeastern Pennsylvania in the lower Delaware River Valley. In the eighteenth century
it extended through the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian Mountains to Missouri and
eventually as far west as the German Hill Country of Texas. By 1763 British colonists
had pushed westward across the Appalachian Mountains. Other routes of the era followed

11
For a discussion of European interest in trade with China and interimperial competition
for the resources of what would become the American West see, Paul W Mapp, The
Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713-1763 (Chapel Hill; Williamsburg, Va.:
University of North Carolina Press; Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early
American History and Culture, 2011); and Michael Block, “New England Merchants, the
China Trade, and the Origins of California” (PhD diss., University of Southern
California, 2011). On Indian migration forced and voluntary see, Richard White, “The
Winning of the West: The Expansion of the Western Sioux in the Eighteenth and
Nineteenth Centuries,” The Journal of American History 65, no. 2 (1978): 319–43; Theda
Perdue and Michael D. Green, The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears (New York:
Viking, 2007); and John Bowes, Exiles and Pioneers: Eastern Indians in the Trans-
Mississippi West (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
12

from and to more northern and southern places bringing greater numbers of British and
other recent European immigrants westward across the continent.
12

With independence achieved settlers pushed farther into what was known as the
"backwoods." The young United States took more of a role in facilitating this westward
expansion. The Northwest Ordinance (1787) divided land for settlement and accelerated
westward expansion. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 seemed to assure that the United
States would continue to grow ever westward. The 1804-6 exploration of Lewis and
Clark preceded emigrants overland to the Pacific Coast and helped to stoke interest in the
region. Accounts like those of Lewis and Clark as well as later explorers including John
Charles Frémont as well as journalists like Edwin Bryant also helped to frame
overlanders' interpretations of the landscape through which they traveled. Published
materials became a benchmark for private correspondence as diarists told their friends
and family when the power of description failed or time cut it short, "see Byrant."
13

These references to published material are just one example of how emigrant
accounts were part of a collective, public literature. Some travelers designed their
accounts to keep track of movements and distances traveled. Other narratives helped to
satisfy a desire for self-reflection as well as a means to communicate their experiences to

12
Steven Stoll, Larding the lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 74.
13
For an example of "see Bryant" see P. C.Tiffany, "Overland Journey from Mount
Pleasant, Iowa to California,", June 25, 1849,Western Americana Collection, Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. For a discussion of the overland
trail diary as a genre see, Dale L. Morgan, “The Significance and Value of the Overland
Journal,” in Probing the American West: Papers from the Santa Fe Conference (Santa
Fe, NM: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1962) ed. K. Ross Toole et al, 26–34.
13

distant family and friends. Letters written to brothers, sisters, parents, and wives at home
often made their way from relative to relative and then from neighbor to neighbor or
wound up in print in local newspapers. This blurring of public and private is exemplified
by the famous collection of letters by overlander Louisa Clappe. Clappe addressed her
letters "Dear Sister" but wrote them as a series for a periodical.
14

Through countless letters home, and by way of their diaries, journals, and
reminiscences, EuroAmericans engaged with the landscapes and peoples of these distant
places, both at the time of “the crossing” and for years and decades afterwards.
“Overlanders” sketched what they saw on their journey, they carefully pressed an untold
number of flowers and leaves into their diaries, letters, and books, and they imagined that
the details of the journey would forever be committed to memory. The trail experience
was of course lived, but it was also sifted and re-written by time and memory (as it is
still). When aligned with government documents, newspapers, and other published
materials, these diaries and journals reveal not only the personal experiences of thousands
of ordinary EuroAmericans but also the ramifications of the trail experience for pressing
concerns of nineteenth-century life.
Forty or fifty years ago historians, like the general public, saw the covered wagon
as the defining icon of westward expansion. The overland trail captured the romantic
story of the West as a place where heroic settlers battled Indians and the elements to
spread democracy and domesticity across the continent. In the hands of scholars, writers,

14
I would like to thank William Handley for bringing this example to my attention.
Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe, The Shirley letters from the California mines, 1851-
1852 (New York: Knopf, 1961).
14

novelists, and filmmakers alike, the story was neat, melodramatic, and ever so wedded to
western movement as national and individual progress. And it was wrong. Fortunately a
New Western History rose up over the last generation to displace the tired and
complacent Eurocentric assumptions of the long established narrative. But in doing so,
the New Western scholars missed an important opportunity: to rework rather than set
aside a pivotal American story.
15

This study attempts to do what New Western historians could and should have
done. This dissertation reconceives the trail as both an experience driven by cross-
cultural encounters between Indians and whites as well as a journey that places major
themes of nineteenth-century United States history in a new light. We tell a half-told tale
if we cast this migration as only a collective document of westering. That vast
documentary record is rendered full when we see the record as telling of all of American
history, east to west and west to east. Overlanders underwent and wrote about events and
experiences which provided them not only with thrilling narratives of western adventures
and hardships but also lessons, solutions, and insights to some of the central problems of
nineteenth-century America.
16

15
Although for the most part historians have not attempted to reevaluate this story as a
whole for the past thirty or forty years it would be remiss not to acknowledge the work of
Michael Tate and Will Bagley who is currently working on a four-volume series of the
overland trail, the first of which appeared in 2010. See, Tate, Indians and Emigrants; and
Will Bagley, So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Oregon and California trails,
1812-1848 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010).
16
Moreover, even as the trail has fallen out of favor with academic historians, edited
journals and diaries continue to be produced by and for overland trail enthusiasts and
general readers. The Arthur H. Clark Company, affiliated with the University of
Oklahoma Press, pubishes many of the edited diaries and journals. There is robust
15

Before the trail became a casualty of New Western History in the 1980s, a
number of historians had already taken significant steps to tell more than a flat narrative
of white triumphalism. In the mid twentieth century David Potter explored the problem of
the trail as one of mobilization. Focusing on the material demands and challenges of this
migration, Potter moved decisively away from previous portrayals of the journey as a
gleeful pageant.
17

Historians have also argued for the importance of Indians to the overland trail
experience. Many of these works have dealt fairly narrowly with the question of Indian
attacks. In 1968 the historian Robert L. Munkres concluded that emigrants tended to
overemphasize and fabricate stories of Indian attacks and violence.
18
John Unruh's
massive synthesis The Plains Across (1979) explored the trail as an experience that not
only changed over time but was also at heart a story of interactions between emigrants,
indigenous peoples, and the landscapes of the West. Unruh also foregrounded the
fallacies of some overland accounts, and in particular claims regarding indigenous
violence. He concluded that the trail was a lot less violent than EuroAmerican chroniclers
would have had us suppose. Such conclusions provide a footing on which to build a

interest as well from the Oregon and California Trails Association (OCTA) and the
National Park Service (NPS) in preserving trail sites and creating trail histories.
17
David M. Potter, Introduction to Trail to California: the Overland Journal of Vincent
Geiger and Wakeman Bryarly, ed. David M. Potter (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1945), 1-73.
18
Munkres drew his conclusion from 66 diaries and limited his study to the portion of the
route along the Platte River. Robert L. Munkres, “The Plains Indian Threat on the Oregon
Trail Before 1860,” Annals of Wyoming 40 (1968): 193–221. Munkres is one of a cadre
of prolific trail historians.
16

deeper exploration of the meanings of cross-cultural encounters. The historian Michael
Tate attempted a similar study of the overland trail just six years ago, focusing his entire
book on these "encounters." Nonetheless, these studies fail to move beyond the assertion
that cross-cultural encounters were a significant element of these westward treks and
reach conclusions of larger significance.
19

A number of historians have also examined questions of EuroAmerican culture,
particularly gender relationships, on the trail. The same year as Unruh's study, John Mack
Faragher took up the subject of gender relations on the trail. In Women and Men on the
Overland Trail, Faragher argued for a conservative impulse among overland travelers
who, in the face of geographic change and contemporary challenges to cultural
conventions, strove to maintain existing gender relations. Faragher is one of a number of
historians who have recognized the rich possibilities of a topic for which there is a great
archive of accounts authored by women as well as children.
20

19
Unruh, Plains Across; and Tate, Indians and Emigrants. As early as 1984 the historian
James P. Ronda (who served as president of the WHA from 2000-2001) conceived of the
Lewis and Clark exploration, the famous first westward cross-continental trek, as
essentially a story of encounters between people from different cultures. As other
Ethnohistorians had before him Ronda drew on Archaeology and Anthropology to help
flush out Native American motivation and perception from the limited references in
EuroAmerican-authored texts. James P. Ronda, Lewis and Clark Among the Indians,
(University of Nebraska Press, 1984).
20
John Mack Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail, vol. 2nd (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2001). For other studies of the trail that address the experiences of
women, as well as children, another underrepresented group, see, Julie Roy Jeffrey,
Frontier Women: the trans-Mississippi West, 1840-1880, (New York: Hill and Wang,
1979); Elliott West, Growing up with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western
Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989); Elliott West, The Way
to the West Essays on the Central Plains, (Albuquerque N.M.: University of New
17

The first wave of New Western historians, however, depicted the trail as a tired
tale of triumphal EuroAmerican expansion into a "wilderness" imaginatively depopulated
of its Native American and Mexican inhabitants.
21
Although it was Frederick Jackson
Turner's "Significance of the Frontier in American History" that would take the biggest
beating in the quest to upend hide bound western history, the overland trail, which
seemed all too Turnerian to these scholars also fell by the wayside. Since that time
(roughly the later 1980s and early 1990s), Turner has been, while not resurrected, at least
partially reclaimed and recognized for his positing of a less empty wilderness as well as
for his attention to the creation of democratic frameworks.
22
This dissertation seeks to the
same for the trail. At the heart of New Western historians' intervention was the need to
consider the west not as an uninhabited place but rather one populated and traversed by

Mexico Press, 1995); and Kenneth Holmes, Covered Wagon Women: Diaries & Letters
from the Western Trails., Bison Books ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998).
21
On the call to move beyond the overland trail because it focused too much on one brief
historical moment of movement into the West without considering other factors shaping
western development or traffic out of the region see, Richard White, "Trashing the
Trails," in Trails: Toward a New Western History eds. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde
A. Milner, and Charles E. Rankin (Lawrence, Kan., 1991), 38-9. New Western historians
recognized the insights of Unruh and Fargher even as they asserted a need to move
beyond the study of the overland trail, Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of
Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987),
38, 40, 52-3; and Richard White, "It's your misfortune and none of my own": a history of
the American West (Norman, 1991), 203-8.
22
On efforts to reclaim Turner see, Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Turnerians All: The
Dream of a Helpful History in an Intelligible World,” American Historical Review 100,
no. 3 (1995): 697–716; Kerwin Lee Klein, “Reclaiming the ‘F’ Word, or Being and
Becoming Postwestern,” Pacific Historical Review 65, no. 2 (May 1, 1996): 179–215;
and John Mack Faragher, ed., Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: The Significance of
the Frontier in American History and Other Essays (New York: Holt, 1994).
18

various groups including Native Americans, Mexicans, as well as EuroAmericans. The
story of the trail is precisely that kind of story of cross-cultural interaction.
23

Similarly, historians of Western America like other postcolonial scholars have
begun to consider western travelers and explorers as more than simply agents of empire.
This story of the trail builds on these insights. Neither overlanders nor the overland trail
fits neatly into a framework of conquest and domination. Overlanders could be both
critics and proponents of colonialism, sometimes within just a few dirt and water-stained
pages of the same overland journal. This ambiguity, not its polar opposite, is one of the
reasons that the trail can be a revealing story not only for scholars of the American West
but American History and postcolonial studies writ large.
24

The trail is a powerful vehicle to advance both the major directives of western
history and point towards new directions. First, the trail portrays the west as shaped by
peoples of many races as well as the landscape. Secondly the trail connect the history of
the region with broader national trends and events. The overland trail once commanded

23
For two recent studies that expound this theme see, Sherry Smith, “Reconciliation and
Restitution in the American West,” Western Historical Quarterly 41, no. 1 (2010): 5–21;
and Karin Louise Huebner, “Remembrance and reform: a multi-generational saga of a
Euro-American-Indian family, 1739-1924,” (PhD diss., University of Southern
California, 2009). For another study that is more geographically and temporally close to
the trail experience see, Mark Alan Sigmon, “Heretics of race : an exploration of Indian-
White relationships in the trans-Mississippi West 1820-1850”, (PhD diss., University of
Caliofrnia, Berkeley, 1995).
24
On the need to move beyond post-colonial theory's blanket conviction in travelers and
explorers as agents of empire and to create more nuanced historical studies see, David M
Wrobel, “Global West, American Frontier,” Pacific Historical Review 78, no. 1 (2009):
1–26; and Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the
Roots of American Environmentalism (New York: Viking, 2006), 18-20.
19

the attention of many American historians. This study hopes that it will do so again.
Finally, this study bridges many of the current subspeciality divisions in western history.
The overland trail does not fit neatly into any of the rich subfields that are currently
dominating what may be termed the "Post New Western" history. Post new western
scholars have continued to press forward into subfields such as environmental history,
borderlands, and the new Indian history. While vibrant, these subfields may be
symptomatic of a field fragmented from within and searching for a coherent conceptual
whole. The trail brings all of these stories together. Emigrants and Indians, Emigrants and
landscape, Emigrants and Mexican Americans, these are some of the defining features of
the trail experience. Building on the insights of these fields helps to stitch back together
not only a more interesting story of the trail but also of the nineteenth-century American
West and the United States. This project addresses head on the specter of overland trail
that continues to shadow post new western Historians, some of whom argue for the
significance of their migration studies on the basis that they are "every bit as compelling
and significant" as the overland trail.
25

This project also hopes to intervene in the regional fragmentation of American
history. It is not new to say that New England remains equated with the nation, but
historiography continues to tilt east and north. Western places and processes are too often
detached from the broader narrative of American history, particularly the narrative of the

25
Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 96; and Jared Farmer, On Zion's mount :
Mormons, Indians, and the American landscape (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2008), 292.
20

nineteenth century where the Civil War continues to dominate the scholarship and direct
the periodization. This logic of sidelining the West follows along the lines of casting the
region as alternately too familiar or too foreign. In the extreme version of the "too
familiar" formulation, Western processes and events appear so similar to processes in
other regions of the United States that it seems possible to facilely extend theses about
other places, say Boston or New York, to the West. In the "too foreign" version the West
is so different that it seems altogether removed from the United States and thus remains
unincorporated in the narrative at all.
26

This false separation also perpetuates a distinction between a United States "core"
centered along the eastern seaboard and a "periphery" to the West. Scholars of empire
and postcolonial studies, however, have moved beyond this paradigm to explore empires
as transnational spaces characterized by "circuits of movement." In this formulation core
and periphery as fixed geographical spaces and centers of relative power lose meaning in
favor of the recognition of shifting movement and boundaries. Once on the trail
EuroAmericans looked east to home and the United States but their family, friends, and

26
For calls to reperiodize the nineteenth century see, Elliott West, “Reconstructing
Race,” The Western Historical Quarterly. 34, no. 1 (2003): 7–26. For examples of studies
that extend theses about the nineteenth century to the West without considering the
perspective from the region see, Rebecca Edwards, New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded
Age, 1865-1905 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Scholars have effectively
placed the iconic western event of the California Gold Rush, previously perceived as "too
foreign," into a national cultural and social context. See, Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring
Camp: the Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000);
Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Days of Gold: the California Gold Rush and the American
Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); and Brian Roberts, American
Alchemy: the California Gold Rush and Middle-class Culture (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2000). This study does the same for the overland trail.
21

public at large looked west and read their narratives with an avidity that stemmed from
conviction in the importance of people, events, and processes on the "edge." Not all
EuroAmericans desired to undertake the journey, but many more yearned to approximate
it through texts, images, and face-to-face interactions with those who had undertaken the
journey and returned. These travelers' journeys were made greater because they had
walked beyond and ahead of national settlement, charting its future even as they provided
a window into its past. Overlanders, in the historical parlance of our own times, were
uniquely transnational figures.
27

One need only cite a few of the major events of the nineteenth-century United
States to see the West at the center. Unsettling political, cultural and social issues vexed
the nation during these middle decades of the nineteenth century. In the 1840s, the United
States-Mexico War and Oregon territory dispute transformed the land on which
overlanders set their sights into a part of the American nation. Sectionalism—set to a boil
over disputes about the future of the West—brought about the Civil War and eventual
victory for the Union, re-solidifying (in theory) the United States and freeing four million
former slaves. The overland trail ran through all of these decades and all these issues. It is
one of the central, if not the primary, American experience in the generation leading to
the Civil War. It is not “out West.” It is not “something else going on.” Nor was the trail
just a thread that ran through these decades of change; it was a formative force in shaping

27
On the importance of viewing imperial and colonial spaces as "circuits of movement"
in transnational spaces as opposed to separate nodes of core and periphery see, Ann
Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: the Politics of Comparison in (Post) Colonial
Studies,” Itinerario 27, no. 3-4 (2003): 263–284.
22

and transforming major issues of the period. Overlanders, through the experience of
travel and the dissemination of their stories, crafted a particular narrative of the making
of America into a transcontinental nation. They argued that their migration not only
helped fold the West into America's cultural landscape, but that they also provided the
stories and lessons that spoke to other dominant concerns of the period. In so doing, they
offered a compelling narrative, their own hypothesis for nineteenth-century America
cobbled from a mosaic of the experiences of hundreds of thousands of ordinary
EuroAmericans.
The plains through which overlanders traveled were unfamiliar territory, and the
emigrants described their journeys as a distinctive period of their lives. This was true, but
the problems of the trail were the problems of the United States. The documentary record
of the trail speaks to a number of issues of the period including technology, violence, and
childhood. I have selected the themes that follow because they emerged as prominent
concerns in my sources and because they provide a fresh perspective on the trail
experience as well as the broader national context. Like those who stayed home,
overlanders grappled with major issues such as growing economic dependency, slavery,
mobility, improper attendance to care of the dying and the dead, and a melancholic
nostalgia for the past.
This dissertation takes up each of these subjects in turn. It begins with comparing
the cultural symbolism of the trail to everyday emigrant experience or westering practice.
The trail's cultural meaning was as expansive as its geographic scope. It was at once a
path to romantic adventure and economic freedom as well as one towards fulfillment of
23

the Nation's imagined—promised—destiny. So too does this chapter explore themes of
dependency, relations between labor and capital and ideas of religion in understanding
the significance of the journey. The second chapter situates the trail at the center of the
keystone debate over national destiny—would the United States remain a country of
slavery or become one of freedom? Overlanders traveled through territories whose status
as slave or free became the question of the era. These questions are inextricably
connected with attempts to draw racial boundaries, a process that worked in different
ways along the trail. Emigrants' movement was entirely political, even as they attempted
to attend to the quotidian business of traveling.
The next chapter addresses this problem of mobility head-on. EuroAmericans
were moving to all cardinal points across the continent (as well as outside of the country)
in this period. The trail by virtue of its vast distance and unfamiliar territory presented an
extreme manifestation of such mobility. As such it threatened the maintenance of the
domestic sphere as the division between private and public, family and gender that lay at
the heart of this construction. Yet the trail also helped to move families west, especially
to the open lands of Oregon.
Chapter Four examines the cessation of the mobility: what happened and what did
it mean when overlanders had to leave loved ones along the way, buried in shallow
graves hastily dug? Although mortality rates on the trail more or less mirrored those in
the settled United States, the challenges of the trail severely constrained emigrant ability
to attend to the dying and dead. Of these concerns the greatest was for the bodies left
behind along the trail – concerns revelatory in their cultural meaning and practice.
24

The final chapter looks at the way that overlanders, their families, and
EuroAmericans at large remembered the trail in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. It was in this period that EuroAmericans cement the significance of a migration
that had been touted and transformed since the first EuroAmerican wagon rolled over the
South Pass of the Rocky Mountains in the 1820s. Dynamic and alive with movement and
meaning as it was being trampled, the trail remained so even as time passed, as wagons
stilled, and as grass grew over the ruts carved in the earth. This thesis closes with a close
look at the memory of the trail and the cultural work those many memories were
expected to perform, as the nineteenth century became the twentieth.
25

Chapter One: The Great Medicine Road of the Whites

In the summer of 1851, a decade after travel across the overland trail commenced
in earnest, the French Jesuit Father de Smet accompanied representatives of the
Assiniboine, Minnetarees and Crow eastward across the plains to Fort Laramie in the
Southeastern part of Wyoming territory. The men were on their way to attend an 1851
treaty session with other Indians of the plains and the United States government. The
meeting had been called to resolve disputes that had arisen in part because of emigration
across the overland trail. When De Smet and his companions reached the overland trail
he described how his Indian companions approached the mile-wide expanse of trodden
grass and soil impacted by thousands of wagons. They picked up spoons and other
objects left by the wayside and told him that this was the "great medicine road of the
whites."
1

Although we can not be certain of the accuracy of De Smet's transcription of these
Indians' words nor of their exact meaning, his language indicates that the sight of the
great road and the emigrant debris was not only visually arresting but also potentially
symbolized something of great power and mystery.
2
Overlanders, in their own language,

1
Pierre-Jean de Smet, Life, Letters and Travels of Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, S.J.,
1801-1873: Missionary Labors and Adventures Among the Wild Tribes of the North
American Indians vol. 1 (New York: F.P. Harper, 1905), 63. On the Fort Laramie treaty
see, Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to
Wounded Knee (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 37-9.
2
On the meaning of "medicine" see, Beth LaDow, The Medicine Line: Life and Death on
a North American Borderland (New York: Routledge, 2001), 40-1.
26

said as much about the Indian trails, villages, goods, and peoples that they trespassed
over and encountered as they made their way across the continent. The overland trail was
a unique world for many EuroAmericans, due in large part to their ability to interact with
indigenous peoples of whom many had only read. The trail was a distinctive space and
experience for Indians as well as emigrants. Nonetheless, the power and meaning of these
interactions, for both peoples, was tied to specific dilemmas and aspirations of their
respective societies—societies whose past, present, and future were inextricably
intertwined.
As revolutions roiled Europe during the spring of 1848, many EuroAmericans
turned their sights to the western edge of North America. A few months after the Treaty
of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded California, Arizona, and New Mexico to the United States, a
Louisville newspaper editor celebrated the paired goals of romantic adventure and
economic gain for motivating overlanders to embark on the transcontinental journey to
California and Oregon. In the cultural script describing the significance of the overland
trail, these two pursuits worked in tandem to further the nation's imagined destiny. While
the editor deemed the "spirit of gain" less romantic than the "spirit of adventure," both
had the effect of motivating EuroAmericans to undertake the journey and thus advance
national expansion.
3

Emigrants themselves tended to put the two themes together, at least in their
minds, as they contemplated pushing off for the West. Adventure and gain were, for

3
Lousville Journal, May 18, 1848, reprinted in St. Joseph Gazette, June 2, 1848, quoted
in Unruh, Plains Across, 58.
27

many of them, tied entirely together, two sides of the same westering coin. Or so they
imagined. Once out on the trail, however, overlanders frequently encountered a gap
between these lofty ideals and the realities of their journeys. Romantic adventure did not
always square with the sheer tedium of the several thousand mile journey. At the same
time, the constraints of the trail knit travelers together in mutual dependence, instead of
casting them in solo pursuit of economic freedom and gain. But the expansive cultural
symbolism of the trail, that combined romantic adventure and gain and aligned it with
national destiny, helped to lift the trail above these concerns and cement its enduring
significance. Emigrants cast the journey as a romantic, western adventure for themselves
and the nation. Achieving this adventure, however, depended on their interactions and
encounters with Indians. So too did it stem from the Christian religious symbolism of a
journey through the wilderness and a nationalistic conviction in America's providential
destiny. Overlanders described these goals of adventure and gain as interrelated, and they
drew on the symbolism of the trail as a providential, national enterprise to help bridge the
gap between real experience and imagined ideals.
In the early to mid-nineteenth century, the journey to the Pacific represented both
the opportunity to participate in the nation's imagined destiny and the path to economic
independence. Politicians, journalists, and many members of the EuroAmerican public
framed the trail as a means to advance the nation's destined westward growth and to solve
the country's growing problem of economic inequality and dependence. Those
imaginings inevitably saddled the journey with expectations beyond what could be
reasonably expected; this gap between overland naïveté and experience should not
28

surprise us, given the hyperbole attached to migrating to Oregon or California. But the
trail experience not only fell short of these goals, it also deepened dilemmas it was
supposed to help resolve. Westering emigrants felt their independence wash away as they
established dependent relationships with Native Americans, the government, as well as
strangers on the trail. Moreover, conditions on the trail compromised emigrants' religious
expression and raised questions about their civility even as they were supposed to
represent God and the nation's pilgrims. Yet, by selectively drawing on the symbolism of
the overland trail as a moment of divinely sanctioned expansion, romantic adventure and
the means to economic freedom, overlanders tied their journeys to these lofty ideals and
made good on their investments.
The identification of the West with romantic adventure and economic opportunity
was a sacred creed of nineteenth-century America. In novels like Washington Irving's
The Adventures of Captain Bonneville and images such as the paintings of George Caleb
Bingham, the West was a romanticized region populated with frontiersmen and Indians
who, EuroAmericans claimed, no longer existed in the settled United States. If the far
West represented the last chance to experience the adventures of a passing era, it was also
to this region that EuroAmericans set their sights for solving the nation's social problems
and achieving the future which they imagined had been promised the nation. For
Northern EuroAmericans, politicians, farmers, as well as laborers, the overland trail
represented a path to fulfill the Jeffersonian dream of creating a democratic, republican
nation of independent yeoman. By the antebellum period, promoters of western
expansion declared that the expansive free lands of the West would not only advance the
29

economic solvency of western farmers, but also provide a "safety valve" to siphon off
increasingly dependent and impoverished EuroAmericans as well as newly arrived
European immigrants.
4
The 1848 discovery of gold in California added the empirical
exclamation point to this equation that put region and economic gain together. Now the
West would not only foster economic independence, it held the possibility of ensuring
that such independence came by way of wealth. Such was the vision of overlander David
Dewolf as he embarked for California, sure that the far West would render him
“independent” of the “Darned Sonabitches” who had lorded it over him because he was
poor.
5

4
Traditional economic histories of the nineteenth-century American West have focused
on the theory of the West as a "safety valve." Frequently attributed to Frederick Jackson
Turner and his frontier thesis, this theory proposed that "empty" western lands would
provide a place to send new emigrants. Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of
the Frontier in American History (1893)," in John Mack Faragher, ed., Rereading
Frederick Jackson Turner: The Significance of the Frontier in American History and
Other Essays (New York: Holt, 1994), 31-60. For a definition and discussion of the
limitations of this theory see, William Deverell, “To Loosen the Safety Valve: Eastern
Workers and Western Lands,” The Western Historical Quarterly 19, no. 3 (1988): 269.
Social reformers, of course, did not specify that travelers should go overland in order to
reach the promised lands of Oregon and California. Bostonian Hall J. Kelley began
promoting migration to Oregon Territory for unemployed men as early as 1831. Kelley
and other social reformers also tried to organize ships to transport single young women in
need of husbands or jobs to the Pacific. For an example of Kelley's work promoting
emigration see, Hall J. Kelley, A Geographical Sketch of That Part of North America,
Called Oregon Containing an Account of the Indian Title;--the Nature of a Right of
Sovereignty;--the First Discoveries;--climate and Seasons;--face of the Country and
Mountains--natural Divisions, Physical Appearance and Soil of Each;--forests and
Vegetable Productions;--rivers, Bays, &c.; Island, &c.; Animals;--the Disposition of the
Indians, and the Number and Situation of Their Tribes;--together with an Essay on the
Advantages Resulting from a Settlement of the Territory. To Which Is Attached a New
Map of the Country, (Boston: J. Howe, 1830).
5
Edwin E Cox, ed., "David DeWolf; Diary of the Overland trail, 1849, and letters, 1849-
50, of Captain David De Wolf," Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society for
30

Although some guidebooks primed overlanders to think they were bringing
capitalism to the plains for the first time, those who took the journey knew better. Former
fur traders and EuroAmericans fresh from western outposts set up trading stations or
traveling peddling shops to satisfy emigrant demands for foodstuffs. Mormons
established permanent ferry posts in order to reduce the costs of their own emigration and
to profit from the less organized gentile sojourners. In the fledging settlement of Salt
Lake, the passing gentiles provided a much-needed market for Mormon agricultural
products. In their diaries, journals, letters, and reminiscences, many overlanders also
described Native Americans as shrewd bargainers whose deft exploitation of passing
emigrants rivaled that of the wily Yankee or Latter Day Saints trader, the latter of which
earned excessive and often undeserved ire from Protestants. Other emigrants labeled
Indian efforts to trade mere "begging," and thus illegitimate. The trail created a seasonal
economy whereby indigenous inhabitants of the plains could purchase worn out livestock
for a small fraction of their value in the United States and gain access to EuroAmerican
manufactured clothing and other goods. Indians and mountain men were uniquely
positioned to profit from this migration.
Overlanders recognized and resented this advantage. John Rankin Pyeatt accused
Indians he met near Salt Lake City of fabricating tales of "burnt grass” ahead to convince

the year..., Vol. 3 (1925): 221. California held its own economic promise of a ready
supply of gold that once obtained would allow miners to purchase greater independence
at home. Employing tools of modern industry, EuroAmericans transformed western
landscapes in their own capitalist image. For two excellent studies of these
transformations see, West, Contested Plains; and William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis:
Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).
31

his company to leave their wagons behind and buy their ponies and mules.
6
By declaring
that the grass was all gone to the west these Indians, perhaps Shoshones, were telling
Pyeatt and his company that they should sell at a loss now or risk losing the entire value
of their horses later on. Pyeatt was confident they were lying, but other overlanders
worried they might make the wrong decision. Emigrants also bewailed their constrained
choices on the plains that forced them to sell goods "at sacrifice," including items like
heavy bedclothes, worth hundreds of dollars in the United States, at a pittance to Indian
traders.
7

The economic opportunities that the trail presented for the Sioux, Cheyenne,
Pawnee, and Indians of the plains and Great Basin, who arrived to trade, should not,
however, deflect attention from the violent destruction emigrants and their wagons
wrought on the landscapes and economies of the lands through which they passed.
Overlanders destroyed vital resources and transformed the economic choices of

6
John Rankin Pyeatt, Manuscript Collection MS P99, University of Arkansas Special
Collections, quoted in Patrick and Jack Fletcher and Lee Whiteley, Cherokee Trail
Diaries (Sequim, Wash., 1999), 131. Some guidebooks suggested that overlanders bring
goods to trade such as beads and cheap trinkets that would appeal to indigenous peoples.
However, most overlanders found that while Indians were often interested in these cheap
trinkets, some did value other goods that emigrants had, such as clothing, food, as well as
cash. Lansford W. Hastings, The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California:
Containing Scenes and Incidents of a Party of Oregon Emigrant : a Description of
California, with a Description of the Different Routes to Those Countries, and All
Necessary Information Relative to the Equipment, Supplies, and the Method of Traveling
(Cincinnati: George Conclin, 1845), 146.
7
Stanislaus Laselle, Diary, April 18, 1849, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San
Marino, California. Many of the diaries I will cite are paginated. Whenever possible I
attempt to cite by the date of the entry. However, if the date is unclear and there is a page
number I will provide that information.
32

indigenous inhabitants. Emigrants' livestock consumed vast quantities of prairie grasses,
decimated the water supply, and polluted rivers and streams. Iron-rimmed wagon tires cut
deep ruts in prairie sod destroying the grassland to such an extent that the marks they left
are yet visible today. Indigenous peoples' recognition of the destructive violence of the
emigrant trains is well documented in government records. But Indians did not simply
bewail these changes; they also tried to wring compensation from the passing
overlanders.
8

Evidence in overland narratives suggests that indigenous inhabitants of the plains
as well as fur traders understood the allure they held for passing emigrants. Recognizing
the emigrant thirst for adventure and touristic excitement, Indians and mountain men
sometimes catered to these desires for their own benefit. Indians and Mountain men did
not just sell goods; they also sold emigrants a western experience. Fur traders, for
instance, touted not only their ability to purchase decrepit livestock but their persona as
rugged frontiersmen. It was not for nothing that Jim Bridger proclaimed to passing
emigrants and military men alike that he had lived in the mountains for twenty-eight
years and for sixteen of them never tasted white bread, a sign of his frontier lifestyle and
far remove from EuroAmerican civilization.
9

8
On Indian complaints about the desctruction caused by emigrants traveling the overland
trail see, Ostler, Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism, 32-7.
9
Mountain Men, like the cowboys of western dude ranches of the late nineteenth century,
sold an authentic touristic experience. Emigrants in turn resold these accounts to their
readership as part of their exciting adventure of the western frontier. See Martha M
Morgan, A Trip Across the Plains in 1849-1850, pp. 12–13, quoted in J. Cecil Alter, Jim
Bridger (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), 236; and W.F. Raynolds, Report
on the exploration of the Yellowstone River (Washington, 1868), 76–7.
33

Overlanders saw their journey as an opportunity to temporarily experience some
of the wildness that men like Bridger lived. This conceit of being "the first" in the
wilderness along with the opportunity to see and interact with Indians and Mountain men
had great cultural value. In his reminiscence J. T. Redman described his central
motivating factor to take the journey as a desire "to go amid new scenes and see a country
and people uncivilized and living in their wild state and customs." For Redman, who
hired as an ox driver, his temporary employment was an opportunity to go West, an
opportunity he made good on as, he declared, the journey "proved to be quite an
education to me."
10
Or, as another traveler put it, "Part of the way our road was never
before traveled by white men, and this part of the trip entirely pays me for all fatigue and
hardships experienced since leaving the States."
11
Willful ignorance of previous travelers
and current inhabitants permitted overlanders to augment the significance and value of
their treks.
So too did emigrants willfully bend encounters with Indians in an attempt to gain
the most from their journeys. At Ash Hollow, a common camping place and resting
ground located in Nebraska, Lewis Kilbourn encountered a "large encampment" of Sioux
and Cheyenne. Kilbourn and his party "spent one day buesing [sic] ourselves in
witnessing the peculiarities of Indian life" while the Indians "were as busy in trying there

10
J. T. Redman, "Reminiscences and experiences on my trip across the plains to
California sixty-one years ago when I drove four mules to a covered wagon," ts, pp. 1–2,
Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
11
Chicago Commercial Advertiser Feb 7 and 13 1849, Box 5, "Illinois," the Ralph P.
Bieber Collection, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
34

[sic] luck at begging something or anything that they might eat or wear." Kilbourn
refused to trade with the Indians, instead preferring to lapse into ethnographic reverie.
12

One might imagine that Kilbourn, primed like other overlanders to expect to meet
violent Indians, would have been grateful that these men and women wanted to trade. But
for emigrants violence on the trail was not just a threat but an asset. In fact, violence and
danger were so quickly commoditized into romantic adventure that it was often hard to
separate the two. These claims for romantic significance rested on often-purposeful
reconfigurations of their journeys. The editor of Bayard Taylor's overland narrative
delighted that he had been robbed, declaring with great excitement to Francis Parkman
that during his cross-continental overland trip Bayard Taylor had been "romantically
robbed by banditti in Mexico—a capital incident for the book!!" Or when Kit Carson, hot
on the pursuit of a party of Jicarilla Apaches who had taken a white female captive from
a passing emigrant train found the Apaches and woman gone, but a copy of Beadle's
dime novel left in the dirt beside the still smoldering embers of the fire. Of course that
“penny dreadful” featured a story in which the valiant Carson rescued a woman held
captive by Indians.
13
It is no wonder, then, that emigrants valued the overland trail as

12
Lewis Kilbourn, Journal, April 1, 1850, Overland Journeys to the Pacific Collection,
MSS 1508, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland, Oregon.
13
E. P. Putnam to Francis Parkman, March 14, 1850, Box 1, Ms. N-645, Francis
Parkman Papers, 1565-1903, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts;
and Patricia Nelson Limerick, "Making the Most of Words: Verbal Activity and Western
America," Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past eds., William Cronon
and George A. Miles (W. W. Norton & Company, 1993), 167–8.
35

much for its romantic adventure, its own form of social commodity, as for the possibility
of economic gain.
The economic turmoil of antebellum America helped set the stage for motivating
men and women to take the long journey to the Pacific. Increasing concern with the
transition from individual proprietorship to wage labor marked this period. Descriptions
of the "promised lands" of California, where gold was said to lay ready for the plucking
along river banks, and Oregon, where fattened pigs, the tines of forks already inserted
into their rich flesh, wandered the verdant vistas, proved compelling for many
EuroAmericans.
14
The Panic of 1839 followed closely on the heels of the Panic of 1837,
intensifying the need for new economic opportunities. Increased concern led to
willingness to take new risks, including that of the roughly two thousand mile overland
journey to Oregon and California. By the time news of the discovery of gold in California
reached the United States, approximately 14,000 travelers had already embarked overland
to the Pacific. Over the next two decades, the overland trail continued to serve as a
beacon for Americans looking for a solution to growing economic dependence and
insolvency. By 1857, when the next panic hit, the gold rush had come and gone, but

14
Ray Allen Billington, America’s frontier heritage. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1966), 27–8; Billington, Words that won the West, 1830-1850 (New York:
Foundation for Public Relations Research and Education, 1964), 9–11; and James Christy
Bell, Opening a highway to the Pacific, 1838-1846 (New York: Columbia University,
1921), 188–89. These descriptions were the latest iteration of booster rhetoric describing
profitable western landscapes. Unruh, Plains Across, 127, 186n39. On the expressed
certainty of emigrants that they will gain in economic status and prestige in Oregon, thus
demonstrating their adherence to booster rhetoric, see, Ibid., 90.
36

EuroAmericans continued to trudge west (albeit in smaller numbers) in the hope of
economic gain.
15

The companies of overland emigrants were variously organized. They could be as
informal as a wagon train of extended kin or more commercial like the passenger trains
organized in Missouri that solicited passengers with newspaper advertisements. Many
"Californians" formed joint-stock companies complete with shares and contracts for
undertaking the overland journey. Joining these groups required travelers to expend cash,
often in excess of one hundred dollars or provide goods such as a livestock or a wagon in
exchange for securing their stake. Compnay contracts frequently had provisions for
disbanding upon reaching their final destination whereby cash and property would be
divided and distributed to the original owners. These companies were designed to pool
resources while retaining the independence of overlanders. However, they frequently tied
members into undesirable and near inextricable dependencies.
While mining and farming were seen as something that could be approached as a
single individual, a small partnership, or a family, the overland trail required a larger,
group effort. Emigrants came together for protection from the Indians they were sure
would attack them. They pooled resources to hire guides, some of whom were Indians, to

15
Ibid., 119-20. Many overlanders attributed this migration to an innate trait of American
culture, in his account of his journey to Oregon in the early 1830s John Wyeth described
it as Americans' conviction that "the farther they go from home, the surer they will be of
making a fortune." John B Wyeth, Oregon, or, A Short History of a Long Journey from
the Atlantic Ocean to the Region of the Pacific by Land Drawnup from the Notes and
Oral Information of John B. Wyeth ; One of the Party Who Left Mr. Nathaniel J. Wyeth,
July 28th, 1832, Four Days’ March Beyond the Ridge of the RockyMountains, and the
Only One Who Has Returned to New England (Cambridge, Mass.,: Printed for J. B.
Wyeth, 1833), 8.
37

help direct them across the West’s wide-open or mountainous spaces. While historians
have described these relationships as "cooperative," positive interactions that helped to
ensure the success of the emigration, it is important to note how much conflict the need to
work together created. These conflicts led many to describe their relationships with their
traveling companions with the more negative term of "dependency." As Catherine Haun
put it in her reminiscence, travelers were acutely aware of their "mutual dependence."
16

Cooperation implied choice and election; dependence suggested an inescapable, and
resented, need to work with other emigrants. This dependence, however, did not mean
that companies could not break up or that travelers could not join new companies during
the course of their journeys. Some travelers joined and rejoined multiple companies
before arriving at their destinations. Nonetheless, these reconfigurations often arose from
virulent company disputes engendered by the mutual dependencies of company members,
rather than any sense of “heading out on our own” individualism or autonomy. These
company reconfigurations, therefore, were not evidence of emigrant independence but
rather of the difficulty of accommodating the needs and desires of fellow travelers.
The language of dependence that emigrants used was a common feature of
antebellum discourse. Republican ideals valued independence, and it was the vision of a

16
John Unruh was the first to emphasize the importance of cooperative efforts and
mutual interactions to overland trail travel, Unruh, Plains Across, xv–xvi. Catherine
Haun, "A Woman's Trip Across the Plains in 1849," Reminiscence, p10, Henry E.
Huntington Library, San Marino, California. The logic behind these decisions was that
emigrants needed to join behind a guide or pilot to find their way and join together who
to better protect themselves from Native Americans. These related singularities of the
trail—unfamiliar territory and violent threats—created a situation in which economic and
social obligations were often more binding than they were at home.
38

democratic nation of independent yeomanry that had helped to drive Thomas Jefferson to
complete the Louisiana Purchase in the eighteenth century and transform the expanse of
free land into small farms. By the 1840s when overlanders began to travel west in
earnest, the United States economy had evolved, thrusting many young men into wage
labor and clerkships in growing urban centers, and tying farmers and their produce more
tightly to the demands, and vagaries, of larger markets. The scholar Brian Roberts has
claimed that California was a place where men could realize their economic dreams away
from the "competitive constraints" of the marketplace.
17
However, overlanders found
little relief from capitalism or the vagaries of market conditions during their journeys.
Instead, the trail threw these problems into sharp relief.
On the trail agricultural capitalists mixed and mingled with new urbanites from
the Northeast and western places like Chicago and St. Louis. Though diverse, these
emigrants shared many of the same economic concerns and goals. The figure of the
confidence man did not only invade genteel middle-class parlors but also frequented rural
roadways and inns and, as we shall see, frequently wiggled his way into a warming spot
by emigrants' campfires.
18
The trail was what scholars have termed a "fringe" economy, a

17
For concerns about economic change and dependency in this era see, Bruce H. Mann,
Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence (Cambridge,
Mass.,: Harvard University Press, 2002); and Edward J. Balleisen, Navigating Failure:
Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2001). Roberts' discussion is from, Roberts, American Alchemy,
269–70.
18
The definitive discussion of the confidence man is, Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men
and Painted Women: a Study of Middle-class Culture in America, 1830-1870, (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).
39

society on the edges of the central capitalist structure. The nature of the economy was due
in part to the fact that the trail was geographically removed from the United States.
Although by 1848 the United States laid claim to much of the land through which
overlanders traveled, their control was nominal at best and the majority of the region's
Native American inhabitants still operated autonomously. Nonetheless, because of its
identification with national and individual progress and by virtue of drawing so many
diverse people, the overland trail constituted its own type of cultural center. In their
diaries, journals, letters, and reminiscences, overlanders proffered solutions and
rationales for an expanding capitalist economy in which they were the foot soldiers.
19

From the beginning, the trail threw into sharp relief the logic of a capitalist
economy. In order to reach the plains overlanders drove their wagons across Illinois and
Iowa or, if coming from farther east, boarded multiple trains, steamboats, and
stagecoaches before reaching one of the "jumping off" places along the western
"frontier." This was a multidirectional and racial economic world that for would-be
emigrants displayed a bewildering array of goods and services for seemingly impossibly
high prices. Some prospective emigrants, unable to meet the prices that had risen in
response to overlanders' collective demand, turned back. Others called on the kindness of

19
On the continued dominance of agriculture in the American economy during this time
period see, Christopher Clark, “Rural America and the Transition to Capitalism,” Journal
of the Early Republic 16, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 223–236. As scholars such as Ann
Fabian have shown, people on the fringes of respectable economic practices, including
California miners and gamblers, were perhaps just as central to defining this new
capitalist ideology. The trail was one of these fringe economices that helped to define a
national response to these changes. Ann Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books, & Bucket
Shops: Gambling in 19th-century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).
40

friends, like Will Price whose friend let him into their company for a mere $100, which
was much lower than market value. Others sent frantic letters home to their parents or
wives asking them to send cash or letters of credit that they could use to fund their
journeys.
20

If overlanders were astonished by the prices in these border towns, they were just
as amazed by their first flavor of the western experience. Watching Mexican traders from
Santa Fé strolling arm in arm with local Indian women, brushing shoulders with
buckskin-clad fur traders and Indians, overlanders began to sense that the frontier
adventure had begun.
21
Like the oxen traders were selling for multiple times the price of
those in rural communities, the value of this experience was augmented by the belief that
there was only so much of it to be had. In the same breathless prose that countless
emigrants described seeing the fantastical multiracial milieu of St. Joseph, they also
harkened to the conviction that American "civilization" would soon transform this social
world.
22

20
William Renfro Rothwell to Father and Mother, May 5, 1850, William Renfro
Rothwell Papers, Western Americana Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, Yale University; and Lewis Garrard, Wah-to-yah, and the Taos Trail or, Prairie
Travel and Scalp Dances ... (Cincinnati: H.W. Derby, 1850), iv.
21
Theodore Talbot, Diary, Volume 1, May 21, 1843, Box 1, The Papers of Theodore
Talbot, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
22
The westward advance of EuroAmerican settlement did transform these relationships,
but it was a process that took decades and never fully supplanted the existing interracial,
familial economic networks. West, Contested Plains, 185–91; and Anne F. Hyde,
Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860,
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011).
41

Emigrants, however, also hoped that it would provide an escape. Even as
overlanders imagined the far West as a means to better their economic positions within
capitalism, they also exhibited the hope that the trail would provide a respite, however
brief, from the fiscal and economic concerns of home. John C. Frémont’s wife, Jessie
Benton Frémont, painted an idyllic, if naïve, portrait of economic relations on the plains
when she assured the mother of a soldier that her son would have no need for cash during
his time in Frémont's expedition, as once "freed from the cities" every man simply
"renders to another the services in their power, without money and without price."
Overlanders, to some extent, celebrated a similar ideal, gesturing towards a spirit of
fellow feeling and expansive hospitality. Emigrants, they declared, were willing to share
whatever they could with people in need. Others described a custom amongst companies
that any excess, privately owned goods automatically became a public resource.
23

But despite these characterizations and the assertions of some guidebooks and
newspaper editors, a cash nexus had definitely arrived on the trail by the late 1840s. In
1849, Clark Wallace Thompson wrote, "the Idea advanced at home" that emigrants did
not need cash is "erroneous."
24
Emigrants' determination to rely on a capitalist cash
economy is evident in the anecdote of a boat for which Thomas Van Dorn's company
paid $20 to use once to cross the Platte River. Van Dorn declared, "I learned that the

23
Jessie Benton Frémont to Adelaide Talbot, April 21, 1844, Box 2, Talbot Papers,
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C; and John Phillip Reid, Law
for the Elephant: Property and Social Behavior on the Overland Trail (San Marino,
Calif.: Huntington Library, 1980), 39.
24
Clark Wallace Thompson to Brother, July 4, 1850, Clark Wallace Thompson Papers,
1841-1906, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
42

same boat has passed to 5 different trains at the same price."
25
What Van Dorn described
was a precedent set that all had to follow or risk losing their $20. In so doing, he
proffered a type of metaphor for the way in which even as overlanders looked to the trail
as a romantic adventure away from the economic worlds of home the trail was not
exempt from accustomed structures and practices. Wish as they might; imagine as they
might, emigrants could not escape the precedents of home.
Some had no desire to do so. If the trail demanded cash, it also provided the
opportunity to purchase goods on credit. When David A. Burr found himself without cash
on the journey, he worried how he would be able to continue. He did, however, take
advantage of his existing "good credit" to solve his financial difficulties, finding a friend
who welcomed him into his camp.
26
Their economic standing on the trail, overlanders
found, was tied up in the social relationships as well as the webs of debt and credit they
had established at home. The trail experience was not an economic void, but a period of
economic change and opportunity much like that of any other period of emigrants' lives.
Stories circulated amongst overlanders of another traveler who having incurred multiple
debts at Fort Hall in Wyoming Territory on his way west, struck a different route home
the following year to avoid his creditors. Once he made it home, the man promptly

25
Thomas J. Van Dorn, "Diary of T. J. Van Dorn On Departure from Woodburn
Macoupin Co Ill for California, April 10. 1849," June 21, 1849, Western Americana
Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
26
David Auguste Burr to Father, October 7, 1857, Papers, 1855-1864 American
Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. This is evidence of the increasing
alignment of economic status with personal and moral status, Scott A Sandage, Born
Losers: a History of Failure in America (Cambridge, Mass.,: Harvard University Press,
2005).
43

devised a scheme to sell his new route to would-be Californians striking out for the
West.
27

Although most overlanders were less ambitious in their hopes to profit from their
journeys, many did seek to gain as they traveled along the trail. On the journey, one
man's worn-out ox was another man's opportunity for profit, as when "Some of the boys"
in George McCowen's company "picked up an old cow and drove her five or six miles
and made a sale of three dollars." Cash frequently exchanged hands for tasks both skilled
and unskilled like setting the wheels of a wagon or for retrieving lost items, as in the
instance of one man who earned five dollars for fetching a pack another traveler had
accidentally left behind.
28

It is likely that nothing on the trail made so much money as ferries, makeshift or
otherwise. Dr. John Smith, for instance, encountered a wagon company that had built a
ferry and were charging passage on it in order to recoup their expenses before they
moved on. Howard Cutting reported a similar situation when he described a group of
emigrants charging others for water from a well they had dug "to repay them for their

27
J. Golsborough Bruff, Overland Journal, p103, Journal and drawings of J.
Golsdborough Bruff, 1849-1853, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino,
California.
28
George McCowen, "Western Journal of George McCowen," p55, The Henry E.
Huntington Library, San Marino, California; and John Pratt Welsh, Journal, July 16,
1851, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
44

trouble."
29
Even though the ostensible goal of the trail was to get somewhere else,
emigrants could not resist the urge to turn a profit from their labor.
Perhaps one of the most remarkable features of the overland trail was the massive
destruction of property tossed overboard or otherwise abandoned as travel or weather
worsened or the burden of carrying things just got to be too much. Stoves, bedframes, and
furniture worth substantial cash in the United States became worthless on the plains
where emigrants abandoned them on the roadside or chopped them for firewood. Not all
EuroAmericans, however, viewed such loss as a negative. Caroline Whipple thought the
vast amount of property destroyed on the plains was essential to achieving the far West's
promise of democratic independence. She declared that some of the wealthiest emigrants
had lost all their cattle and were now "poorer than we;" "crossing the plains," she
concluded, "levels all classes."
30

Promoters of migration to the far West, however, tended to argue that the
democracy on the trail and in California and Oregon depended on travelers' middle-class
status. Nineteenth-century EuroAmericans imprinted a variety of utopian ideals on this
migration. Advocates of emigration like the editor of the New York Enquirer described
emigrants as composed of men who were not only "enterprising and energetic" but who
had also practiced "prudence and industry." The editor thus labeled overlanders with

29
Dr John Smith, Journal, July 1, 1853, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino,
California; and Howard A Cutting, "Journal of a trip by overland route," June 8, 1863,
Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
30
Caroline Whipple to M. A. March 24, 1853, Charlotte Lambert Whipple Diary and
Family Correspondence, 1847-1888, Manuscripts and Archives, New York Public
Library, New York.
45

keywords used to describe economically and morally successful men. In this formulation,
only the best citizens would desire and be able to afford the journey all the way to the
Pacific. Still other publications took up the idea of the trail and the far West as a middle-
class utopia. With the "poorer emigrants" excluded by the high costs of the journey, there
existed a "true spirit of brotherhood and hospitality," exceeding that of any other "part of
the world." Democracy, in this case, would exist because the indigent were excluded.
31

But on the plains property could make these wealthier travelers more dependent.
The conditions of the trail threw travelers into close, physical proximity and required
them to work and travel together as a unit. While the positive view of this, as noted
earlier, was that any extra resources became the property of the whole company, this
situation also led to raucous disputes. Emigrants with profuse amounts of goods often
imposed unwanted burdens on their fellow travelers. A wagon train could only travel as
fast as its slowest unit, and the more goods a family or individual had the slower they
traveled across the plains. Individuals with fewer goods complained about the shortness
of distances traveled and quickly grew to resent the burdens their company members'
property placed on them. Following a heated discussion, one company agreed not to

31
"The Church in California," February 9, 1849 Morning Courier and New York
Enquirer, February 9, 1849, Box 15, "New York," Ralph P. Bieber Collection, The Henry
E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California; and B. Schmölder, The Emigrant’s Guide
to California, Describing Its Geography, Agricultural and Commercial Resources.
Containing a Well-arranged List of the Commodities Most Desirable for Exporting to
That Country, with a Table of the Duties. Also, Some Useful Information for
Commanders of Vessels, and for the Overland Travelers Through Texas. Together with a
Valuable Map, on Which the Various Routes Are Traced, and an Authenticsketch of San
Francisco; to Which Is Appended the Governor of California’s (Colonel Mason’s)
Official Despatches Concerning the Gold Districts (London: P. Richardson, 1849), 50–1.
46

require emigrants who did not own livestock other than the team for their wagon from
guarding the loose herd of stock owned by others. After members of the Kennedy wagon
train blamed a cattle stampede that caused the death of a mother and her newborn child
on the dogs of their fellow travelers, the train voted to kill the remaining animals. Some
emigrants objected so strongly to prospect of losing their pets in this way that they opted
to leave the company.
32

Whether they had it or they didn't, property posed a problem for the great majority
of overlanders. Travelers who owned property needed help to move their goods across
the plains. While some travelers could depend on an older son or a younger brother,
many others hired laborers to help them across the plains. These relationships often
erupted in conflict on the trail much as they would have in settled communities.
Nonetheless, such disputes took on a particular urgency because emigrants identified the
far West with equality and democracy. Although historians have tended to replicate
promoters' claims of overland travelers as economically independent, great numbers of
men needed financial assistance to reach the far West.
33

The mid-nineteenth century American economy was not a world of independent
producers but rather a world of risk and frequent failure and insolvency. Even as cultural

32
James Scott McClung, Diary and Letters, August 3, 1862, Overland Journeys to the
Pacific Collection, MSS 1508, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland,
Oregon.
33
On historians upholding this idea of middle-class economic solvency to reach the far
West see, Billington, America's Frontier Heritage, 190n22. Even though they failed,
there were efforts to bring industrial workers to Oregon and California. See, Mark A
Lause, Young America: land, labor, and the Republican community (Urbana, Ill.:
University of Illinois Press, 2005), 65.
47

ideals upheld the overland trail as a means to resolve social and economic problems,
overlanders remained entangled in webs of debt and credit they had created at home. Men
were encouraged to take financial risks but they frequently had to declare bankruptcy.
One traveler described his trip as an attempt to start fresh after a business partner had
stolen all of his savings, another wrote home to his wife that he was going, and would not
return until he could pay the money he had stolen from their neighbors. Swindled and
swindler alike searched for redemption on the Pacific.
34

Overlanders funded their journeys much like they would fund any other business
venture: they borrowed money and goods and pooled their resources. Such arrangements
were routine. Few emigrants possessed the necessary resources to fund their journeys
independently. Accordingly, overlanders commonly entered into written and oral
agreements in which they shared clothing, equipment, and labor to facilitate the move
across the continent. The Gold Rush "joint-stock" companies are perhaps the most well
known of these contractual organizations. Many of these organizations were formed
explicitly for the purposes of the journey and intended to disband when they reached the
California gold fields or Oregon farmlands.
35

34
Silas Newcomb, Journal, Preface, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino,
California; and James C. Riggin to Rebecca Jane Riggin and Friends, January 23, 1851,
Riggin/Pettyjohn Family Papers, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino,
California. For overlanders like Newcomb and Riggin the overland trail provided one
way to achieve what Edward Balleisen has called a "financial resurrection." Balleisen,
Navigating Failure, 15.
35
Alva Shaw outlined the articles of agreement he had made with his company while
crossing the plains, declaring that they had joined "for mutual protection" and adopted
rules and regulations "as will secure to each individual the protection necessary to his
indipendance (sic) and security in such collected capacity we do therefore adopt the
48

Still other travelers entered into labor or passenger contracts that resembled the
terms of apprentices and indentured laborers. Mostly single, young men, these
overlanders hired onto family wagon trains, often abdicating wages for the duration of the
six months they traveled and receiving only basic necessities like food in compensation
for herding livestock or driving the wagon as they crossed the continent to California or
Oregon. George McCowen's father went with him to sign a contract obliging him to drive
livestock in exchange for his board and passage. According to an outside observer, one
emigrant "hired" three young men to travel with his family. He charged each twenty-five
dollars in cash and made them perform most of the camp labor in exchange for food.
36

While the bulk of the narrative evidence focuses on these male "hired hands," women
also signed labor contracts to reach the Pacific. Coloradan Mary Ann Alvard's husband
not only accompanied her to the negotiations but also co-signed her contract. The
contract stated that in exchange for transportation costs for Mary and their child she

following articles of agreement." Alva Compton Riggs Shaw, Organizational Agreement,
Papers, 1843-1848, MSS 941, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland,
Oregon.
36
George McCowen, "Western Journal of George McCowen," p55, The Henry E.
Huntington Library, San Marino, California; and Helen McCowen Carpenter, "A Trip
Across the Plains to California in 1857," p28, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San
Marino, California. As Howard Lamar and others have shown, the West provided
perhaps fewer independent economic opportunities and more systems of contract and
wage labor than other regions. Steven Howard Lamar, “From Bondage to Contract:
Ethnic Labor in the American West, 1600-1890,” in The Countryside in the Age of
Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 293–326.
49

would, "cook for. . .wash, and. . .do all other things. . .for the comfort of the fellows."
37

Alvard's husband did not accompany her, presumably remaining behind to attend to
business matters in Colorado.
Wealthy patrons not only contracted with EuroAmericans for their labor on the
trail but also for their labor in the gold fields. When the obligation of settling his father's
estate prevented B. G. Ferris from traveling overland to the California Gold Fields in the
spring of 1849, he sent "a man in his place."
38
Billington Whiting, Ferris' neighbor and
one of his would-be partners in the enterprise, applauded Ferris for not leaving him and
the other partners in the lurch but did not consider the replacement itself worthy of
comment. His silence suggests that these substitutions were not unusual. Although it is
not clear if Ferris sent the man as a "proxy" or if he encouraged him to take over his stake
in the company, at least a few wealthy patrons assumed the costs of transporting men to
California in the expectation of receiving a portion of their profits from the gold mines.
39

37
Agreement between Mary Ann Alvard, John L. Houghton and D. Gillepsie, May 9,
1849, MSS 2200, Colorado Historical Society, Denver, Colorado. Although Alvard's
gender and marital status make her case somewhat unusual, many emigrants hired
themselves out in order to cross the continent.
38
B. C. Whiting to Susan Whiting, April 13, 1849, Billington Crum Whiting Papers, The
Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, Caliofrnia. Whiting makes no further mention
of the man or his arrangement with Ferris in the correspondence. He does mention that
Ferris may have been planning to travel to California himself the following spring.
39
John Unruh mentions the case of a contract between William and Thomas Berry and
John C. Hays, Unruh, Plains Across, 106, 523n85. Nonetheless, the precise arrangement
that Ferris made with this unnamed man is not further elucidated in Whiting's
correspondence. Ferris may have recruited the man not as a proxy traveler but rather as a
replacement who assumed the financial burden of Ferris' share in the company. However,
Whiting's language ("sends") suggests that Ferris paid the man's expenses to California.
50

In 1850 Joel Grant advised his brother to make such an arrangement with a wealthier
man. Grant declared that he had read "you can get some one to bear your expenses and
then divide equitably the results of your labor." By taking no "pecuniary risks" himself,
Joel argued, his brother had nothing to lose.
40
The journey, construed as a risky,
potentially fatal, western adventure, could nonetheless shield travelers against financial
risk by allowing them to become a type of salaried employee.
Conditions on the trail, however, created unexpected situations and often
transformed the relationships between employer and employee. In 1849 Vincent Hoover's
train put "a man. . .ashore to day in the prairie cause unwilling to do his duty."
41
Hoover's
choice language likened being thrown off a wagon train to being forced to disembark
from a ship. With this language he underscored the seeming isolated nature of a wagon
train. Like a ship at sea, the wagon train was a vaguely militaristic economy and
organizing unit. However, these trains were part of a broader social world that was
intimately connected to relationships established at home. Some travelers excised from
trains found support and sustenance among other wagons. One woman recalled a train

40
Joel Grant to Daniel Grant, February 26, 1849, Box 3, Grant-Burr Family Papers,
American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Masschusetts. Grant ended up going as a
member of a joint stock company.
41
Vincent Hoover, Diary, Vol. 1, May 3, 1849, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San
Marino, California. Historians have explored the literary and visual implications of
comparisons between prairie and the sea, but Hoover's account suggests that the sea
metaphor for trail labor relations deserves further investigation.
51

that took in the son of a family friend when he asked for their assistance because his
employer was treating him badly.
42

In addition to turning to friends for help resolving difficult situations, overlanders
depended on contracts and company committees to resolve disputes between emigrants
and their hired hands. The quasi-governmental nature of emigrant trains helped mediate
labor disputes. Normally the trains elected a committee of men to make decisions
regarding travel and to intervene in case of conflict. The captain of George Banning's
company settled a dispute between Rachel Welden and her teamster. Welden fired the
man on basis that he had not fetched wood or water when she asked. The committee
called witnesses and gathered information on the nature of the contract, and ruled that the
parties should adhere to contractual agreements. Welden's teamster, whose contract
apparently did not specify that he should fetch wood and water, was reinstated.
43
Vincent
Hoover's family had a “lawsuit” with their driver, and was charged to pay him $15.
Apparently not having the cash on hand, they compromised by giving the man a watch.
44

The fact that many employees owned only a small amount of property could
increase their independence. When John Pratt Welsh refused to pay his "hired hand" near

42
Laura Brewster Boquist, Autobiography, p4, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold
B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo. Utah.
43
Banning did not report any further on the outcome of the dispute. George Banning, "A
Journal of the Emigration Company of Council Point, Pottawatomie County, Iowa, from
the Time of Their Organization Until Their Arrival into the Salt Lake Valley in the
Summer of 1852," p50, Mormon File, c. 1805-1995, The Henry E. Huntington Library,
San Marino, California.
44
Vincent Hoover, Diary, Vol. 5, August 16, 1849, The Henry E. Huntington Library.
San Marino. California.
52

the end of their journey (the man had joined his train after Welsh found him destitute on
the roadside) the man simply abandoned Welsh to his wagon and livestock, "as he could
walk in, in one day."
45
In the late nineteenth century the historian Hubert Howe Bancroft
declared that employers could not release an "insolent man" if they wanted to get their
property shipped across the plains, thus "the master was as much in the hands of the man
as the man was in those of the master."
46
The central problem of the overland trail, the
need to move people and goods across the continent, could give employees the upper
hand in their relationships with their employers.
Owning shares of property or simply traveling together bound overlanders into
perhaps even greater dependencies with their partners. Even amongst companions
traveling who had not formed partnerships, logistical necessities constrained emigrants
into relations of greater dependence. David Auguste Burr wrote home to his father from
the Green River in Wyoming in 1857 that he had arrived without funds because he had
had to lend his traveling companion money on the way as otherwise "he would have been
obliged to stop." He and the man were, he explained, "traveling as one company." John
Howlett felt similarly compelled to lend his traveling companions money on the plains.
After arriving in California, Howlett lost track of the men and he was still anxiously

45
John Pratt Welsh, Journal, September 23, 1851, The Henry E. Huntington Library.
46
Hubert Howe Bancroft, California Inter Pocula (San Francisco: The History Company,
1888), 111.
53

waiting for reimbursement months later. Even when they had not entered into formal
partnerships, overlanders felt obligated to lend their companions money.
47

Owning shared property made it difficult to resolve or extricate oneself from
disputes. Clark Wallace Thompson urged his brother to keep his correspondence about
his partner and their neighbor Joe Hill "private" because he did not want to spread rumors
at home that would damage his reputation or Hill's. Hill, according to Thompson, proved
a disagreeable partner who opposed Thompson's decisions regarding their shared
property as well as the ones Thompson made as the elected leader of their train. After two
months of this power struggle, Thompson was eventually able to more or less resolve the
issue by dissolving their partnership. He took half the provisions and permitted Hill, who
was short on cash and thus unable to purchase replacements, to retain control of the "tent
and cooking apparatus." The dissolution brought immediate relief for Thompson because,
as he wrote his brother, "I am more independent."
48

While Thompson and Hill were able to divide their property relatively easily, for
others it proved a challenge. In his reminiscence, Benjamin Butler Harris recalled how a
man was just able to fend off one of his partners who owned a one-fifth interest in a
wagon from chopping "up the rear wheel of the wagon." The "would be wheel chopper,"

47
David Auguste Burr to Father, October 7, 1857, Folder 3, David Auguste Burr Papers,
1855-1864, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts; and John Howlett
to wife, March 4, 1857, Box 7, Folder 4, Howlett Family Letters, 1831-1873,
Miscellaneous Mss. 'H,' American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.
48
Clark Wallace Thompson to Brother, June 3, 1850, Clark Wallace Thompson Papers,
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
54

fed up with his partners, claimed, "it was his share of it."
49
Stories like these, satirizing
the exaggerated dependencies of overland travelers, are commonplace in overland
narratives. Edwin Bryant, the author of the popular guidebook What I Saw in California
that first appeared in 1848, described a similar incident where two Oregon emigrants
became involved in a "troublesome dispute." The disagreement culminated when the ox
owner attempted to take the animals from the wagon "and thus leave it to move along by
the best mode" possible.
50
A committee formed from members of the company eventually
resolved the scrape but it shows how increased dependency made this journey difficult.
Even as Clark Thompson bewailed Joe Hill's growing petulance, overlanders spun
the fact that conditions on the trail revealed travelers' true nature as a positive. Bryant
used the story of the wagon dispute to illustrate his point that the journey helped reveal a
man’s true character. In his words, the trail served as a "magic mirror" that revealed a
man's true character, good or bad.
51
On the plains emigrants were less fearful of being
deceived than they may have been at home. Instead they became more worried that fights
and disagreements could increase risk to life and limb. On the plains where close
quarters, fatigue and imminent danger made it impossible, so they thought, to maintain

49
Benjamin Butler Harris, "Journal of Benjamin Butler Harris, Crumbs of '49," pp. 103-
5, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
50
The wagon train formed a committee, and the matter was eventually resolved
peacefully. Edwin Bryant, What I Saw in California (Philadelphia: G. S. Appleton, 1849),
68. Bryant's book, published just before gold was discovered in California became an
immediate hit soon thereafter. The book had already gone through at least six editions by
1850, Edwin Bryant, What I saw in California. (Palo Alto: L. Osborne, 1967), vii.
51
Bryant, What I Saw, 68.
55

the correct social face. The trail therefore provided a solution to these fears: one could let
one’s guard down, as the truth of character unveiled could be celebrated as liberating.
But the trail conditions also facilitated emigrants' ability to create new, temporary
identities in the interests of needs both immediate and long-term. Helen Carpenter wrote
of a "tramp" who claimed to be a doctor. When a gentleman rode hurriedly into camp
looking for a doctor the man conveniently disappeared.
52
Carpenter dismissed this man as
a charlatan. Emigrants, however, cast the stakes of acquiring necessary provisions and
assistance as justifying prevarication and outright deception. In his diary Andrew Orvis
described how he acted "half craisy" and refused to leave another party's camp until they
agreed to sell him some bacon and flour.
53

A deep tan from the relentless sun of the plains or a new buckskin shirt were
enough to make some travelers look like fur traders or Indians, thus further increasing the
ambiguity of their identity in a world of strangers. According to many of their accounts
such newly adopted clothing led other travelers to consider them experienced
frontiersman. Being mistakenly perceived as frontiersmen or Indian rather than falsely
claiming these identities for themselves, overlanders suggested that they were simply
embodying the benefits of their great western adventure. Overlanders also liked to play
with these new "western" identities in their letters home. Jefferis Wilson wrote to his
parents from Scotts Bluff in Nebraska that he had resolved to "leave old Jeff on the

52
Helen McCowen Carpenter, "A Trip Across the Plains to California in 1857," June 22,
1857, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
53
Unruh, Plains Across, 147.
56

prairie." This transformation, he told his parents, was almost complete. Not only had he
sworn to reimburse his creditors and stopped drinking and gambling, but he was now the
"colour of an Indian, drest in a suit of Elk Skin with wolf Cap and nothing but Moccasons
[sic] on my feet." That winter he had amassed money to complete his journey by hiring
on as a messenger for a fur trading company, a position that he told his parents had
brought him into near danger of losing his scalp to the Cheyenne. But he had emerged
victorious, a braver man and one with enough money to join his Rocky Mountain
comrades on an expedition in search of gold.
54
Jefferis described himself as fully
transformed by this adventure taken for its romance and the spirit of gain.
By casting themselves as Christian pilgrims overlanders evoked another aspect of
the adventurous value of the journey: it looked and felt Biblical. Overlanders liked to
think of themselves as only the latest version of Christian pilgrims, seeing in their
journey the march of the Israelites through the wilderness. This tendency was not shared
by all, as one traveler facetiously likened mundane tasks like gathering buffalo chips
(dung) to fuel their fires to the Israelites gathering the manna.
55
Notwithstanding this
parody, the landscape of the far West heightened the seeming biblical proportions of the

54
Jefferis Wilson to Father, April 4, 1850, Wilson-Warner-Corbitt Family Papers, The
Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera. Eric
J. Sundquist has encapsulated the appeal of the mountain men as stemming from their
willingness "to strike out into a dangerous life in the hope of wealth and exotic
adventure." Eric J. Sundquist, "The Literature of Expansion and Race," Volume 2, Prose
Writing, 1820–1865, The Cambridge History of American Literature (1995), 17
(10.1017/CHOL9780521301060).
55
A. W. Harlan, "Journal of A. W. Harlan While Crossing the Plains in 1850," Annals of
Iowa, Third Series, 11 (April 1913), 41, quoted in Lewis Saum, The Popular Mood of
pre-Civil War America (Westport Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 130.
57

journey. The vast expanses of plains, rolling thunderstorms, and daunting peaks of the
Rocky Mountains spoke to a people who found God in nature and yearned for a tangible
experience with the supernatural. The deserts of Nevada and the Southwest helped
cement these comparisons, given their presumed similarity to the landscapes of the Holy
Land. Passing through the Humboldt Desert also lent itself to augmenting comparisons
between overland journeys and that of the pilgrims. Solomon Gorgas reflected on the
"tattered & torn pilgrims" preparing for the desert expanse. While crossing an Arizona
Desert in 1849, another company received an unexpected "God Send' of water. The men
held out their hats, tin cups, and blankets, anything they could use to catch the
unexpected downpour.
56

Books and sermons underscored the identification of the trail with a religious
pilgrimage. Before leaving home many emigrants attended religious services where local
preachers singled them out for good luck and Godspeed in their trials in the wilderness.
Reading John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress made the comparison even more vivid for
emigrant John B. Peirce. At Fort Hall in Wyoming territory in 1849, a preacher delivered
a sermon on the journey of the Israelites, impressing on the gathered emigrants the
exalted nature of their enterprise.
57

56
David Jordan, Notes by the Way, July 9, 1849, Western Americana Collection,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
57
John B. Peirce to Wife, Janury 13, 1851, John B. Peirce Papers, Massachusetts
Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts; Jackson Thomason, "Diary," Department of
Archives and History, State of Mississippi,quoted in Saum, Popular Mood, 8. On the
central importance of the journey to manifest destiny see, Stephanson, Manifest Destiny,
7.
58

Yet emigrants complained that the logistical challenges of the journey drowned
out the attempt to achieve even ordinary religious observance and feeling. The sheer
physical and logistical challenge of the trek compromised such exalted feelings while the
disorienting effects of the trail impaired the religious symbolism of the westward journey.
Bewildered by the long, tiresome journey through unfamiliar territory, overlanders forgot
it was Sunday and found themselves out of sync with Christian rhythms.
58
If they
discovered their mistake before it was too late, some, like John Welsh Pratt, sang after to
supper to "make amends." Still others touted their ability to overcome this challenge.
Joseph Kuhn, nicknamed "chaplain" by his company for his piety, assured his parents,
"all though we are over 200 miles from church of any kind...we know when sunday
comes."
59
Not all overlanders possessed such a remarkable internal religious clock or
Kuhn's desire to impress his parents with his piety.
The protocol for observing the Sabbath, like most decisions on the plains, was a
company decision. The men of the train voted for an elected leader whose position on
observing the Sabbath was often central to his selection. While some historians have
emphasized that women were more likely to observe the convention of setting aside
Sunday as a day of rest, this was perhaps due to female overlanders' investment in
promoting themselves as domestic civilizers than to any gender disparity in religious

58
On the importance of observing the Sabbath in this period see, Alexis McCrossen, Holy
day, holiday: the American Sunday (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).
59
John Pratt Welsh, "Diary," Volume 3, July 9, 1853, The Henry E. Huntington Library,
San Marino, California; and Joseph Kuhn to John, July 6, 1866, Joseph Kuhn Letters, L.
Tom Perry Special Collections, Brigham Young University, Provo Utah.
59

feeling. Many men and women agreed that it was simply impossible to rest, as the need to
find water and or grass for cattle forced them to push onwards. Some who did observe the
Sabbath described it as an act of uninspired diligence, resulting from policy as much as
piety.
60

The manner in which each group observed the Sabbath, however, differed
significantly from practices at home. They still had preachers, but on the trail overlanders
enlisted them without congregational affiliation. For some these compromises helped to
confirm religious feeling in non-denominational exuberance. Overlanders attended
religious services outside in ceremonies that in some cases took on the energy of revival
camps. Though not necessarily a reliable observer, Lansford Hastings declared, "every
camp of emigrants is truly, a camp-meeting, and presents many of the exciting and
interesting scenes, exhibited upon those important occasions."
61
Still others managed to
accomplish their travel and their preaching, joining services after supper or attending to
their camp duties while a preacher gave his sermon in the center of the corral, as
Catherine Haun's company did in 1849.
62
In so doing emigrants were able to mend and

60
Hugh Heiskell, A Forty-niner from Tennessee: the Diary of Hugh Brown Heiskell, ed.
Henry M. Steel (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998), 67.
61
Hastings, Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California, 151. Hastings became infamous
for helping to lead the Donner Party astray and contribute to their being rappedi n the
mountains. However, historians have suggested that Hastings' guidebook and suggestion
was one of a number of factors that contributed to the Donner party's decision. Thomas F.
Andrews, “Lansford W. Hastings and the Promotion of the Salt Lake Desert Cutoff: A
Reappraisal,” The Western Historical Quarterly 4, no. 2 (April 1, 1973): 133–150.
62
Haun, "A Woman's Trip Across," 173. Although some historians have suggested that
attention to preaching divided largely along gendered lines, overland trail diaries suggest
that men as well as women were devoted to observing the Sabbath.
60

wash clothing, clean guns, and complete other camp tasks while also listening to a
religious exhortation. Other companies traveled all day but held meetings at night after
supper. Lorenzo Chillson worked all day with his company, but walked a half-mile in the
evening to join services with another company, writing "it puts one in mind of
Civilization again, to attend meeting if it is on the plains in the wild west."
63
By evoking
the connection between themselves and civilization, travelers confirmed their inherent
civility as well as gesturing toward the civilizing force of their journeys. Time and again
overlanders described themselves as being the first to evoke the word of God in the
"wilderness."
Even as the vaunted cultural symbolism of the journey lent it an aura of assumed
significance, overlanders still had to respond to the perpetual question, "was it worth it?"
Some were more laudatory than others. In 1850, William Renfro Rothwell wrote home to
his brother that even if he did not return from California with one of the hoped-for
"bloated purses," he considered his "California enterprise," both the journey and a stint in
the mines, to be "time well spent." In the postscript of his letter, however, he urged his
brother not to undertake the journey. Emigrants calculated the payoffs or rewards of their
journeys based on a variety of factors. When Thomas Dorsey's family asked if he would
return "well paid for what a man suffers in coming to" California he replied that
improved health would be a good enough return although he would feel better if he also

63
Lorenzo Chillson, Journal, June 5, 1859, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San
Marino, California.
61

made so some money. As it was, he told them "I do not yet regret. . .the Journey."
64
Still
others declared that they could never be compensated for their trip. As James W. Evans
put it, "$2500000000000000000000000000000 and no sense would not induce me to
cross the plains again." Writing home to his wife in 1853, Pennell Usher gave voice to a
similar sentiment declaring, "I don't think that a man can be paid for the trip."
65
With this
assertion Usher may have given voice to the countless, silent "go backs" who turned
around before completing the journey. But for many who did complete the journey and
decided to craft post-trip narratives, this dual symbolism of the trail as a romantic
adventure as well as a road to economic gain provided a powerful rationalization, a
means to uphold the enduring mythos of the trail.
When overlanders' hoped-for payoff in Oregon or California fell short, it was to
the journey that they could easily turn to give their lives, their economic ventures and
risks, greater and social and cultural value even as their purses and bank accounts showed
little improvement. By focusing on the journey rather than the failed promise of
California or Oregon, these narratives made the experience of getting there, not the
achievements once made, the great payoff. Emigrants' individual experiences and
perceptions made it impossible that they would all agree on the stated rewards of the
journey. Nonetheless the shared language that arose from the cultural symbolism of the

64
Thomas S Dorsey to Sister, December 28, 1854, Journals and Letters, 1854-1861,
Uncataloged Manuscript, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
65
James W. Evans to Ellis G. Evans, October 27, 1850, Letter, 1850, MS C1872, The
State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri. I would like to thank Michael
Tate for bringing my attention to this quote.
62

trail and the idea of economics and markets gave them a means to grapple with these
ideas and come to their own individual assessments of the journey.
Economic motivations drove many overlanders to attempt the long journey to the
far West. According to the ideology of the era, the reward of the migration would be
economic solvency and independence - either in a new country as with the Oregon
settlers, or back home, as with the extractive economic aspirations of California Gold
Rush Argonauts. On the journey, however, many travelers found themselves entangled in
relationships of greater dependence, with their partners, entire companies, as well as
Native Americans. Overlanders' aspirations, like many of those who had moved west
before, went unrealized. This gap between ambition and experience was first elucidated
on their journey, and it was often the journey, the act of migrating, that overlanders
assessed and reassessed in order to make peace with their economic failings or to
celebrate their achievements.
The trail highlighted the problems of broader market society, made greater on the
trail because of the material conditions of the journey and the cultural identification of the
West with independence and individualism. Nonetheless these twin goals and the dual
symbolism of the trail helped overlanders adhere to the cultural script of these
accomplishments. In vacillating between these motivating factors or selecting one over
the other when necessary overlanders held the two in their minds and furthered the
significance of their treks. These motives could be in tension with each other but were
twin supports on which the significance of the overland trail rested. The trail was not
simply a means to arrive in someplace, but an end in and of itself.
63

Individual travelers would despair and bemoan dreams unfulfilled, but the broader
cultural symbolism of the trail would remain intact. This was a symbolism that
purposefully excluded the aspirations of southern slaveholders as well as free and
enslaved African Americans. Their hopes, and their dreams, were also tied up with the
overland journey to the Pacific.
64

Chapter Two: Contesting Slavery on the Plains and the Pacific

For Northern Whigs like overlander Billington Whiting, any notion that the far
West could serve as a symbol of freedom depended on its isolation from the economic
and moral taint of slavery. But this partisan and regional identification of the overland
trail with a path to white freedom ran up against the hopes of Southern Democrats and
enslaved African Americans. Northern farmers and laborers couched their journeys as an
escape from the degrading system of black slavery, only to confront the institution in
border states such as Missouri and on the long paths to California and Oregon. Yet the
uncomfortable encounters with slavery that so disturbed Northern emigrants only made
the trail more familiar for their Southern counterparts. In their journeys to, across, and
beyond the plains, EuroAmericans from both sides of the political divide over slavery
debated, disagreed, and occasionally fought over the central political and social issue of
the era.
The trail put a new twist on sectional tension in the United States where the
debate over slavery erupted in violent disputes between public officials and, more
privately, between husbands and wives, fathers and sons. Overlanders were perhaps more
like the former and less like the latter. Because they traveled to and through those
territories whose uncertain status as slave or free was pushing the United States towards
civil war, emigrants were in many ways situated at the center of antebellum sectional
tension. Thus, migration became a political act. In the words of A. D. Mayo of Albany,
those emigrants who westered along the fortieth parallel literally walked the line between
65

North and South, slave and free. In moving to California and Kansas, they had, he
declared, "turned the flank against slavery and barbarism."
1

Emigrants, and EuroAmericans more generally, believed the act of migrating with
or without slaves to have a decisive influence on the question of whether slavery would
expand to the far West. Even after California entered the Union as a free state in 1850,
southerners continued to move their slaves west across the overland trail. The Kansas-
Nebraska Act of 1854, which gave the power of deciding whether these two territories
would be slave or free to voters in the region, further politicized and polarized the
migrations of ordinary EuroAmericans. Caught up in the sectional maelstrom as it
intensified, overlanders understood themselves not just to be claiming territory for the
United States, but also to be determining what kind of nation that would be—slave or
free.
Given these high stakes it is perhaps surprising that there is no record of sustained
conflict erupting between Northerners and Southerners along the overland trail. There are
records of sometimes virulent debate and violence barely deterred, but none of outright
bloodshed. This may have been in part due to the logistical burden of trail travel.
Emigrants traveled under a ticking clock to reach their destinations safely before the
onset of winter would trap them in the mountains; perhaps creating a shared sense of
urgency that may have staved off sustained debate. Moreover, African American slavery
on the plains did not look much like the black chattel slavery made notorious through

11
A. D. Mayo, Western Emigration and Western Character (Albany: n.p., n.d. [1841-
1899?]), 5.
66

Uncle Tom’s Cabin and myriad other writings.
2
Overland examples of slaveholding were
by definition plantation-less; absent were the institution’s most gruesome horrors: the
murderous whippings, slave coffles, and other atrocities described in abolitionist tracts.
As they went west, slave owners traveled with only a few, trusted slaves who journeyed
in close physical proximity with white company members, labored alongside their white
companions, and were frequently armed.
3

2
Reading and listening to public lectures shaped Northern preconceptions of slavery,
increasingly with a heavy abolitionist slant. Perhaps no single book was more influential
in shaping Northern conceptions of the South than Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, or, Life Among the Lowly (Boston: J. P. Jewett and Company; Cleveland: Jewett,
Proctor and Worthington, 1853); but Stowe’s novel was one of many influential works,
alongside for instance the numerous editions of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the
Life of Frederick Douglass, as well as the writings of the Grimké sisters (on whom, see
Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels Against Slavery (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1967), as well as Theodore Dwight Weld, American Slavery as It Is:
Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839).
In the cases of Douglass, the Grimkés and others, lectures were at least as influential as
printed works if not moreso.
3
When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark crossed the continent in 1803, Clark
brought his African American "manservant," York. York is believed to be the first
African American to cross the continent. The recent Lewis and Clark bicentennial made
much of York's participation in order to broaden the base of participation in the iconic
event. On York see, Douglas Seefeldt, Jeffrey L. Hantman, and Peter S. Onuf, eds.,
Across the Continent: Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and the Making of America
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 2. More recently, the National Park
Service and the Organization of American Historians have launched a study of enslaved
and free African Americans on the California and Oregon trails. Thus far the study has
produced one National Park Service Historic Resource Study: Shirley Ann Wilson
Moore, "Sweet Freedom's Plains: African Americans on the Overland Trails, 1841-1869"
(Salt Lake City and Santa Fe: National Trails Intermountain Region, January 31, 2012).
Historian Will Bagley has generously shared references and citations to African
Americans that he has collected for this joint study that have also proved invaluable to
this chapter. The Oregon-California Trails Association been marking and recording the
presence of African Americans along the trail. I am especially grateful to Jim Reil of the
Oregon-California Trails Association.
67

The presence of a spectrum of forms of captivity and freedom in the far West
contributed to reshaping overlanders' perceptions of slavery on the trail. When emigrants
headed west they expected to encounter various forms of indigenous and Mexican
captivity systems. During the 1846-48 war with Mexico, newspapers in Mexico and the
United States cast the conflict as in part a struggle to end the captivity systems employed
by the indigenous tribes of the greater Southwest. This focus shifted the issue from
concerns over the expansion of black chattel slavery to protecting Mexican settlers from
people that Mexican and EuroAmericans newspapers labeled Comanche and Apache
"raiders." Even as EuroAmericans denounced Mexicans as "effeminate" for being unable
to protect themselves from Indian captivity, the threat of seizure by Indians was a trope of
the EuroAmerican journey through the wilderness. Part of the romantic adventure of the
overland trail was that EuroAmericans would be brought into proximity with Indians and
risk becoming captives, a type of bondsperson, themselves. Such titillation aside,
overlanders proved more likely to seize than to be seized, grabbing Indian men and
women and forcing them to act as guides or perform other labor on the trail. This racial
violence occurred with parties of Northerners and Southerners alike, and it underscored
the shaky moral ground on which Northerners based their calls for emancipation of
Southern slaves. A shared antipathy for indigenous peoples may have also created
common ground among emigrants of the North and emigrants of the South.
4

4
Many of these forms of captivity and unfreedom continued to persist well into the
twentieth century. Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-
Mexican War (New Haven: Yale University Press, Published in association with the
William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies Southern Methodist University,
68

The status of the West as a disputed territory similarly appears to have dulled the
edges of sectional mistrust. In an undated note, U.S. Government engineer Colonel
Frederick Lander suggested, perhaps somewhat flippantly, that sectional discord was not
of great concern to EuroAmericans in the Rocky Mountains. Instead, he wrote that the
danger in frontier regions, like the excitement of readying for an Indian attack, “teaches
us the value of union." Such pronouncements reflected the persistent idea that the West
was somehow apart from the sectional problems of the settled United States.
5

However, far from providing an escape from these tensions the trail in fact made
them more apparent. The trail did so by bringing Northerners into contact with slaves and
slave-owners. In this "world of strangers" political and regional identity also became an
important means to build camaraderie or enmity. An overlander from Michigan, Oliver
Goldsmith, remembered how near the end of his journey a company of Southern
emigrants had refused to share their breakfast with him. Famished and discouraged, the
man sat by the road to wait for his companions to catch up. Soon one of his companions
who had a strong Southern accent arrived, and told him how he had not only been invited
to take breakfast with the wagon party but also procured an extra biscuit and bacon for
his friend. As Goldsmith put it, "His familiar speech made them extend to him the

2008), 292–6; and Pekka Hamalainen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2008), 293–300.
5
Frederick Lander, Undated, Volume 4, F. W. Lander papers, Manuscripts Division,
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
69

hospitality of the South."
6

While historians have acknowledged the existence of regional and political
identities amongst emigrants, they have been less successful in connecting them to the
larger debates and conflicts over slavery and sectionalism. The relative dearth of attention
to slavery and sectionalism on the overland trail may be due in large part to the traditional
privileging of the northern route along the Platte River as well as the eventual Union
victory in the Civil War. The focus on this more northern route obscures the nearly
20,000 EuroAmericans who traveled westward through Texas, sometimes dipping south
into Mexico before turning north through Southern California. Historians have tended to
assume that most overlanders were from the North and therefore sheltered from slavery.
However, many did engage with slavery.
7
The Union victory may have also helped to
perpetuate the idea of the trail as apart from this issue by encouraging memoirists to
excise references to slavery or sectional tension from their accounts in order to further the
reunification and healing of the nation in the Reconstruction Era.
8

Historians have also tended to treat the presence of African Americans in the far

6
Oliver Goldsmith, Overland in Forty-Nine: The Recollections of a Wolverine Ranger
After a Lapse of Forty-Seven Years (Detroit: The Author, 1896), 69–70.
7
Moore's recent study did nothing to correct this problem as it was limited to travel along
the northern Oregon and California Trails. Moore, "Sweet Freedom's Plains," 74. On
travel across the southern routes see, Unruh, Plains Across, 20, 67-9; Patricia Etter, To
California on the Southern Route, 1849: a History and Annotated Bibliography
(Spokane: Arthur H. Clark, 1998); and Ralph P. Bieber, Southern Trails to California in
1849, The Southwest Historical Series, 5 (Glendale, Cal.: Arthur H. Clark, 1937).
8
On the importance of sidestepping the issue of slavery and race in order to reunite the
nation after the Civil War see, David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in
American Memory (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001).
70

West in isolation from these larger themes. Historians of African Americans have
explored the roles of black pioneers and settlers in the western United States despite the
enactment of racial exclusion laws stretching back to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.
Long before blacks looked to Kansas in the Reconstruction Era, they had already
migrated to myriad western locales in search of a better life. Some of these African
Americans succeeded in establishing autonomous societies.
9
More recently, scholars have
turned their attention to the importance of the West to the coming of the Civil War, but
these efforts have thus far focused on political ideology and practice at a higher level.
The overland trail provides a more bottom-up perspective on this issue.
10
It also helps to
remind us of the multiplicity of manifest destinies in the nineteenth-century United
States.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Americans from North and South, as well as their
respective political leaders, espoused distinctive versions of a belief in national

9
Rudolph M. Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California, (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1977); and Quintard Taylor, “Slaves and Free Men: Blacks in the Oregon Country, 1840-
1860,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 83, no. 2 (July 1, 1982): 153–170. Margaret
Washington has argued that the West became a place for African Americas to direct their
hopes for freedom. This was, however, different from the freedom envisioned by
Frederick Jackson Turner because it depended on establishing a space apart from
American political and social institutions. Margaret Washington, “African American
History and the Frontier Thesis,” Journal of the Early Republic 13, no. 2 (1993): 238.
10
For the role of California and the West in the coming of the Civil War see, Michael A.
Morrison, Slavery and the American West: the Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the
Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).; and
Leonard L. Richards, The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997). On individuals celebrating gold as the accelerant to
expansion see William Redmond Ryan, Personal Adventures in Upper and Lower
California, in 1848-9: With the Author’s Experience at the Mines (London: W. Shoberl,
1850).
71

Providence. As the young United States looked westward, the possibility of expansion
inspired competing dreams of a free republic and an empire for slavery. Although the
lands of the far West were neither free nor unoccupied, EuroAmericans chose to see them
that way. Imagined copious amounts of cheap land held the promise that the nation could
consist of independent land producers. But more land also allowed for the expansion of
cotton, a notoriously soil-exhausting crop, into the Southwest. Manifest Destiny was a
providential and republican ideology that combined ideas of the sacred with the secular
as well as pacifism with aggression. So too did it combine conviction in American
exceptionalism with concern for the nation's future. The positive conviction in a nation
growing ever westward collided with the divisive issues of American Indian policy and
slavery that many believed if not dealt with justly would bring the anger of a wrathful
God upon the young United States. By portraying Indians as a people without history and
thus without a providential role in the present or future, EuroAmericans helped to absolve
themselves of seizing western lands. They proved less successful at diffusing the issue of
slavery.
11
The serendipitous discovery of gold in California exemplified this internal

11
Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of
Right, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995). For competing ideas of pacifism and
aggression in Manifest Destiny see, Amy Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the
Antebellum American Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
EuroAmericans espoused a confidence in the continued growth of their nation sanctioned
by God, a belief that had originated in Britain and traveled westward with the first
English colonists. Although disagreement persisted, by the 1830s this solution had come
to dominate American thought. It was the issue of slavery that threatened to tear the
nation apart. Nicholas Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607-
1876 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 173–5. On the abstraction of
Native Americans from historical time see also, Steven Conn, History’s Shadow: Native
Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2004). At times overlanders molded their experiences to fit with the
72

ideological tension: the find, happening immediately after transfer of territorial
ownership from Mexico to the United States, confirmed Anglo-Saxon belief in their
destined control of the continent, but by accelerating expansion it also stoked the slavery
debate, pushing the nation closer to civil war and potential destruction.
12
One harried
antislavery advocate became so agitated at the sight of Missourians embarking with their
slaves across the overland trail for the California gold fields that he wrote immediately to
his state senator to sound the alarm.
13
Even after California became a free state in 1850,
slave-owners and their slaves would continue to head west to the new state.
Although the number of African Americans who traveled the overland trail can
not be determined with definitive certainty, it is clear that at least a few thousand made
one or more trips across the trail. Newspaper reports of the emigration commented on the
presence of African American overlanders. With much less concern than the antislavery
advocate mentioned previously, an Iowa reporter described a swarm of "old and young,

rubric of peaceful American progress and vanishing Native Americans. Such convictions
drew on an increasingly racialized view of who and what could accomplish the forging of
American civilization. EuroAmericans saw themselves as members not only of the same
nation but also the same Anglo-Saxon race. For a discussion of the increasing
racialization of EuroAmerican providential thought, see Reginald Horsman, Race and
Manifest Destiny : the Origins of American Racial Anglo-saxonism (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1981). On cotton and the expansion of slavery westward,
Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).
12
Examining the causes of the Civil War has been and continues to be a topic of interest
among historians. See, for example, Gary J. Kornblith, “Rethinking the Coming of the
Civil War: A Counterfactual Exercise,” The Journal of American History 90, no. 1 (June
2003): 76–105.
13
Paul Finkelman, An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 440–1.
73

rich and poor, christian and infidel, black and white, bond and free" headed to the
California gold fields in 1849.
14
Such descriptions suggest a widespread knowledge, if
not acceptance, that both enslaved and free African Americans were moving across the
trail. Many black overlanders have probably been lost to the documentary record.
Moreover, published emigrant diaries and journals frequently excised or failed to mention
the presence of African Americans. When John C. Anderson revised his overland journal
for publication in 1870 he replaced the word "darkey" with "cook," thereby transforming
his African American employee into a man of unspecified race.
15
Still other African
Americans travelers were probably never mentioned at all. For instance, Alvin Coffey,
the sole known African American author of an overland narrative, does not appear in the
accounts of any of his fellow travelers.
16
If not for his own account, there would be no
record of his overland passage. These omissions combined with the existing evidence that

14
Gus Blair to Dr. Sir, 13 July 1849, The Fort Des Moines Star, 2 November 1849, 2/2. I
would like to thank Will Bagley for bringing this quotatione to my attention.
15
John C. Anderson, Journal, 1866, pp. 20, 312, Diary, Special Collections and Archives,
Utah State University; John C. Anderson Diary, Journal, 1870, p. 20, Trails of Hope:
Overland Diaries and Letters, 1846-1869,
http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/Biographies/id/1/rec/1; and email
conversation with Bradley H. Hansen. November 22, 2010. According to a Google
Phrase search conducted February 7, 2011, the use of the term darkey peaked during the
1860s, probably because of the Civil War, but dipped lower after 1865. Anderson's
change of word choice may thus have been nothing more than an attempt to keep up with
the current usage.
[http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=darkey&year_start=1800&year_end=1900
&corpus=0&smoothing=3]
16
Accounts by his company members are, Phil Montesano, “A Black Pioneer’s Trip to
California,” Pacific Historian 13 (1969): 58–62; and Israel F Hale, “Diary of a Trip to
California in 1849,” Quarterly of the Society of California Pioneers 2, (June 30, 1925):
61–130.
74

specifically mentions African Americans makes it probable that African Americans
traveled in much greater numbers than the historical record suggests. Historians Stacey
Smith and Shirley Anne Moore agree. Using census data, historian Smith has concluded
that nearly one thousand enslaved people migrated westward to California around the
time of the Gold Rush.
17
Historian Shirley Anne Moore has suggested that the number of
African Americans who traveled is much larger than earlier generations of historians
have estimated.
18

Many African Americans identified in EuroAmerican accounts are mentioned
only in passing, their dreams and toil a largely unrecorded part of America's
transcontinental expansion. Taken together with discussions about sectional identity and
tension, the evidence suggests that the journey provided EuroAmericans with an
opportunity to debate their positions on slavery. At the same time, the trail underscored
the impossibility of transforming a person into a price while also bringing diverse
systems of unfree labor and bondage into contact. While one scholar has asserted that
EuroAmericans' glancing references to their enslaved companions seemed to treat
African-American emigrants as so "much baggage," their terseness may indicate the
opposite, that the presence of African Americans was so antithetical to the cultural script
of the West as a place of freedom and escape from slavery that the best way to deal with

17
Stacey L. Smith, “Remaking Slavery in a Free State: Masters and Slaves in Gold Rush
California,” Pacific Historical Review 80, no. 1 (February 2011): 28–63. These numbers
are based on the 1850 US Census report of African Americans living in California. The
census counted 2,200 African Americans but did not distinguish between slave and free.
Smith's estimate is based on this census and an 1852 tally taken by the state of California.
18
Moore, "Sweet Freedom's Plains," ix, 128–9.
75

the tension was to pass over their presence. Set against the construction of the West as a
symbol of freedom, the trail environment provided a sharp reminder of the limitations of
freedom in a society largely based on the bondage of others.
19

Although historians have tended to emphasize EuroAmerican dreams of the West,
for some African Americans the West provided its own dream of comparative racial
equality. Long before emigrants began driving their wagons and livestock across the
continent, the fur trade, the dominant economic institution of the early nineteenth-century
West, depended on a vast multiracial and ethnic network of laborers. This in no way is to
suggest that the West was a place of idealized racial harmony. The multiethnic nature of
many indigenous communities, for instance, was a direct result of epidemics and violence
introduced by European imperial powers. Moreover, interracial marriages between
EuroAmericans and Indian women were driven more by economic and political
imperatives than any somehow enlightened view of race. The West had its own systems
of hierarchies and inequalities, but it also displayed a fundamentally different type of
stratification than that which overlanders were accustomed. Because of this, it cast the
racial system and African American slavery, in particular, in a new light. If only for a few

19
For the phrase "so much baggage" see, Walter Durham, Volunteer Forty-niners
Tennesseans and the California Gold Rush (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press,
1997), 184. On the importance of slavery in both north and south see, for instance,
Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass
Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, (New York: Verso, 1990).
76

fleeting moments or months the trail opened up a West where African Americans could
have more power than whites and whites risked becoming the captive slaves.
20

Nineteenth-century Americans believed that the West had transformative powers.
In The Oregon Trail (1846) the historian Francis Parkman described meeting an African
American fur trader on the plains. The man had escaped from slavery in Missouri and
found employment with a French fur trading company. He was, in Parkman's telling,
barely surviving the rigors and dangers of his new life, meeting Parkman by
happenstance when he stumbled, starving and dehydrated, into Parkman’s camp after
having wandered for nearly thirty-three days on the plains. After surviving the night the
man "expressed his firm conviction that nothing could ever kill him."
21
Parkman was
unimpressed with this man (just as he was with the Oregon emigrants more generally),
but his story still describes the West as a place where a slave who had seized his freedom
could find employment and, if he survived the rigors of the wilderness, become stronger
than ever.
While Parkman’s fur trader had not yet acquired the skills and knowledge of a
competent frontiersman, African Americans who did acquire these skills changed places

20
One of major goals of new western history was to recognize and analyze the distinctive
racial systems of the United States West. Historians have taken up this task with
enthusiasm but they have yet to show how the West can tell us something new about
slavery and sectionalism. Elliott West, “Reconstructing Race,” The Western Historical
Quarterly. 34, no. 1 (2003): 7–26. For recent work that brings together issues of African
American slavery with other forms of unfree labor in the West see, Smith, “Remaking
Slavery in a Free State.”
21
Francis Parkman, Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life; or, The California and Oregon
Trail, (New York: George P. Putnam, 1852), 184–6.
77

from the racial category of black to the racially ambiguous category of "mountain men."
James Beckwourth, the son of his owner and a black slave, found his calling in the West.
There, he helped to guide a number of emigrant wagon trains. Beckwourth even
published an autobiography of his life in 1856, albeit one that made no mention of his
African American heritage. While Beckwourth's skills may have earned him respect and
prestige in the West, a EuroAmerican readership might not have been prepared to read of
the accomplishments of an African American. The racially ambiguous figure of the
mountain man entranced overlanders and beguiles modern scholars. Moses "Black"
Harris, a seasoned Rocky Mountain Fur Trader, may have been a white man who had
earned the nickname black, or he may have had African American heritage.
22
Harris
spent decades living in the far West, first working in the fur trade and then helping to
guide emigrant trains across the continent. While in St. Louis in the spring of 1849,
preparing to lead a train to the California gold fields, he contracted cholera. When
passengers learned of his illness, they went to join him in his hotel room in order to be

22
James Pierson Beckwourth, The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth:
Mountaineer, Scout and Pioneer and Chief of the Crow Nation of Indians (New York:
Harper Brothers, 1856); and Blake Allmendinger, “Beckwourth’s Pass,” in Imagining the
African-American West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 1–12. Harris
played a small role in multiple popular overland narratives and novels of the period. He
even earned the moniker "Major," and was credited with assisting numerous pioneers
including Oregon Indian Agent Dr. Elijah White to the far West. James Peltier has even
suggested that Harris was the subject of Alfred Jacob Miller's "Trappers, August and
Louis." The particularities surrounding Harris' life are contested. Jerome Peltier, Black
Harris (Fairfield, Wash.: Ye Galleon Press, 1986), 70, 91, 119.
78

with him when he died. However presumptuous the behavior, this episode nonetheless is
suggestive of the interest the men had in meeting their famous would-be guide.
23

Although referred to by the nickname "Black," the racial alchemy that Harris and
other "mountain men" of potential African descent often achieved was that they had
"become Indian."
24
The category “Indian,” like the category "Black," encompassed a
range of racial statuses. Overlanders generally praised the Indians of the plains (such as
the Sioux and Blackfeet) while derisively labeling Indians of the Great Basin such as the
Shoshones and Paiutes as "Diggers"–little better, if not worse, than slaves. Harris and
others like him, however, became the exalted type of Indian. In the romanticized view of
the fur trade, these men navigated the landscape of the far West with ease, hunted for
their sustenance, and operated with an independence that not only surpassed that of many
African Americans but was also the envy of EuroAmericans grappling with the transition
from individual proprietorship to wage labor. White men could become Indian in this
way too, but whereas for men like Harris becoming Indian was a decided step up on the
racial hierarchy, for EuroAmerican men like Jim Bridger–another celebrity figure of the
overland trail–this transformation had more negative implications.

23
Bernard J. Reid, Overland to California with the Pioneer Line: the Gold Rush Diary of
Bernard J. Reid ed. Mary McDougall Gordon (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1983), 28.
24
On becoming Indian see, Ray Allen Billington, The Far Western Frontier, 1830-60
(Albuquerque NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1956), 50–1. On the dismissal of
racially mixed families as soon as they are no longer politically advantageous see, West,
Contested Plains, 185–91.
79

Overlanders may have marveled at the mountain men and fur traders, but they
also expected the racial makeup of the West to evolve as they imagined themselves to
spread American civilization across the plains. Harris' death was in some ways timely: he
passed away in 1849 just before his "Indian" status would move from an asset to a
liability and he, now a citizen of the settled United States, would be transformed back
into a black man. Beckwourth was less fortunate. He struggled to gain recognition and
compensation from the United States government for establishing Beckwourth Pass.
However, at the time overlanders were traveling the West was still very much a region
characterized by a multiplicity of racial hierarchies. This situation opened up the
possibility for travelers to transform their identities.
Overlanders introduced a new element to this racial makeup, the attempt to draw
hard lines between black and white as slave and free. Throughout the antebellum period,
politicians attempted to diffuse the rising controversy over slavery by maintaining the
balance of political power between slave and free states and territories. This exercise
included attempts (in vain) to draw definitive lines between slave and free territories. But
reality on the ground defied rigid order. Certain territories may have been designated
slave or free by way of sharply delineated lines on maps, but people moved through and
across space and frequently traversed territorial lines. While Northerners migrating
westward helped to expand the United States as a free nation, slave owners feared that
moving westward across the land might transform their ordinarily docile property into
revolutionary freemen. Overlanders' discussion of crossing the imagined line between
civilization and savagery on the western edge of Missouri is well documented, but a line
80

often every bit as chimerical also divided slave and free. One slave-owner claimed to
observe an instantaneous transformation in his slave Lee once they had crossed the
western border of Missouri, declaring that Lee “got too Big for his Britches as soon as he
got out of the state.”
25

For men like Lee's owner, the journey to California or Oregon threatened their
control over their property. According to his correspondence, after Lee's owner observed
this change he promptly sold him as a way to cut his losses. Other slave owners wove
stories of slaves so faithful that they disregarded the pleas and demands of abolitionists
that they seize their freedom. One account even described a slave who traveled home by
himself from California via Panama when the man his owner had asked to watch over
him perished in the mines. This slave not only resisted abolitionists' efforts to entice him
to seize his freedom, he also carried gold home from the mines for his master and other
slave-owners in the community who had sent some of their property to California. In this
tale, the slave brought property home safely, both in his person in the gold that filled his
pockets. These stories of loyal property helped to defy established legal precedent in
California and other places that held that enslaved people who lived in free territories
became and remained free. Yet these southern stories were not simply willful fantasy. In

25
As part of his new-found freedom Lee was said to have declared that he would no
longer work for white men. Dulany to Susan Dulany, 1 May 1850, Correspondence,
Missouri History Museum Library, St. Louis, Missouri, quoted in Will Bagley, "Virulent
Prejudice Against His Race: Blacks on the Trail," unpublished manuscript in author's
possession. Soon after Lee made this pronouncement Dulany sold him for $700 in gold. It
is not, clear when this transaction took place. Stacey Smith has noticed similar comments
among slaveowners with regard to how slaves acted once they arrived in California.
Smith, “Remaking Slavery in a Free State."
81

the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, the United States Supreme Court resoundingly
declared that property like Lee could never be free no matter the location. Scott had sued
for freedom for himself and his family on the basis that he had become free by living in
free territory. But the decision did more to stoke debate than to resolve any questions
about the relationship between mobility and slavery.
26

This same uncertainty over slave and free shrouded California and Oregon,
overlanders' final destinations. Even though Congress had admitted California as a Free
State in 1850, state legislators continued to pass laws that protected the interests of
California slaveholders. Slavery remained more or less an open question in Oregon as
well. Many antislavery advocates declared that Oregon's northern location seemed to
assure that it would "naturally" become a free territory. Nonetheless this equally wishful
and racist geography was constantly undermined by the presence and continuing
migration of African Americans to the territory.
27

26
On the question of slavery expansion and the widening sectional crisis, see also
William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, 2 Vols. (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1990, 2007); Michael F. Holt, The Fate of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery
Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004); and
Bruce Levine, Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of Civil War (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1992). On the Dred Scott case specifically, see Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred
Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1978); and Earl M. Martz, Dred Scott and the Politics of Slavery (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 2007).
27
Even though California entered the Union as a Free State under the Compromise of
1850, the legislature continued to pass laws that protected the interests of slaveholders.
On the continued struggle between slavery and antislavery forces in California, see,
Smith, “Remaking Slavery in a Free State.” See also Rudolph M. Lapp, Archy Lee: A
California Fugitive Slave Case (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1969); and
James Williams, Life and Adventures of James Williams, A Fugitive Slave: With a Full
Description of the Underground Railroad (San Francisco: Women’s Union Print, 1873),
82

For many would-be overlanders from the North, the journey to the far West
marked the first time that they had encountered African Americans and experienced
slavery first-hand.
28
Some travelers were most interested in observing the physical and
mental characteristics of African Americans. These intrigued travelers noted that slaves
came not only in all ages and sizes but also all shades of color, ranging from "jet black"
to "doubtful white."
29
Abolitionists commonly cited the vast phenotypical differences of
slaves as an example the illegitimacy of the slave system and some overlanders may have
had that in mind when they penned their accounts. Others, however, attempted to
depoliticize their observations of these people and the institution, as when one Wisconsite
attributed his interest in the appearance of slaves to a general interest in "everything
new."
30

Overlanders' interactions with slaves also reveal the sharp edge of racism. New

reprinted as James Williams, Fugitive Slave in the Gold Rush: Life and Adventures of
James Williams, ed. Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Blacks in the American West (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2002). On legal restrictions on African American
immigration embedded in early State Constitutions, see David Alan Johnson, Founding
the Far West: California, Oregon, and Nevada, 1840-1890 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992).
28
This was true of other travelers to the south in this period as well. For studies of these
travelers see, Frederick Law Olmstead, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations
on Cotton and Slavery in the United States, Based upon Three Former Volumes of
Journeys and Investigations, 2 Vols. (New York: Mason Bros., 1861); C. G. Parsons,
Inside View of Slavery, or, A Tour Among the Planters (Boston: J. P. Jewett and Co.;
Cleveland: Jewett, Proctor and Worthington, 1855).
29
Silas Newcomb, Journal, April 17, 1850, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San
Marino, California.
30
Ibid.
83

Yorker William B. Lorton's companion amused himself by ordering an Iowa slave to bow
before his party. Lorton, not to be outdone, ordered the next slave they encountered to
bow before their ox, which he jokingly called "the great Sultan of Muscat."
31
For these
Northern travelers, encounters with slaves outside their home section offered an
opportunity to manipulate and degrade another human being with relative impunity. It
also underscores how even as the issue of slavery divided Northerners from Southerners,
a belief in the same racial hierarchy united most of them.
32

Overlanders were culturally equipped to see slaves as racial inferiors, but they
also encountered unexpected situations and relationships in their first encounters with
slavery. While at a rest stop on a steamboat headed up the Missouri River to St. Louis, an
emigrant recently arrived from Sweden spotted a "poor-looking cabin" on the riverbank.
Speculating, "perhaps Negroes lived in it," the man entered only to be embarrassed when
he found it occupied by "well-dressed white women." When Franklin Johnson was
traveling through Missouri he stopped at a farmhouse to ask for directions. The owner of
the house could not tell him, having no idea how to leave his plantation and find a road
going west. He solicited his slave Sam to answer the emigrant's question, who ably

31
The sultan had recently made a treaty with the United States and had attempted to
establish trading relations. William B. Lorton, Diary, May 10, 1849, William B. Lorton
Diaries and Papers, September 1848–January 1850, Bancroft Library, University of
California, Berkeley. I would like to thank Will Bagley for drawing my attention to
Lorton's quote.
32
On northern racism see, George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind:
The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper &
Row, 1971); and Saxton, Rise and Fall of the White Republic.
84

directed them to their destination.
33
For these travelers, slave regions were a confusing
world where white women lived in houses that seemed fit only for slaves and masters
asked their slaves for directions.
Just as curious to northern travelers were the affective relationships between
slave-owners and the people they presumed to possess. John Townsend, for instance,
recalled his surprise at seeing a mistress mourn for a drowned slave boy "as for her own
child," who had been for years, she declared, "only support."
34
This woman's grief may
have been evidence of an emotion deeply felt. Yet this instance was also an example of
proslavery rhetoric that cast slave-owners as dependent and as much the slaves of slaves
and were the people they called property. Although Townsend does not comment further
on this episode, one wonders how seeing such grief and affection may have influenced
antislavery overland travelers. Albeit steeled to resist slave-owner paternalism and
sentimentalism when confronted with the grief of a single woman, now alone on a
steamboat full of strangers, may have helped to increase sympathy, if not empathy, for
her and, possibly, slave-owners more generally.
35

33
Heinrich Lienhard, New Worlds to Seek: Pioneer Heinrich Lienhard in Switzerland
and America, 1824-1846 ed. John C. Abbott, trans. Raymond J. Spahn (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 83; and Frannklin Johnson, "Recollections,"
Overland Journeys to the Pacific Collection, MSS 1508, Oregon Historical Society
Research Library, Portland, Oregon.
34
John Kirk Townsend, Narrative of a Journey Across the Rocky Mountains, to the
Columbia River, and a Visit to the Sandwich Islands, Chili, & C., with a Scientific
Appendix, Northwest Reprints (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1839), 21.
35
On proslavery ideology, see Drew Gilpin Faust, ed., The Ideology of Slavery:
Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1981); and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The
85

Like other travelers to southern regions, overlanders spoke of how witnessing the
slave auction helped to strip away the relationship of slavery to the bare bones of
ownership. The slave auction was an oft-cited critique of the system, as it exposed the
institution at its most base. Watching an auction in Galveston, Texas on his way to
California in 1849, Agur Pixley marveled how the buyers and sellers approached the sale
with such a blasé attitude, "the principle of which is agitating our whole nation."
36

Pixley observed the auction in silence, saving his commentary for a letter written
home to his children, but other emigrants used their travels to engage Southerners and
supporters of slavery in debate. Traveling down the Missouri on a steamboat destined for
St. Joseph, a Wisconsin man and Virginian shared a room and an extended discussion on
the slavery issue. In the end, the Wisconsinite caved to the Virginian's insistence that
while Southerners indeed desired to get rid of their slaves, they resented the attempt to
seize their property.
37
Dr. Mendall Jewett was less willing to find common ground with
the editor of a Missouri democratic paper. The man assured Jewett that he thought
slavery itself evil but believed African Americans incapable of independence. Jewett
"cited to him the mind of Douglas[s]" a former slave who "in eloquence could not be out

Mind of the Master Class: History and Fatih in the Southern Slaveholder’s Worldview
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
36
Agur Pixley to Son, March 16, 1849, Agur Pixley Texas Correspondence, 1849 Mar-
July Western Americana Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University. For current
scholarship on the slave trade, see Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the
Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).
37
Anable, Henry. "Journal of H. S Anable, From Sheboygan, Wisconsin to Sacramento,
California, in the year 1852," ts, May 12, 1852 The Henry E. Huntington Library, San
Marino, California.
86

done" and who in "intellect" ranked with the "great men of the nation."
38
Jewett,
evidently pleased with his own assertive eloquence and intellect, did not record the
editor's response.
But the trail not only introduced emigrants to southern regions it also took them
through landscapes where slave and free existed uncomfortably side-by-side. A child at
the time she recorded her family's journey across the plains in 1852, Abigail Scott was
impressed by the contrast between free and slave labor that they encountered on their
journey. To the north of their route through Illinois she observed EuroAmerican farmers
plowing their fields. To the south, she watched slaves work, posing a contrast so great
that it occupied her mind for the rest of the day.
39
Observed simultaneously as she
traveled, the overland trail experience made visual the difference between north and
south.
So too did the course of travel present the opportunity to intervene in the lives of
individual slaves. New Yorker R. Beeching and his inexperienced company found
themselves fortunate to fall in with "a Negro teamster (a slave)" just outside of Houston.
Beeching declared that he and his company "made him as our equal." When they paid

38
Dr. Mendall Jewett, "Journal To and From California of Dr. Mendall Jewett,” March
25, 1850, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
39
Abigail Scott, "Journal of a Trip to Oregon," Covered Wagon Women: Diaries and
Letters from the Western Trails, 1840-1890, Volume 5, eds., Kenneth L Holmes, David
Duniway, (Glendale. Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1986), 5–6.
87

him for his labor it brought the man to tears.
40
Beeching's story is delibreately misleading
as many slaves routinely performed work for men other than their masters for pay. Yet,
the episode helpes to cast his overland trip as not simply a journey but an intervention in
the life of one slave whose potentially imagined tears manifested the injustice of slavery.
While this intervention was a small gesture of good will, other travelers raised the
possibility of helping slaves to escape from freedom. T. J. Connor recorded meeting a
female slave on a steamship headed up the Missouri who also began shedding tears when
he expressed his sorrow for her servitude and his inability to help her to rise up from
servitude. The image of these slaves moved to tears could be read as a comforting,
sentimental image of African Americans passively waiting for moral northerners to take
action to emancipate them. But they also suggest the impotence that abolitionist
sympathizers like Connor felt with their inability to free these slaves; a frustration made
perhaps all the greater by coming face to face with deeply entrenched social ills as they
tried to make their way towards what was supposed to be a better place.
Moreover, evidence suggests that African Americans also saw the West as a place
of comparative racial freedom. Passing through Missouri in 1850, Clark Wallace
Thompson encountered a "pious old darkey," who asked Thompson to take him to
California. The man had acquired the idea from his master who had talked of making the
journey the previous spring. However, when his master decided not to go, "Mr Darkie,"
as Thompson referred to the anonymous slave, hoped to seize the opportunity for himself.

40
R. Beeching, Diary, March 12, 1849, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino,
California; and T. J. Connor, March 17, 1853, "Diary of T. J. Connor," Oregon Historical
Society Research Library Portland, Oregon.
88

Thompson did not take the man; nor did Robert Eliot answer the plea of the slave of a
man he roomed with on the way to California to buy him and take him to the California
gold fields where he could earn his freedom.
41
These Northern overlanders respected,
even marveled at, slaves' desire for freedom, but did not lift a finger to help.
At least one emigrant seized the opportunity to aid slaves in their efforts to escape
from freedom. Asa Cyrus Call reported that he helped set a slave catcher on the wrong
path when the man came looking for a runaway "he supposed. . .had started for
California." Later that night Call heard that they had confined the man in jail but that he
had escaped a second time. That night, Call "saw a Negro man pas [sic] our camp about
midnight." Call concluded that he must have been "on his way to the land of promise."
42

The rumored wealth to be found in California also suggested a path out of slave-
ownership. In 1849 the Virginian William Coleman wrote his uncle asking to borrow
nearly two thousand dollars order to send two or three of his slaves to California. Such a
loan, Coleman declared, would allow him to keep his promise of freeing his slaves. Once

41
Clark Wallace Thompson to Brother, April 29, 1850, Clark Wallace Thompson Papers,
1841-1906, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C; and Robert
Eliot, "Overland to California: An Interesting History of the Trip of General Hammond
and Robert Eliot Across the Continent in 1849," pp.7–8, Braun Research Library, Autry
National Center, Los Angeles, California.
42
Asa Cyrus Call, Diary, April 23, 1850, in Asa Call diary, MS 301, North Baker
Research Library, California Historical Society, San Francisco, California, quoted in
Stacey Leigh Smith, “California bound : unfree labor, race, and the Reconstruction of the
Far West, 1848-1870”, (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2008), 113. Stacey
Smith has argued that given the geographic distance from a slave state it was unlikely
that slaves sought freedom by traveling overland to California. However, given the racial
ambiguity on the trail noted in Chapter 1 as well as the historical examples of slaves
seizing freedom in the far West may have inspired some enslaved people to attempt to
seize their freedom on the trail.
89

in California, Coleman, continued, the slaves would quickly earn enough money to repay
the debt, and then some. This initial seed money, he hoped, would eventually allow him
to manumit all of his slaves. The loan would, he urged his uncle, "pave the way for their
freedom.'"
43
Coleman's desire for his slave's, and by extension, his own freedom from
slavery was not an aberration from the system of slavery. Drowning in debt, Coleman
could not institute manumission proscriptions for his slaves upon his death as other,
solvent slave-owners had. The potential of quick money in the West was a means not
only for Northerners to avoid clerkship or other wage labor but also for at least one
Southerner to see a path out of his current financial predicament.
Although Coleman, who invoked a common proslavery rhetoric that slave owners
became slaves to slaves, may have thought California held a promise of a type of
economic and social freedom, for enslaved people the journey to California or Oregon
came with the promise of legal freedom. For many slaves, the promise of freedom may
have been necessary to convince them to undertake the long journey across the overland
trail. Many enslaved African Americans traveled west only after making emancipation
contracts. Frequently oral, these agreements outlined requirements slaves had to meet
before they would gain their freedom in the far West.
44
William Parker Tell, for example,

43
William Coleman to David L Swain 16 Aug 1852, David L Swain Papers, Southern
Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, quoted in John Inscoe, Mountain
Masters, Slavery, and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina (Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 95. I would like to thank Stacey Smith for bringing
my attention to this quote.
44
Stacey Smith mentions the case of Robert and Lucy who agreed to work for their
master in California for three years or earn $1,800, whichever came first, before gaining
their freedom. Smith, “Remaking Slavery in a Free State,” 53.
90

met an African American man from Missouri who was going to California with a master
who had promised him freedom in exchange for three years of labor on the Pacific Coast.
Similarly, when Joseph Wood invited "an old negress" to rest by his campfire, she told
Wood and his companions that she had elected to head west because her master had
promised that "if she served . . . well on the road to California & 2 or 3 years after" she
would be free. Wood declared, "I could not help looking after her & thinking of the fond
idea which animated & supported her through the hardships of the journey, poor thing."
45

Through describing these interactions with slaves on the trail, Northern overlanders
helped to construct the trail as a path away from slavery even as it brought them into
contact with it.
Yet in the far West, slaves promised freedom often found their hopes dashed.
Woods' concern that the old woman he met "may be disappointed yet" proved all too
truthful for many hopeful for freedom. The case of Robin Holmes in Oregon became an
infamous example of this misrepresentation. In a petition before the Oregon Territorial
Supreme Court Holmes described how his then master, Captain Nathaniel Ford, had
promised Holmes that once he had helped him establish a farm in Oregon Territory he
would free him, his wife, and their children. Ford eventually freed Holmes and his wife,
but he held onto their three children. The Oregon legal system stepped in and granted the

45
William Parker Tell, "Notes by the Way," July 19, 1849, The Henry E. Huntington
Library, San Marino, California; and Joseph Wood, "Notes from Diary of '49," May 11,
1849, Vol. 1, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
91

Holmes children their freedom in 1853.
46

Legal battles over freedom often hinged on the agreements slaves had made with
their masters before they started across the continent to Oregon and California. In the
high profile case of Archy Lee, whose master attempted to forcibly remove him back to
slave territory after learning that he could be freed in California, Lee’s fate hinged on
whether he thought he had traveled to California under the control of his master or as a
fugitive. If Lee had been traveling with his master as a bondsman he would gain his
freedom once he arrived in California, a free state. If, however, he believed he had
traveled under his own power and, thus, as a fugitive, California's fugitive slave law
would send him back to the South. The court eventually decided in Archy's favor, but the
climate was so tense that Archy and his supporters decided to relocate to Canada to
further ensure his freedom.
47

Even without the promise of freedom to lure them westward, some African
American men and women chose to travel west with their masters. Amanda Johnson
described how she elected to move west with her master because she feared her freedom
would be compromised if she remained behind in Missouri. Although her master offered
her the option of staying behind as a free woman, Johnson decided to take her freedom
but also to follow him to Oregon. As Johnson's owner prepared to leave from Missouri, a
trader supposedly offered to buy her for $1,200, a large sum. Her master, however,

46
Fred Lockley, “The Case of Robin Holmes Vs. Nathaniel Ford,” The Quarterly of the
Oregon Historical Society 23, no. 2 (June 1922): 111–137.
47
Smith, “Remaking Slavery in a Free State,” 60–3.
92

demurred, asserting, "Amanda isn't for sale. She is going across the plains to the valley
with us. She has had the care of our four children. My wife and the children like her. In
fact, she is the same as one of our family, so I guess I won't sell her."
48
Without Johnson's
protection, Amanda feared, men like this one who had offered to buy her might be able to
forcibly re-enslave her. Oregon, she hoped, would promise a fresh start, but it also
seemed like a necessary move in the context of obtaining freedom and ensured her
continuing dependence on her master for protection and sustenance. For African
Americans in the mid-nineteenth century, freedom and independence rested not only on
legal status recorded in court documents but also on social capital invested in personal
identity and protection from a former master or friend. While images of former slaves
weeping at their master’s departure revealed a paternalistic conceit of slave owners,
former slaves may have been sorry to see their former masters, and their informal social
protection, depart with them.
49

For many slave-owners, the labor demands of the trail made slaves an especially
valuable asset. During the Gold Rush years, some parents provided their sons with one or
two slaves to accompany them to California.
50
To these Southerners, it would have been

48
Jean Ward, Pacific Northwest Women, 1815-1925 Lives, Memories, and Writings, Repr.
ed. (Corvallis Ore.: Oregon State University Press, 1997), 166–72.
49
For examples of stories of slaves crying at their master's departure see, Susan Isabel
Drew, Recollections, "Crossing the Plains in 1853," Overland Journeys to the Pacific
Collection, MSS 1508, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland Oregon.
50
On southerners taking slaves see notice that John Rollin Ridge's mother had given him
her slave Wahcooli to accompany him to California, Patricia Fletcher, Jack E. Fletcher,
and Lee Whiteley, Cherokee Trail Diaries (Sequim, Wash.: Fletcher Family Foundation,
1999), 24–5.
93

unthinkable to commence such a massive undertaking without their unfree labor.
Kentuckian George Murrell filled his letters home with affectionate and grateful
descriptions of his slave companion Rheuben. Murrell nearly always allowed Rheuben to
add a few words to the letters and he also transcribed Rheuben's missives to their shared
"white and black family." But Murrell's reports on Rheuben's health and well-being were
as much about assuring his father that his property remained intact as they were about
any affectionate connection. Rheuben's worth became evident when Murrell described
how upon arriving in California he hired Rheuben out to the manager of his boarding
house, at a rate that more than covered his own room and board.
51

For Murrell, however, Rheuben's value exceeded the worth of his labor and price:
slaves were a symbol of home. Sometimes these connections were not as personal as that
between Murrell and Rheuben. Just before Missourian J. Robert Brown and his company
left the Sweetwater River to cross the Rocky Mountains, a wagon of California emigrants
approached with a "family of Negroes which looked homelike."
52
Missourian Bennett C.
Clark took a tour through his memory of earlier days from a camp in the Humboldt
Valley when the "negro" guide of a Virginia company with whom they had encamped

51
George McKinley Murrell to Elizabeth R Murrell, April 5 and May 10, 1849,
Correspondence of George McKinley Murrell 1849-1854, The Henry E. Huntington
Library, San Marino, California. Murrell's collection is unique as it is thus far the only
one where the overlander wrote letters home for his slave.
52
J. Robert Brown, "Journal of a trip across the plains of the U.S. from Mo. to Cal.," p44,
Ayer Collection, The Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois.
94

began "Singing the airs of our old mountain home."
53
For Joseph McGee, the first
familiar person he encountered after stumbling into California from the Plains in 1849
was the slave of a friend from home. McGee described unabashed joy in meeting with the
acquaintance, who provided him not only with a friendly face but also with a much-
needed $10 in cash. But he tempered his joy with the pronouncement that, "I would have
been glad to meet even an animal that I had known at home."
54
McGee's racist aside
functioned rhetorically to undercut his dependence on the man, but it also revealed how
important African Americans and African American culture were to Southern
EuroAmerican travelers.
Once on the trail, slaves could enhance their social standing among masters and
fellow travelers. Their ability to rise in the estimation of their fellow travelers may have
been made more possible by the fact that the slaves selected to join their owners on the
overland trail were relatively privileged compared to slaves who remained at home.
Many owners only took one or two enslaved people with them. Some slaves traveling
overland may have had special skills, perhaps Spanish language abilities as was the case
with “John” whom Isaac Duval enlisted to accompany him to a meeting with a group of
Indians he and his party encountered on the border between Texas and New Mexico.
John went out to translate the conversation and was able to warn Duval that the chief

53
Bennett C. Clark, “Diary of a Journey From Missouri to California in 1849,” ed., Ralph
P. Bieber, Missouri Historical Review 23, (1928): 35. Clark had been born in Missouri
54
Joseph McGee, "Story of the Grand River Country, 1821-1905 Memoirs of Maj.
Joseph H. McGee," The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
95

intended violence; thus notified, Duval was able to prohibit the attack.
55

Other slaves performed the same labor tasks as the white men in their trains. The
captain of P. F. Castleman's train frequently assigned him to work with Reuben, one of
the slaves accompanying the train. Reuben, like many of the enslaved men on the trail,
was armed and expected to hunt both with Castleman and alone, sometimes taking him
miles from the train. With labor, resources, and time all short, slaves made invaluable
contributions to companies whose biggest fears were falling behind or getting lost in the
wilderness, their actions seemingly as valuable as other overland emigrants. When
another slave fell sick, Castleman became concerned that their train would "be deprived
of another man."
56

When the slave did pass, the company buried him next to a recently departed
white man of the train. On the trail, it seems, labor demands and time constraints could
blur racial lines, turning a slave into a "man," and forcing the creation of graveyards
where slaves and EuroAmericans were buried together. Other evidence suggests that
these lines remained rigid despite the apparent pressures to the contrary. An Alabama
overlander wrote home to his brother describing how his company had recently lost two
men while encamped in Arizona, one white and one black. Although the men died less
than twenty-fours hours apart and in the same campground, the company buried the

55
Richard H Dillon and Charles Shaw, eds., Texas argonauts: Isaac H. Duval and the
California Gold Rush (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1987), 89.
56
P. F. Castleman, Overland journey to California, May 21, June 3, June 9, October 3,
1849, Western Americana Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale
University.
96

bodies one hundred yards apart. This choice suggests a purposeful decision to separate
the men in death, as racial ideologies had separated them in life. Emigrants, as we will
see in Chapter Four, commonly buried bodies close to each other, sometimes traveling
for miles before burying a dead companion alongside an existing emigrant grave, in an
attempt to establish "grave clusters." The hundred yards that stretched between these two
men symbolizes how racial distinctions continued to be important on the journey.
57

To be sure, slaves were very much still regarded as property on the trail. The
"would be wheel chopper" who was thwarted in his attempt to take his portion of his
shared wagon in Chapter One next turned his wrath on his partner's slave Dick. Dick
fought back, and was soon joined by white men in the company who came to the defense
of their fellow traveler’s property. The privilege of beating a slave, an English overlander
named Thomas quickly learned, belonged to his owner. Seeing a Mr. Thompson beating
his slave, the Englishman rushed in, declaring, "he should not whip him." Thompson
warned that if the Englishman interfered he would whip him too, and seizing a hatchet
seemed ready to execute this threat. At this stage Mrs. Thomas threatened Thompson, “If
you kill my husband you shall not live.“ Thomas, going back to his wagon, now came out
with a pistol. Others in the company intervened, telling Thomas he had no right to say
anything to Thompson for whipping his Negro. Mrs. Thomas then reminded her husband

57
Arkansas State Gazette, November 22, 1849, "Alabama to Arkansas," in Ralph P.
Bieber Collection, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Another
overlander, A. C. King, described passing the two fresh graves near this location on
August 26th but did not indicate how close together they were. A. C. King, "Diary of A.
C. King member of the Arkansas Company, bound for the gold mines of California, 6 Jul
10 1849 - 10 Mar, 1850," August 26, 1849, Manuscripts and Archives, New York Public
Library, New York, New York.
97

that they were now in the States, not England. "Well, but what's the difference?" another
traveler chimed in, "Didn't the Americans all come from England!'" With this recognition
of common colonial origin the disagreement, and apparently the beating, ended.
58
The
lesson for this English couple was that slavery had to be respected on the plains.
Interracial violence, of course, did not only occur between masters and slaves.
Overlanders aggressively attacked and exploited indigenous peoples they encountered on
their journeys. T. J. Ables, who credited his journey with solidifying his stance against
slavery, also described how he and his company captured a number of Indians from a
camp that they believed had stolen emigrants' horses. Before releasing these men they
had them help them drive the cows back to their camp. EuroAmerican proslavery and
antislavery advocates alike had little compunction about taking Indians hostage and
forcing them to labor. This hypocrisy would become part of the proslavery argument in
California, when Democrats asked how Republicans who kept Indians in "pens" could
make them free their African American slaves.
59
Notwithstanding this widespread racial
violence, some northern overlanders attributed emigrant attacks on Indians to their
support for slavery. According to Benjamin Franklin Bonney, while on the journey to
Oregon in 1853 a man in their train captured a Paiute Indian. The man declared that he

58
Benjamin Butler Harris, "Journal of B. B. Harris, Crumbs of '49, (1890)," pp. 105–6,
The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California; and Hugh Heiskell, A Forty-
niner from Tennessee: the Diary of Hugh Brown Heiskell, ed. Henry M. Steel (Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1998), 25.
59
T. J. Ables to Father and Mother, October 12, 1857, A Trip Across the Plains, The
Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois. During debates over slavery in California,
Democrats accused Republicans of hypocrisy for opposing African American slavery
even as used Indians as forced laborers, Smith, Remaking Slavery, 416.
98

would make him his slave and proceeded to tie the man to the back of his wagon, beating
him mercilessly each day. Bonney declared no one in the train agreed with his violence,
but they were all too scared to step in.
60
This tactic may have worked for the man with his
African American slaves in the south, but he proved incapable of holding the Indian
against his will.
Even without slaves present, the trail continued to provide a venue to express
conflicting views on the sectional issue. As the story of the southern accent suggests,
political and regional identity became perhaps more pronounced where EuroAmericans
found themselves in a foreign space and amongst strangers. Theodore Talbot on passing
Independence Rock saw not only the signatures of ordinary travelers but also in large
characters "Henry Clay" and beside it in still larger characters "Martin Van Buren”
placed, as he put it, by some "ranker politician." Talbot thus recognized the signatures not
as those of the men themselves but rather their competing political supporters.
61
Travelers

60
Fred Lockley, “Recollections of Benjamin Franklin Bonney,” The Quarterly of the
Oregon Historical Society 24, no. 1 (March 1, 1923): 41–4.
61
Theodore Talbot, Diary, Vol. 1, pp. 88–9, Box 1, The Papers of Theodore Talbot,
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.Although scholars no longer
as quick to describe the nineteenth century as a "golden age" of political engagement,
most do agreee that EuroAmericans had politicial conciousness and participation far
greater in the nineteenth than the twenetieth century. For this position see, for example,
Mark E Neely, The Boundaries of American Political Culture in the Civil War Era
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). For a work that specifically
discusses broad engagement with the issue of slavery and sectionalism in private and well
as public activities and correspondence see, Amy Murrell Taylor, The Divided Family in
Civil War America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Stuart M.
Blumin and Glenn C. Altschuler have made an argument against such a widespread view
of political participation on the narrow basis of participation in party meetings and other
events, Glenn C Altschuler and Stuart M Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and their
Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).
99

not only transformed iconic national landmarks into political symbols but also played out
their disputes and disagreements with fellow travelers they met along the way. Israel
Hale, for instance, encountered a cross-regional joint-stock company from Ohio, which,
despite repeated quarrels, had managed to reach the Humboldt Valley without breaking
up. However at that place, the company disbanded for good and "agreed to leave it to the
Yankees."
62

Even as these disputes demonstrated the consequences of the sectional divide on
the trail, overlanders also emphasized a shared fraternalism with their fellow travelers.
Once on the wilderness surrounded by "red men of the forest" Clark Wallace Thompson
said he and his party began to feel "partially acquainted" with every white man they saw,
as they knew that they too were on their way to California. Just as Lander had gestured
towards a united, white identity so did Thompson gesture to something new, a
Californian identity based on shared desire to cross overland to the gold fields. This was a
depoliticized national identity, a cross-regional fraternalism.
63

But this idealized fraternalism of the Californians on the trail frequently gave way
to violence and disputes in the California gold fields. As the historian Stacey Smith has
shown, labor in California is best described in terms of a system of varying levels of
unfreedom. Indentured Native Americans and Mexicans labored for pittances while
African American slaves often labored for nothing more than the elusive hope that their

62
Hale, “Diary of a Trip to California in 1849,”108.
63
Clark Wallace Thompson to Brother, May 5, 1850, Clark Wallace Thompson Papers,
1841-1906, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
100

master would make good on a promise of emancipation. Even after California entered the
Union free in 1850, slave owners continued to promote a proslavery agenda. California's
Fugitive Slave Act, passed in 1852, in theory permitted slave owners to remove enslaved
peoples from the territory if they had arrived before California became a state. Slave
owners, however, attempted and sometimes succeeded in removing slaves they had
brought to mine after 1850.
64

As sectional tension escalated during the 1850s, overlanders became increasingly
politicized. T. J. Ables' experience of traveling through the "bloody grounds" in 1857 on
his overland journey to California made him a stronger Republican than ever, "slavery
being the issue."
65
Ables' position strengthened even more after boarding with a Missouri
slaveholder. The two men "conversed considerably" on the recent events in Kansas.
During their discussions, Ables learned how pro-slavery men who were not legitimate
residents of the territory nor even, in some instances, of the necessary age had bought the
right to vote for one dollar. Notwithstanding his disapproval, Ables joined a train that
included some of the men who had moved to Kansas expressly for the purpose of voting
for the proslavery position. Passionate as he was, Ables was nonetheless able to set aside
differences to join with the very same men he disagreed with so strongly. But not all
EuroAmericans were as understanding as T. J. Ables. Failed pro-slavery Kansas
politician Thomas Cramer recalled how he passed a crowd listening to an abolition

64
Smith, "California Bound," 99–100.
65
T. J. Ables to Father and Mother, October 12, 1857, A Trip Across the Plains, The
Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois.
101

speech on his way out of the state. The encounter made Cramer's blood boil, but the wife
of his host that evening, “by her gentle kindness, subdued even the Alpine heights of my
anti yankee prejudices."
66

During the Civil War the possibility of sectional violence increased. Encamped
along the Des Moines River in Iowa on their way to California in 1863, Howard Cutting's
company a warning from a passing emigrant that a party of men intended to attack and
disarm them that night "thinking we were secesh." The company from Illinois put out an
extra guard that night and readied their arms in case they were attacked. No one,
however, appeared. In 1861 James Norvell's train was nearly torn apart by the "war-
spirit" that infected their party as they made their way through Kansas in the spring of
1861. After one man shot another over their sectional differences, Norvell remembered,
that "Men took sides, and for a time it looked as if we would have a free-for-all with
guns." The Captain called for all men willing to "eschew politics" to travel on with him.
A number of people separated from the train while the rest traveled onward to California
without further violent incident.
67
Presumably, successfully finishing the journey required
them tread lightly on political or sectional differences of opinion or nativity. A. A.
Cooper, traveling overland in 1863, joined with another train after leaving the

66
Thomas Cramer, "Overland Journey from Kansas," May 12, 1859, Western Americana
Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Library,
67
Howard A Cutting, "Journal of a trip by overland route [from Fidelity Ill to
Sacramento, Calif by way of the Oregon Trail and Salt Lake City]," p3, The Henry E.
Huntington Library, San Marino, California. James Norvell, "Reminiscence’s [sic] of
One Who Crossed the Plains with the Covered Wagons," 4–6, Missouri History Museum.
St. Louis, Missouri. I would like to thank Will Bagley for bringing my attention to this
reminiscence.
102

Sweetwater in Wyoming? for the purpose of uniting for protection. But disputes over
route and disagreements about travel and rest made their presumed protection a liability.
The other train made plans to attack them and take their provisions hoping "it would be a
small episode of the war raging in the land, and maybe would never be heard of." The
northerners evaded the fight by electing to travel on the Fourth while the Southerners
remained behind "sneered" at them "for being so unpatriotic when we claimed to be
unionist."
68

The same year that Norvell's train crossed the plains, Emmanuel Leutze
completed his mural of westward migration for the United States Capitol building.

Figure 2. Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way, 20'x30' Emmanuel Leutze. German artist Emmanuel
Leutze's 1863 mural for the State Capital exemplifies the ways in which westward-moving settlers embodied
national progress and the promise of America's future. Painted in the middle of the Civil War, this image was
designed to deflect attention from the current crisis towards the image of a united, forward-looking nation.
(Architect of the Capitol.)

68
A. A. Cooper, "Our Journey Across the Plains, 1863," pp. 25–6, Galloway Family
Papers, 1851-1981, MSS 730, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland,
Oregon.
103

In 1861 Leutze contracted with Colonel Montgomery Meigs, the engineer of the
new capitol project, to paint a mural depicting westward expansion. Leutze had gained a
reputation for American historical painting with "Washington Crossing the Delaware"
(1852) and his new commission was designed to help promote American nationalism as
the Union was fighting the Civil War. Leutze appears to have added the figure of the
African American leading the mule shortly after Abraham Lincoln issued the
Emancipation Proclamation. Scholars have theorized that Leutze added the man to
demonstrate that African American freedom was now part of nation's search for freedom.
The painting visualized what northern overlanders had been remarking on since the
1840s, the intertwining of the EuroAmerican and African American search for freedom in
the far West. Asked about his decision to include the African American figure in an 1868
interview in Lippincott's Magazine, Leutze confirmed that he had intended to celebrate
African American forbearance and manhood, aligning him with the great struggle of
pioneer mythology.
69
In so doing, Leutze underscored a truth that overland narrators had
already made the nation aware, that the "Emigrant and the Freedmen are the two great
elements which are to be reconciled and worked with."
70

69
Patricia Hills, “Picturing Progress in the Era of Westward Expansion,” in The West as
America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920 (Washington: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1991), 97–147; Emanuel Leutze to Colonel Meigs, February 14, 1854,
Folder entitled "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, Correspondence, 1854-
1937," Justin G. Turner Autograph Collection, Manuscripts Division, Library of
Congress, Washington. D.C.; and Vivien Green Fryd, Art & Empire: The Politics of
Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815-1860 (Ohio University Press, 2001), 209–13.
70
“Emmanuel Leutze, The Artist,” Lippincott’s Magazine of Literature, Science and
Education 2, (November 1868): 536.
104

Even as Leutze made social space for these groups in his painting, his mural
depicts a western landscape devoid of indigenous and other peoples who called the land
home. The symbol of the West as a place to expand the American nation could
accommodate the same elements, the social tensions, there as they did at home, but this
opportunity for accommodation depended on the exclusion of Indian peoples and other
western inhabitants. But this was also an incorporation that depended on the resolution of
Reconstruction tensions. In the decades immediately following the Civil War, more and
more EuroAmericans flocked to the capital to visit the halls of the reunited nation and to
bask in the glory of the United States and the confirmation of American democracy.
There, from the steps of the west stairway of the capitol, they would gaze on an idealized
symbol of national westward expansion across the overland trail, a symbol that proposed
to incorporate the symbolic tensions of the nation. The figure no doubt prompted visitors
to pause, and wonder at its inclusion.
Across the continent, African American pioneers both living and dead served a
similar purpose to the anonymous figure in Leutze's mural. In 1883 the Society of
California Pioneers (SCP) elected Alvin Coffey its sole African American member.
Coffey, who described himself as "the only colored man in the State of California who
wears the Pioneer badge" is also the only known African American author of an overland
narrative. Coffey's 1901 reminiscence, which the SCP included in their multivolume
reminiscence collection published the following year, describes the overland journey as a
long and torturous path to freedom. On his way West, when bartering with a white man
for flour, Coffey declared that he said the "first saucy words" to a white man. But his
105

owner, who Coffey refers to only as Dr. Basset, took the gold Coffey had mined on his
own time and then sold him when they returned to Missouri in 1851. Coffey eventually
convinced his new owner to allow him to return to California to mine the gold necessary
to purchase his own and his family's freedom. In 1858 Coffey, after traveling across the
plains to Missouri and back a third time, settled with his family in California.
71
Coffey's
reminiscence, and especially his inclusion of detailed figures of how much he had earned
for his master during his time in slavery, helped to make the idea of owning a person and
their labor more real for an audience nearly forty years removed from slavery. Moreover,
as the sole African American pioneer Coffey and his membership was a powerful, albeit
innocuous, symbol of African American manhood and freedom detached from specter of
widespread African American power.
The security of Coffey's exceptionalism is underscored by the failure of a group
of African Americans to gain membership in the Native Sons. These eighteen men, led by
George Dennis, Jr., the publisher of San Francisco's African American newspaper, first
petitioned for membership on the basis that the Native Sons' whites only policy violated
the Federal and State Constitutions. Summarily rejected, the men appealed again three

71
Brenda Frink, “Pioneers and Patriots: Race, Gender, and the Construction of
Citizenship in California, 1875-1915," (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2010), 44–8, 79.
"Autobiography and Reminiscence of Alvin Aaron Coffey, Mills Seminary P.O., 1901,"
"The Society of California Pioneers Collection of Autobiographies and Reminiscences of
Early Pioneers," Sullivan Library, Society of California Pioneers, Online Archive of
California, http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt8489q5km; Thurman, Pioneers
of Negro Origin in California, 11-17; Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California, 25, 69–70;
"Was Once a Slave: The Colored Member of the Pioneers," San Francisco Chronicle,
March 19, 1893. See also, Eual D. Blansett, Jr. and Jeannette L. Molson, The Torturous
Road to Freedom: The Life of Alvin Aaron Coffey (Linden, California: Self-Published,
2009).
106

years later. The San Francisco Examiner reported on Dennis' presentation of their case on
the floor of the Sons' Grand Parlor. According to the report, Dennis based the group's
appeal on being "the colored men who crossed the continent in '49," who had "met with
the same experiences" as white men and whose "sufferings and privations were as
great."
72
The Native Sons again denied the petition but Dennis' plea on the basis of shared
overland experience gave life to a trail history that encompassed both white and black
and slave and free.
Farther north in Oregon, George Himes, the secretary of the state historical
society, took up the task of making sure that this twin story would be recorded. Himes
devoted much of his life to painstakingly collecting detailed reminiscences and artifacts,
often spending days traversing the countryside on foot or, when the debilitating pain of
old age became too much, driving a small wagon.
73
In 1910 he wrote to former
overlander and state legislator John Minto asking for information on the "slave girl"
Daniel Delany had brought to the territory in 1843 and if J. D. Sauls and George
Washington Bush, two fairly prominent Oregon pioneers, were "not colored men?" Minto
responded that they were. In fact his 1876 address before the meeting of the Oregon
Pioneer Association had centered on the story of his overland journey with the "mulatto"

72
"Historic Marks Restored: Noble and Patriotic Work of the Native Sons of the Golden
West," San Francisco Examiner, April 27, 1893; B. Gordon Wheeler, Black California:
The History of African Americans in the Golden State (New York: Hippocrene Books,
1993), 72–74; and Sue Bailey Thurman, Pioneers of Negro Origin in California (San
Francisco: Acme, 1949), 5–10.
73
George Himes to John Minto, October 21, 1910, Box 1, John Minto Papers, MSS 752,
Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland, Oregon.
107

George Washington Bush. As events in the South underscored the limits of the hope of
Reconstruction, Minto wove a tale of realized freedom in the far West. Bush was already
free when he departed Missouri in 1853, but he was concerned that Oregon's Black
Exclusion Law, passed two years earlier, would preclude him from settling in the
territory. Bush, like Minto and the other white travelers in their company, cast their
journeys west as a journey away from slavery. These white men promised to stand by
him when they arrived to assure his ability to settle. Once they arrived, they found the
issue a moot point. The Oregon legislature had "in spite of his color" recognized "the
worth of this man" and allowed Bush to settle in the territory. Minto applauded the
pioneers of Oregon for rising above the prejudice of race at a time when it was perhaps
the strongest.
74

But other narratives challenged these triumphal stories of western freedom. In two
different oral histories, EuroAmerican families portrayed slaves as so loyal that they
follow their masters to Oregon, concealed in boxes, so as to protect themselves from
meddling abolitionists and federal soldiers. These stories, told of John Livingstone and
Rose Jackson, act as counter narratives to the antislavery celebration of Henry "Box"
Brown's daring trip north to freedom in a wooden box.
75
These narratives may have

74
John Minto, "The Occasional Address," in Transactions of the Fourth Annual Re-
Union of the Oregon Pioneer Association, (Salem, Or.,: E. M. Waite, Steam Printer and
Bookbinder, 1877), 37–8.
75
The story of Rose Jackson is primarily based on family legend. Darrell Milner states
that this story and a number of others on Oregon's African-American pioneers came to
light through the work of Vera Martin Lynch, a local historian of Clackamas County
Oregon, Vera Martin Lynch, Free land for free men; a story of Clackamas County.
(Portland, Or.: Printed by Artline Print., 1973). See, Darrell Milner, email message to
108

begun as family oral histories but John Livingstone's was also a major feature of his
obituary. There, printed and reprinted in local newspapers it became part of a larger
historical cadre of knowledge regarding the overland trail and "pioneer" history.
Still other oral histories are of freedom denied, of African Americans whose tales
underscore the intricate dependencies between white and black. Long after the Matlocks
crossed the Oregon Trail, their family continued to tell stories of their journey. In order to
cross the plains to Oregon the Matlocks had hired two drivers before they left Missouri.
These drivers helped the family reach Oregon but they themselves were prohibited from
entering the territory because they were black. Angered at their exclusion, the men cursed
the Matlocks. For generations to come the family attributed crop failures and other
economic catastrophes to the "Matlock Curse." The curse was believed to be so real, that
well into the twentieth century one descendant would not discuss the Curse for fear that
in doing so she would give it more power.
76
The story provided the Matlock family with
a rationale for their failure, while also suggesting the unease felt by those Oregonians
who had tried to base white freedom on black exclusion. Even denied entry these perhaps
fictitious turned-away Missourians had a guiding hand in the future prosperity of the

author, April 14, 2011. A printed version of Rose's story appeared in Clackamas County
Historical Society, Clackamas County Historical, 1962-1963: Growth. (Oregon City Or.:
Clackamas County Historical Society, 1963), 49. The story of John Livingstone, slave of
Robert Livingstone was included in his 1912 published obituary. "John Livingstone Early
Black Pioneer in Clarkes Area," Ringo Family File, Clackamas County Family History
Society, Oregon City, Oregon.
76
Kenneth Hammill, "Dorothy Dell (Dutton) Hammill, 1910-1986, Daughter of Oregon
Pioneers Her Life, Ancestry, Descendants," (Portland, Oregon, 1986), 13. In author's
possession. Linda Matthews, email message to author, May 8, 2012.
109

family they had hired to help across the plains.

110

Chapter Three: Mobilizing Domesticity

Mobility and its concomitant concerns were defining features of the vast majority
of nineteenth-century EuroAmerican families. The overland trail existed at the center of
such anxieties in popular culture and individual or family consciousness. For a nation
dealing with an increasingly mobile population, the trail was an extreme manifestation of
families separated by physical distance. A journey of over two thousand miles inevitably
strained the marriage promises of engaged couples, forced husbands bound for the
California gold fields to leave wives and young children far behind, rendered youthful
voices tearful and fearful, and created countless poignant scenes in which presumed final
goodbyes to parents and aged grandparents marked the very moment of adventurous
travel westward. In their letters, diaries, and reminiscences, overlanders gave voice to a
ubiquitous language of undying familial affection and influence; the same language used
by new urbanites, recent European immigrants, and other mobile Americans of the
period.
Of all mobile EuroAmericans of this period, overlanders were perhaps best
positioned to respond to this problem of mobility and familial bonds severed by distance.
They were positioned so well because of the identification of the trail with the movement
of families. Overlanders, like other emigrants had to leave some sort of home and family
behind, but many also traveled as part of both nuclear and extended family units. In the
middle decade of the overland trail experience, when visions of gold characterized much
of the westering motivation, men headed to California tended to travel without family or
111

relatives. However, they constructed their journeys as a means to better the position of
the families they had left behind, to improve domesticity. Moreover, these all male
companies were one thread of a larger migration, and traveling Argonauts were quick to
note their ability to achieve some comforts of home at the warming campfires of families
bound for Oregon.
1
Therefore, even as emigrants bemoaned leaving home behind the
domestic traveled with them.
The symbolic value and comforting meaning of the overland trail depended in
large part on a counterintuitive conviction. Overlanders believed, and seemingly had to
believe in the midst of their anxieties and loneliness, that just as they were leaving
domestic comfort behind, they were in fact helping to expand domesticity, and thus
civilization, westward. There was, perhaps, no greater conceit of the overland trail than

1
Scholars have long recognized the potential of the overland trail for shedding light on
familial relationships and gender roles. See, for example, Nancy Wilson Ross, Westward
the Women (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1944); Sandra L. Myres, Westering Women and the
Frontier Experience, 1800-1915, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982);
Lillian Schlissel, Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey, (New York: Schocken
Books, 1992); Julie Roy Jeffrey, Frontier Women : the trans-Mississippi West, 1840-
1880, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979); and the seminal John Mack Faragher, Women
and Men on the Overland Trail, 2nd. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). For
a more recent study of gender and domesticity on the trail see, Melody M. Miyamoto,
“No Home for Domesticity? Gender and Society on the Overland Trails” (PhD diss.,
Arizona State University, 2006). In recent decades historians of women and gender have
shown how integral women and gender roles are to all of American life irregardless of a
sustained physical presence on the battle or gold fields. See, for example, Alice Fahs, The
Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North & South, 1861-1865, Civil War
America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Amy Greenberg,
Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2005); and Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: the Social World of the
California Gold Rush (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000).

112

that which insisted, prima facie, that emigrants were bringing domesticity and civilization
to a world of savagery; they left home but somehow brought home with them, in the form
of cultural baggage, even outright cultural obligation. EuroAmericans saw their embrace
of domesticity and protection of the home as proof of their civilized, and superior,
culture. In turn, they wielded cocksure domesticity as a means to tame people and places
they considered uncivilized. Urban reformers, western expansionists, and emigrants alike
spoke of civilizing people and places, in essence, of instilling domesticity. Domesticity,
as scholars have shown, was not, therefore, bound to the home, but rather a foundational
part of expanding America's cultural reach; domesticity moved with a people on the
move.
2

Among its many attributes, the overland journey made the strange familiar and
the familiar strange. Emigrants' contention that they moved as families allowed them to
claim that they transported the domestic with them. Through their narratives, letters,
journals, and objects carried and collected along the way, overlanders blended the
familiar with the foreign, in the process expanding the former and domesticating the
latter. Through sending letters, diaries, pressed flowers, and other mementoes home,
overlanders introduced the strangeness of their journeys and the landscape of the far West
into the domestic circle. Similarly, treasured bibles, daguerreotypes, and ordinary-
seeming saddle bags stitched by a spouse “back in the States” became powerful

2
Amy Kaplan, "Manifest Domesticity," American Literature, vol. 70, 3, (1998): 581–
606.
113

connections to the domestic circle as emigrants made their way ever farther from home.
3

What overlanders helped to create, essentially, was a mobile domesticity, detaching it
from particular places and identifying it with affective bonds and transportable goods.
Through mobilizing the ideology of home and family life, overlanders not only purported
to extend their cultural reach across the continent but also expected to provide a
reassuring framework for families dealing with the modern problem of mobility. Thus,
the overland trail came to symbolize a solution to the problem of modernity even as it
was an instance of that same dilemma.
The ideology of domesticity emerged as a means to combat twin fears of
modernity and mobility. In mid-nineteenth-century America, domesticity described a
particular view of family life, one in which wife and mother served as the religious and
affective pillar of the private household. A paragon of "true womanhood," the ideal
woman was said to embody values of religiosity, purity, and civility; she was in turn
charged with, or obligated to, disseminate these traits to her husband and (especially)
children. The physical boundaries and material accoutrement of this private space,
including bedrooms, parlors, and bibles, were both emblems and instruments of

3
For a discussion of the importance of these objects in providing continuity for families
and reminding them of their common past see, Elliott West, Growing up with the
Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1989), 61–3. On the importance of such family items for helping
EuroAmericans to transfer gentility to the West see, Timothy R. Mahoney, Provincial
lives: Middle-Class Experience in the Antebellum Middle West (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 155–6. The idea that home could be changed and reestablished
was an important part of modern capitalist ideology. The nineteenth century marks the
point during which EuroAmericans as well as people around the globe grappled with this
change. For a comment on this transformation see, Susan Matt, Homesickness: an
American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 72.
114

domesticity. Domesticity thus depended on a specific combination of the material and the
moral. As modernity and industrialization pulled the economic center out of the
household, EuroAmericans reconstructed the domestic circle and the material space of
the home as a sanctuary apart from the public and thus tainted world of the expanding
marketplace. This public and private division, scholars have shown, was substantially
more porous than nineteenth-century EuroAmericans professed. Even as nineteenth-
century EuroAmericans portrayed the domestic as distinct, and even walled off, from the
public sphere, they employed the ideals and ideologies of domesticity to help drive
political projects ranging from social reform to national expansion in that very public
sphere.
4

At roughly the same time that the discourse of domesticity solidified in the 1840s,
the United States secured political control of California and Oregon. By the early fall of
1848 California and Oregon had become territories of the United States. That same year,
New York became the first state to pass a married women's property act, allowing wives
to maintain greater control over their assets, thus augmenting female independence within
marriage. More states followed with similar statutes shortly thereafter. As new states,
including California and Oregon, began to draft constitutions and their own marriage
laws over the next decade, they kept alive debates over the relationship between man and

4
The literature on this topic is vast. Two excellent, pertinent works are, Mary P. Ryan,
Cradle of the Middle Class (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and
Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (New York:
Knopf, 1986). For a specific discussion of domesticity and its connection to efforts to
"civilize" the far West see, Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue : the Search for Female
Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1990).
115

wife—the cultural as well as the legal foundation of domesticity.
5
Accordingly, even as
sectional issues increasingly consumed the nation, definitions of home, family, and
gender relations were also on the national agenda. Some of this attention to these issues is
apparent in The Oregon Donation Land Claim Act. The act, passed by Congress in 1850,
became the first to entitle not only men but also married women to own title to property.
The act created a temporary spike in marriages in Oregon and helped to pull
EuroAmericans West. Over the next two decades thousands of farming families, reeling
from the panics and ensuing depressions of the late 1830s and 40s, would pick up and
reestablish themselves in the far West.
6

Although the vast majority (nearly 80%) of Americans would continue to work in
agriculture until the 1880s, the rise of urban industry put the nineteenth-century United
States on a course toward dramatic and irreparable change. The antebellum period
marked the apogee of American urban growth. From 1820 to 1860 the proportion of
EuroAmericans living in cities rose nearly 800 percent while the overall population rose

5
On these debates, and the revisions in state constitutions see Hendrik Hartog, Man and
Wife in America: a History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 110–16,
148.
6
John Unruh has estimated that nearly 65,000 emigrants moved to Oregon across the trail
between 1840 and 1860. Many of these settlers were farming families, and many more
families crossed the trail to California. Unruh, Plains Across, 119–20. Twelve years later,
The Homestead Act of 1862 promised to further female independence by allowing
unmarried women to claim land as single head of households. A number of historians
have explored the lives of single women who took advantage of this opportunity. See, for
example, Sherry L Smith, “Single Women Homesteaders: The Perplexing Case of
Elinore Pruitt Stewart,” The Western Historical Quarterly 22, no. 2 (1991): 163–183.
Although some single women did travel across the plains, many intended to marry once
they arrived in Oregon, not establish their own households.
116

approximately 200 percent. Moreover, cities themselves became larger, denser, and
therefore less knowable. The influx of immigrants from Britain, Italy, Germany, and
other European countries increased the threatening anonymity of this "world of strangers"
on the eastern seaboard. With the public world becoming so unfamiliar so rapidly,
EuroAmericans increasingly retreated inward to a comforting domestic sphere. The
ideology of domesticity elevated the home as a sacred space apart from the public world
of the market, and charged the mother and wife with exercising moral influence over her
husband and children. The home, and the moral code and emotional bonds it fostered,
was constructed as an anchor against the corresponding pulls of the city and the market.
But domesticity's effectiveness was necessarily based on being tied to familial space.
Thus, it proved inadequate to accommodating the increasing mobility that required a
break from the physical world of the home.
7

7
Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: a Study of Middle-class Culture
in America, 1830-1870, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 35–6.
117

Figure 3. Leaving the Old Homestead, James Wilkins (c1853). Images of westward migration, like those of urban
and transnational migrations, underscored the familial sacrifices of mobility. Following the precepts of
domesticity, the women in this painting bear the brunt of the emotional anguish of this departure. The young
mother, whose gathered belongings signify her imminent departure, buries her face in one hand and clasps her
pale mother's hand with the other. The youngest daughter mimics her mother's distress, while the older girl
embraces her grandfather for what we presume is the final time. The husband, in contrast, stands apart holding
his bundle and rifle at the ready. The boy, in the midst of playing with the family's dog, appears to be the least
affected by the departure. (Courtesy Missouri History Museum, St. Louis Missouri.)

The era’s concern is evident in the vast collection of novels, songs, plays, and
visual culture depicting the poignancy of leaving home. James Wilkins' "Leaving the Old
Homestead" (1854) memorialized the familial sacrifices of young families who moved
west. Although neither the title nor the visual details in the painting specify the emigrants'
destination, Wilkins, who traveled across the overland trail in 1849, may have been
inspired by the overlanders he had seen on his journey, as well as his own departure. This
painting was a product of its time, a scene of leaving home in search of opportunity. But
in depicting a young farming family leaving as a unit for a presumably western
118

destination, Wilkins proffered a more traditional scene than that of, say, a single young
man leaving the farm for the city.
8

EuroAmericans not only cast leave-taking as a family unit as a traditional form of
mobility, but also touted these migrations as a means to further national imperatives. The
logic of westward expansion dictated that ordinary citizens helped to seize western
territory for the nation by transforming "wilderness" into agricultural fields. Expanding
the United States thus depended on a pastoral domesticity of farm families who would
bring agriculture, ever intertwined with civilization, westward. George Caleb Bingham's
"Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers Through Cumberland Gap (c. 1851-2)," produced
around the same time as Wilkins' painting, portrayed the movement of the first
EuroAmerican settlers through the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian Mountains as a
movement of families, complete with Boone's wife as an idealized, Madonna-like figure.
9

EuroAmericans thus saw overlanders' mobility not as creating a radical break with home
and the domestic but rather as a contemporary iteration of a more traditional form of
mobility that was also necessarily familial and national.

8
Much has been written about the construction of women as being the least likely to want
to emigrate and their emphasis on their emotional exile once in the West. For scholarship
that uses this particular painting as an example of this construction see, Janet Floyd,
Writing: The Pioneer Woman (University of Missouri Press, 2002), 70–2. Wilkins, who
traveled the trail himself in 1849, would have seen mostly companies of single young
men. However, when he visually depicted leaving home for the West he chose to create a
more iconic image of a young family leaving home.
9
Patricia Hills, “Picturing Progress in the Era of Westward Expansion,” in The West as
America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920, eds. William H. Truettner
and Nancy K. Anderson (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 113–4.
119

Proponents of westward expansion also made this explicit connection. An 1849
article in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review argued for the intertwining
of familial and national expansion. After describing a couple that married "in the Gate of
the Rocky Mountains" the author asserted, "holy matrimony is the main-spring of
emigration." He then went further, declaring, "emigration is the pivot of American
progress." Thus, emigrant unions were not only personal but also national in their
significance.
10

But although many overlanders moved as families, few were moving west for the
first time. Of the emigrants in John Mack Faragher's study of family migration across the
overland trail, 90% of the male heads of households had already emigrated from points
east.
11
Some of these men may have moved west as children with their parents but others
had moved multiple times as adults. Any familiarity with mobility, however, did little to
quell emigrants' laments at leaving family and homes far behind as they embarked on
transcontinental journeys for the first time. Although Forty-niner Augustus Ripley
Burbank had only passed a portion of his adult life in Naples, Illinois, he mourned
leaving "old Naples" even though it was neither his place of birth nor the town where he

10
“The Wedding in the Gate of the Rocky Mountains,” The United States Democratic
Review, 24, 8 (February 1849): 126, Making of America Collection, Cornell University
Library, (ebooks.library.cornell.edu).
11
Faragher, Women and Men, 18. At this time I do not have comparable data for Gold
Rush emigrants. These men tended to be younger, and the Gold Rush may have been the
first time many left their parents' houses. Faragher has estimated that approximately half
of all emigrants traveled in companies composed only of their relatives, Ibid., 25–33.
Notwithstanding these realities of the centrality of family to westward expansion, many
individuals as well as published authors and politicians declared the journey too
dangerous for women and children, Unruh, Plains Across, 65.
120

spent his childhood. His grief suggests how EuroAmericans continued to redefine the
nature of home throughout their lifetimes.
12

This mobility did, however, complicate the departures idealized in paintings like
that by Wilkins. Keturah Belknap, who had moved from Ohio to Iowa shortly after her
marriage, returned to her parents' home for a final visit nearly one year before she and her
husband planned to depart for Oregon. Reluctant to taint the pleasure of the reunion with
the information of her impending departure, Belknap kept the news "buried. . .in my. .
.breast." Jefferis Wilson's father similarly learned of his departure for California by "mere
accident." Friends in the town of Cincinnati, (where Jefferis had been living after leaving
his father's Indiana farm), not Jefferis, alerted his family of his imminent departure.
Jefferis himself did not inform them until he posted a letter from St. Joseph, Missouri just
before striking west across the plains. He cited lack of funds for prohibiting him from
returning home to "say. . .farewell," and urged his father to understand, "how much I love
thee and how hard it was for me."
13
Belknap portrayed her decision to hide the truth from
her family as a selfless act to obviate any distress they might feel at her departure.
Wilson, in contrast, emphasized his emotional suffering induced by his own leave taking.
Both strategies, however, speak to the resistance and emotional distress overlanders knew

12
Augustus Ripley Burbank, Augustus Burbank Ripley Diary, 1849-80, April 20, 1849,
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
13
“Keturah Penton Belknap,” in Women of the West, ed. Cathy Luchetti and Carol
Orwell, (St George, Utah: Antelope Island Press, 1982), 140; and Jefferis Wilson to
Father, July 22, 1849, Wilson-Warner-Corbitt Family Papers, The Winterthur Library:
Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera.
121

they would cause their families (and themselves) by moving farther from home than ever
before.
The great geographic distance between the Pacific Coast and the settled United
States obviously increased families' trepidation at seeing their loved ones depart.
Belknap, for instance, specifically did not inform her family because, while the less than
month-long journey between Ohio and Iowa could be made multiple times a year, the
over two thousand mile journey to Oregon and California would likely prohibit her from
returning to see her family ever again.
14
Belknap's concern is a common and oft-cited
feature of overlanders' laments. These expressions of grief, however, should not distract
from the fact that many overlanders reunited with their families. Countless men who
traveled to the California gold fields, and especially those with families, expected to
return home but the great distance of the trail augmented fears that they might die before
they could do so. Concern for the vast expanse of the journey helped to portray
overlanders as men and women who endured an extreme separation from family for the
benefit of themselves and the nation.
Notwithstanding this great geographic distance, the movement of family members
West changed EuroAmericans' perceptions of western geography. Even as Belknap
bemoaned her inability to ever return to Ohio, she helped to reconfigure her relatives'
conception of home and the domestic circle by way of her westward journey. Mary
Rodgers' sister, for example, thought the trail to Oregon too long to be feasible, but she
could understand why Mary, whose son Andrew had already relocated there, was

14
"Keturah Penton Belknap,” in Women of the West, 140.
122

considering it; “was my children going,” she declared, “I would go to be with them."
15

Once emigrants like Andrew arrived in Oregon or California, they frequently began to
encourage other relatives to join them. In his letters home Andrew strongly urged his
family to think about joining him in Oregon, dwelling on how lonely he was and
emphasizing the benefits of his new home. California emigrant T. J. Ables struck a
similar stance with his parents, insisting that the journey to California had been so hard
that he could not contemplate crossing the plains again, unless he did so to bring his
mother, father, and extended family across with him.
16
Subtly, Ables may have been
suggesting that to see him again they would have to join him in California. By virtue of
moving west, these emigrants helped to reconfigure the locus of home and family.
Other overlanders planned to have their families join them in California or
Oregon before they started across the plains. As scholars have shown, overlanders
frequently relied on "chain migration," whereby one relative would help to bring other,
and often many, family members to join them in a new home.
17
EuroAmericans

15
Elizabeth Letcher to Mary Rodgers, June 26, 1846, Box 1, Rodgers Family Papers,
1773-1925, bulk 1830-1890, The Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois. For similar
patterns of chain migration and familial reunification in the West among both
EuroAmericans and European immigrants see, Jon Gjerde, “We’ll Meet on Canaan’s
Land: Patterns of Migration,” in Minds of the West (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2002), 79–102.
16
Andrew Rodgers to Brother, September 12, 1845, Box 2, Rodgers Family Papers,
1773-1925, The Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois; and T. J. Ables to Father and
Mother, Oct. 12, 1857, A Trip Across the Plains, The Newberry Library, Chicago,
Illinois.
17
On the importance of chain migration for settling the far West see, Walter T. K
Nugent, Into the West: The Story of its People (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1999), 50.
123

commonly sent one or more relatives, usually a husband, father, or eldest son, west to
assess the country and establish a foothold before the entire family relocated. This initial
migration helped to secure valuable information about both the new country and the
journey. Some relatives sent letters home to help their kin follow in their footsteps, while
others returned to help guide family members across the plains. For some this process
took just a few years, but bad luck in Oregon or delays at home could extend the
separation.
18

The overland trail not only promised to establish young families on their own
farms but also to reunite dispersed relatives. This domestic promise had been long
associated with western lands. While traveling through Iowa with her family to California
in 1849, one female overlander conversed with a grandmother she passed outside of a
farmhouse just west of Council Bluffs, Iowa. Curious, she asked the Iowan why she and
her family would move "so far from all society privileges." The woman explained that
farther east they had had plenty of material comforts, but they wanted to have room to
have their children and grandchildren near them. Westward migrants, in this formulation,
traded modern material luxuries for a domesticity built on the proximity of

18
See, for example, Henry Anable, "Journal of H. S Anable, From Sheboygan, Wisconsin
to Sacramento, California, in the year 1852," ts, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San
Marino, California. An Illinois paper reported a similar arrangement for a Mr. Cutting
who had gone to California the previous year to decide whether a viable place to relocate
them and was now returning home so that he could move his family west in the spring."
and "California--The Gold Region," Illinois State Register, December 22, 1848,
"Illinois," Box 5, Ralph P. Bieber Newspaper Collection, The Henry E. Huntington
Library, San Marino, CA.
124

intergenerational families. This anecdote suggested that mobile westward emigrants
prized the most important relationships of home, the connection with relatives.
19

Popular culture took up this idea of the trail as a path to familial reunification. In
his best-selling narrative What I Saw in California (1846), journalist Edwin Bryant
described an attempted reunion between a mother and son. Informed by her doctor that
she was not long for the world, seventy-year-old Sarah Keyes devoted her final days to
seeing her "only son once more on earth." Sarah embarked with her daughter's family
(who were migrating to California) in the hope of reaching Fort Hall in Wyoming
territory where her son, who had been living in Oregon, had promised to meet her. But
the "hardships of the journey" were too much for Sarah who "expired without seeing her
child" and was buried on the Kansas plains. Although Sarah was thwarted in her efforts
to reunite with her son, her attempt to supersede the distance demonstrated that while
physically separated from her child her emotional domestic attachments were as strong as

19
Roxana Cheney Foster, The Foster Family: California Pioneers of 1849 (n.p, 1889), p
11, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. On these types of
migrations see, Faragher, Women and Men, 34. Elliott West has called the trail "a family
reunion on wheels," West, Growing up with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western
Frontier, 19. For moving to Oregon to rejoin family see also, Peter Boag, Environment
and Experience Settlement Culture in Nineteenth-century Oregon (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1992), 37. For an argument about not only the maintenance but also
the strengthening of extended familial bonds among western emigrants see, Tamara
Gaskell Miller, “"My Whole Enjoyment & Almost My Existence Depends Upon My
Friends’: Family and Kinship in Early Ohio,” in The Center of a Great Empire: The Ohio
Country in the Early American Republic, ed. Andrew R. L. Cayton and Stuart D. Hobbs
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 122–45.
125

ever.
20
In so doing, it helped to confirm the proper maternal affection of overland
emigrants.
So too did many overlanders cast marital partnerships as the driving force behind
the decision to travel. Emigrant narratives frequently describe the debates and discussions
between couples leading up to the decision to start for the far West. Although there are
stories of husbands who compelled or misled their wives to get them to relocate to
California or Oregon, many of these narratives explore the decision as a partnership,
albeit one in which the husband retained the upper, patriarchal hand.
21
In a memoir
written sixty-five years after her journey to California in 1849, Mary Jane Hayden
described how she convinced her husband to delay his departure for California. Too weak
to journey after giving birth six weeks earlier, Hayden told her husband that she had
married him so they could live together, and because she could not travel he ought not
either.
22
Hayden's husband acquiesced, and they departed for the far West the following
year. Catherine Haun also described her journey as a movement of marriage partners. In
her reminiscence of her trip to California, Haun argued that her decision not to tell her
husband of her early despair had helped buttress his own wavering resolve. Haun cried

20
Bryant, What I Saw, 63–4. Keyes would eventually gain fame for being the first
member of the Donner Party to perish, and her grave become an important tourist site
along the trail. For the popularity of Bryant's guidebook see Chapter One.
21
For an account of a husband delibrately deceiving his wife see, Faragher, Women and
Men, 164–5.
22
Mary Jane Hayden, Pioneer Days (San Jose, CA: Murgotten’s Press, 1915), 7. Hayden
was not the only wife to remind her husband of his matrimonial duties. See, for example
Peirce's discussion with his wife, John B. Peirce to Wife, January 13, 1851, John B Peirce
Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts.
126

privately to herself, hiding evidence of her emotional distress so as not to discourage her
husband who was also "disheartened and was struggling not to betray it."
23
In these
stories, migration requires the emotional support of husbands and wives. In other words,
these stories cast the companionate marriage ideal of domesticity as central to trail travel.
Furthermore, even as the ideal of domesticity emphasized the need for physical
proximity to relatives and the clearly defined material space of the home, institutions like
the post office helped family members maintain their relationships at a distance. The
historian David Henkin has identified the Gold Rush and the Civil War as two watershed
moments in transforming the postal system into a formative force for maintaining familial
relationships at a distance. The overland trail is perhaps a third watershed moment in this
change. Although Henkin considers the overland trail in his examination of the Gold
Rush he does not analyze it in and of its own right. While Henkin concerned himself with
the relationship between EuroAmericans and the official postal system, the overland trail
for the most part existed apart from official networks. Overlanders had to establish their
own networks, and they did so in partnership with Native Americans, traders and
trappers, and the army.
24

When overlanders managed to send letters home they did not just further the
identification of the family letter with making portable the affection and influence of
family life, they also made the mail a communal endeavor. Emigrants collaborated with

23
Catherine Haun, "A Woman's Trip Across the Plains in 1849," p 7, The Henry E.
Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.
24
David Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communication in
Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago, 2006).
127

passing traders, Indians, Mormons, the army and other emigrants collaborated to send
mail. Moreover, more than miners writing from California or soldiers writing from the
battlefields, overlanders contributed to the project of making territory only nominally part
of the United States more accessible. The power of family letters was not only that they
helped to transport familial influence and affection but also that they became vehicles of
connection with Native Americans with whom emigrants as emigrants frequently
negotiated the terms of carrying letters east.
At the same time, these missives helped to domesticate foreign territory by
sending penned pictures of unfamiliar places home in familiar forms. Overlanders relied
on the mail as well as mementoes and their imaginations to maintain virtual connections
with their loved ones. The cultural role of the mail was already in place by the time
overlanders began traveling across the trail, but the trail made familial separation more
extreme and took overlanders into strange territory. Thus, the journey increased the
stakes of maintaining this virtual domesticity through these missives.
25

In the mid-nineteenth century rising literacy rates, reduction of postage prices,
and an explosion of post offices across the country transformed the mail into a system of
mass communication.
26
The rise of the modern postal system changed the geography of

25
Henkin, Postal Age, 7, 147.
26
In 1845, the United States Congress, inspired in part by EuroAmericans' desire to
communicate with family members who had migrated west, significantly reduced postage
rates, making the mail affordable for most Americans and transforming the post into a
system of mass communication. Even as the vast majority of letters continued to serve
interests of traders and long-distance merchants, EuroAmericans grasped onto the idea of
the post as a force to keep families connected in an increasingly mobile world. On the
transformation of the postal system see, Richard John, Spreading the News: the American
128

familial separation, facilitating communication with relatives at a distance. For the days
up to weeks during which overlanders made their way westward to "jumping-off" towns,
the post kept them in contact with loved ones. Some overlanders sent letters home simply
because they could, without yet having any significant news or items of interest to report.
But for others the post provided a means to potentially avert the impending separation. In
letters written to her husband and son soon after their departure from Buffalo, New York
Sarah Ann Nichols declared that she would die if they did not return home immediately:
"save my life I can not live if you go to California," where "war, famine pestilence –
murder" lay in wait. Nichols' husband and son ignored her plea, but would-be miner
Jackson Thomason would have rejoiced to receive such a missive from home. A few days
into his journey, he confided to his diary that he hoped a letter would arrive demanding
that he return to his family.
27

Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1995), 161n227; and Henkin, The Postal Age. The strength of the post office was
particularly strong in nineteenth-century America. The postal system was nearly twice as
large as Britain's and five time as large as that in France. There were 74 post offices for
every 100,000 US citizens compared 17 for every 100,000 Britons. On the specific
importance of letters to fostering and maintaining romantic relationships see, Karen
Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-century
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). On the impact of increased
mobility on families in the eighteenth century see Sarah Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives
and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
On the importance of immigrant letters see, David Gerber, Authors of Their Lives : the
Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth
Century (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
27
Sarah Nichols to Samuel and George W. Nichols, April 7, 1849, Samuel Nichols
Collection, 1753-1897, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California; and
Jackson Thomason, "Diary," April 10, May 6, and May 9 1849, Department of Archives
and History, State of Mississippi, quoted in Lewis Saum, The Popular Mood of pre-Civil
War America (Westport Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 4.
129

While neither Thomason nor Nichols received the desired response, their hopes
demonstrate the ways in which the post extended the connection between travelers and
home. As Theodore Talbot put it, the mail allowed him to imagine himself in a "manner
near" to his beloved sister and mother. Once in St. Louis, at the edge of Missouri and the
settled United States, he hoped to delay his departure, thereby putting off what seemed to
be a "second separation" from loved ones.
28
Nineteenth-century EuroAmericans
described the post as the means to remain connected to home and thus to civilization.
This importance was made even more clear when one forty-niner learned that Jim
Bridger, the so-called "mountain man" who had abandoned the United States to live in
the western "wilds," effectively cut himself off from his family by refusing to write
home.
29
By severing these ties with family Bridger crossed over from the world of
civilization to that of savagery. In the nineteenth century, then, the line between
civilization and the wilderness was defined in part by the ability to receive mail.
Yet many overlanders found that this separation was not as absolute as they
anticipated. One of the most oft-cited, quirky features of the trail was the ad-hoc mail
system that overlanders developed to keep the lines of communication open. Some of
these missives, like paper notes tacked to trees, or messages etched onto buffalo skulls

28
Theodore Talbot to Sister, June 9, 1845, Box 1, The Papers of Theodore Talbot,
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
29
Charles D. Ferguson, The experiences of a Forty-niner during thirty-four years’
residence in California and Australia, ed. Frederick T. Wallace (Cleveland, O.: The
Williams publishing company, 1888), 63.

130

left by the wayside, were designed to communicate with other travelers. Known as the
"prairie telegraph," this system was a testimony to overlander ingenuity. Overlanders
were equally ingenious in their efforts to send communications home. Mud post offices,
letters tucked into the recesses of a wall along the North Platte River, and backward
journeys to collect pencils forgotten at the previous night's encampment were just some
of the strategies and challenges overlanders adopted and overcame in order to keep these
lines open.
30

Through writing and mailing these letters, overlanders imagined themselves to be
maintaining emotional connections and fulfilling domestic roles and responsibilities.
Writing to her grown children from the trail in 1853, Harriet Ward declared that while
their father napped "I am in the wagon, spending an hour with you, my dear children."
31

Parents like Ward also received updates on their children's development. Sometimes, the
first they learned of a child's ability to write was in a cautiously penned postscript.
Similarly, through letters husbands provided their wives with instructions on managing
the household finances, and advice to their children. This advice could be derived from
their experiences on the trail. While employed by the United States government to survey
a wagon road to California, Captain Edward Fitzgerald Beale wrote home to tell his son
that the previous year an emigrant girl had been shot with an Indian arrow near where he

30
Unruh, Plains Across, 134; Henkin, Postal Age, 123; and Alden Finney Brooks,
“Grand Trip Across the Plains,” June 3, 1859, p8, Ayer Collection, The Newberry
Library, Chicago.
31
Harriet Sherrill Ward, Prairie Schooner Lady: the Journal of Harriet Sherrill Ward,
1853, (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1959), 70–1.
131

was now stationed in the Mojave Desert in Arizona. Despite the pain the girl, not wanting
to "distress her parents," did not cry. Beale concluded that he hoped his son would "try &
be as brave & good."
32
Thus, these letters not only allowed overlanders to remain
connected to their families but also necessarily channeled knowledge and information
derived from their foreign experiences. By transforming a recent, and in this case real,
conflict with the Mojave into a lesson for a young boy living in the nation's capital, Beale
helped to domesticate these foreign places and episodes even as the violence he evoked
demonstrated the partialness and vulnerability of United States control in the region.
So too did these letters also reveal the limitations of overlanders' ability to form
domestic connections. Wives received advice too late, or simply chose to ignore it all
together. Young children came to know their fathers only through their letters, rather than
the person in the flesh. Correspondents bemoaned the limits of paper missives, even as
they tilted their letters ninety degrees and wrote more words atop their sentences and
paragraphs.
33
Pen, paper, and mere words, family members asserted repeatedly, were a
poor substitute for the affectionate touch of a loved one. Though partial, letters also bore

32
E. F. Beale to Wife, March 14th, 1859, Box 3, Beale Family Papers from the Decatur
House, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Published literature
similarly wielded the story of the trail as a means to instruct EuroAmerican youth. Jacob
Abbott's The Engineer (NewYork: Harper and Brothers, 1856) told the story of a
fictitious Colonel Markham who, like Beale, had traveled west to build roads for the
Unite States Government. Markham used his travels to teach his children lessons about
the peoples of the West and the challenges of traveling through those regions as well as to
instill in them ethics of hard work and perseverance. On the recognition of the mail as the
way to maintain family relationships and instruct children see, Henkin, Postal Age, 142.
33
Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Days of Gold: the California Gold Rush and the American
Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 47–9, 107–9.
132

the physical traces of their writers. In the nineteenth-century, receiving letters that bore
traces of physical contact with the writer, through handwriting, and perhaps kisses on the
paper, confirmed the missive as the personal product of a loved one. Yet making this
personal connection with the letter writer also depended on composing and reading these
missives in relative privacy. Few overlanders had many opportunities for leisure time and
read and fewer still could do so in relative privacy.
34
Notwithstanding these limitations,
the language denouncing the limits of paper missives in and of itself helped confirm
overlanders' domestic feelings and attachments. Through bemoaning the partiality of
these letters overlanders portrayed themselves as keeping at the front of their minds and
memory the way things were when they were together in the flesh. Although temporarily
separated, this language promised that once physically reunited, overlanders would be a
family once more.
So too did the peculiar challenges of writing and sending letters from the trail
highlight emigrants' domestic attachments and commitments. Military forts and unofficial
drop boxes across the plains as well as passing emigrants, traders, and Indians were just
some of the methods emigrants used to send and receive missives.
35
When William

34
Henkin, Postal Age, 55–6; Lystra, Searching the Heart, 24; and Gerber, Authors of
Their Lives, 117.
35
For more on overlanders' efforts to remain connected to the post see, Henkin, Postal
Age, 121–4. Many overland travelers contracted with Indians to carry their letters to
California. Although William Wells doubted the honesty of the Indian with whom he
negotiated carrying the letter to the East, "he may take them and he may not," the letter
arrived safely at his wife's address. William Wells to Virginia E. Wells, May 15, 1849,
California Section, California State Library, Sacramento, cited in Unruh, Plains Across,
158–9.
133

Pennell's company encountered a group of traders from Bent's Fort on the banks of the
Arkansas River in 1849, he and his companions seized the opportunity to send letters
home. Pennell immediately began penning a letter to his wife, apologizing for its brevity
by explaining candidly "we have stopped in the road. Kyle in the hind part of the wagon,
Perry in the forepart, and myself in the middle all using out of one ink bottle."
36

Although it was a common convention of nineteenth-century letter writers to paint
a scene of themselves in the act of writing, when describing the trail these descriptions
had the dual effect of making the letter writer seem more real and sharing an unfamiliar
space and environment with relatives at home. Overlanders penned pictures of
themselves in the act of writing, lounging on Buffalo robes and blankets, and surfaces –
logs that also doubled as mess tables, or "the back of a tin dinner plate," that was
summarily recalled by the cook so he could serve dinner to the company.
37
Through these
details, emigrant letter writers shared the idiosyncrasies of the journey with far-away
relatives, including them in the experiences of their cross-continental treks. Outlining the
peculiarity of the environment of the trail made it more knowable and more familiar to
intimate circles as well as to the unknown readers of their published accounts. In

36
William D. Pennell to Wife, June 8, 1849, Pennull Usher Family Papers, The Henry E.
Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Overlanders were equally eager to receive
all the news of home. John B. Peirce asked his wife to keep a daily journal of her
activities and "thoughts & feelings" so that he could review it when he returned home and
thus catch up on all he had missed during his absence. John B Peirce to Wife, September
15, 1851, John B Peirce Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston,
Massachusetts.
37
Letter St Jo, Apr 23, 1849 and St Jos, May 7, 1849, GEM of the Prairie, Chicago, May
19 and June 9 1849, Box 5, "Illinois," Ralph P. Bieber Collection, The Henry E.
Huntington Library, San Marino, Caliofrnia.
134

describing their environment, overlanders opened a window for their correspondents onto
the unfamiliar world of the trail.
Such letters not only communicated the texture of the journey to distant relatives
but also provided them with the means to track their loved one's progress across the
continent. Charles Stanton's brother described how he had "a map lying before me on my
table." Each time he received a letter from Charles, his brother "would trace out his
course on the map." Through this process, he "was enabled to travel along with him."
38

When the letters stopped coming, the marks on the map also stalled. Stanton had, in fact,
been trapped in the Sierra Nevada and he died there, with many other members of the
Donner Party, during the winter of 1846. The marks that had visualized Stanton’s
westward progress now visualized his journey toward death. As it had and would for
countless other overlanders, Stanton's journey ended far short of his hoped-for
destination. While the marks on the map had been seen as an individual manifestation of
America's westward progress they now represented a chilling reminder of the great
distance between the deceased and his family.
For some grieving families relics and mementoes plucked from the grasses of the
western plains or collected in the Rocky Mountains had the effect of helping to bridge the

38
Philip V. R. Stanton to George McKinstry, February 14, 1848, Papers on the history of
California, BANC MSS C-B 84, The Bancroft Library, University of California,
Berkeley. Henkin, Postal Age, 119. While David Henkin recognized the importance of
the post to allowing people to "plot the movement across the country" it is doubtful that
EuroAmericans saw these travelers as being in the United States. Instead, they moved
through culturally foreign territory and through their movements, they helped to make
these places more known and thus assimilated regions and areas in which American
dominion was often tenuous at best.
135

gap between themselves and their lost loved one. When Hugh Brown Heiskell's cousin
perished on the way to California. He made sure to send "all the pieces of rocks & wood
gathered by him on our journey" along with his prized personal possessions brought from
the East home to his extended family. The inclusion of these seemingly insignificant bits
of rock and wood with the dead man's watch, bible and other personal mementoes
suggests that Heiskell and his cousin's grieving family considered these pieces of the far
West as important as other mementoes long treasured. This family might have held and
even displayed these bits of rock and wood as their most tangible connection to the
months they had not shared with the man before he perished. These relics, by
personalizing the connection to the landscape of the far West, also had the twin effect of
making the far West seem more familiar and thus more American.
39

Emigrants picked and plucked their way westward with unbridled exuberance.
Through receiving and displaying elements of their journey, overlanders' relatives also
got their own piece of the trail experience. J. Robert Brown, for instance, collected stones
to make pipes for his mother, mother-in-law, and as a "keepsake" for his own cabinet. A
pressed flower from a mountain top, and a “little pebble for a memento” of a particularly
“sweet spot” slipped into a saddle bag for safekeeping all helped to serve as mementoes
of the journey as well as specimens of the far West.
40
Through collecting these items

39
Hugh Heiskell, A Forty-niner from Tennessee: the Diary of Hugh Brown Heiskell, ed.
Edward M. Steel (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998), 91.
40
J. Robert Brown, "Journal of a trip acros the plains of the U.S. from Mo. to Cal.," p45
The Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois; and Charles Benjamin Darwin, Journal, vol 1,
p164, HM 16770, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
136

overlanders shared a piece of not only the journey but also of the far West, which they
expected to become part of the American nation.
Although few families overtly described the power of objects to convey distant
places, overlanders' discussions of going home in imagination through their connection to
material goods as well as songs and visions make explicit how EuroAmericans conceived
of a virtual domesticity. On the trail, home was a presence made palpable in touching
beloved tokens, hearing familiar music, and gazing on a daguerreotype of a beloved or a
carefully preserved pound cake, opened and eaten on the 4th of July. William Smedley
described how "the sweet tones of a violin. . .carried us back to. . .scenes. . .of happy
homes.” Home was conjured up as emigrants slept, too. Elijah Bristow, for instance,
reassured his children that although a vast distance separated them, in his dreams "I see
and converse with you."
41

Recalling family and friends through material objects also led to moments of
sociability for traveling emigrants as well as for emigrants and Indians. Harriet Ward
described how, "Mrs[.] Fox and her daughter ware with us. . .We took out our
Daguerrotypes [sic] and tried to live over again some happy days."
42
While these
daguerreotypes of loved ones provided Ward and her friends with a means to recall a
shared past, images of family members helped other travelers forge new connections.

41
William Smedley, Across the Plains in '62, (Denver, Co: 1916), 17; Lucius Fairchild,
California Letters of Lucius Fairchild. Ed. with notes and introduction by Joseph Schafer
(Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1931), 31; and Elijah Bristow to Dear
Wife and Children, July 8, 1845, Elijah Bristow Letters, The Henry E. Huntington
Library, San Marino, California.
42
Ward, Prairie Schooner, 61, 95.
137

John Hawkins Clark recalled how after dining with a group of Native Americans he and
his companions showed them the daguerreotypes of their "sweethearts and wives."
43

According to Clark, their Native American visitors were impressed with these images.
Even as the ideology of domesticity purported to draw firm lines between EuroAmericans
and Native Americans, the idea of family and loved ones provided an opportunity for
cross-cultural connection.
While in this encounter family served as an avenue for cross-cultural connection,
the larger ideal of American civilization made up of countless individual families and
domestic circles drew lines between Native and EuroAmericans. Material goods from
home helped to remind emigrants not only of their loved ones but also their civility and
membership in a distinctive EuroAmerican culture. One of the most common items given
to departing overlanders was a personal bible. Charles Reed told his sister that he spent a
private moment away from his company to open his "small bag which contains. . . choice
presents made by those I dearly love" including "my bible [sic] in which still remains
those marks, you and Mary made. . .when I was last at home."
44
In contemplating his
Bible, Reed remembered both the love of his sister and of Christ. Such religious feeling
came with a responsibility to instill and advance these precepts in new places. In his 1854
California emigrant guidebook John Steele urged prospective emigrants to keep the

43
John Hawkins Clark, Overland to the Gold Fields of California in 1852: The Journal
of John Hawkins Clark, ed. Louise Barry (Topeka: Kansas State Printing Plant, 1942),
253.
44
Charles Reed to Abby Kendall, May 13, 1849, Box 3, Series 2, Family
Correspondence, 1842-1907, Nathan Kendall and Abby J. Reed Kendall Papers, 1842-
1912, The Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois.
138

affection and influence of domesticity at the forefront, in order to inspire them to "bless
the land you look upon as your home–at least for a time." Holding family and the moral
precepts and codes taught there in their minds was supposed to keep travelers civilized on
the trek and ensure that they could, once settled in their western homes, establish new
outposts of American civilization.
45
The ability to keep the domestic at the forefront of
one's mind furthered the colonial project.
Emigrants envisioned the overland trail as allowing them to virtually transport
their domestic ties, and thus a piece of American civilization, across the plains. When
Augustus Ripley Burbank scrambled up Independence Rock to fulfill the common
practice of chiseling his name in the stone, he also, "cut. . .several of my comrades & my
Ladies (whom is at home)."
46
Chisel in hand; Burbank imposed the presence of his wife
even as she remained far away. In so doing, Burbank and other travelers not only carried
the familiar with them but also imposed it on the western landscape. On the rock Burbank

45
John Steele, The Traveler’s Companion Through the Great Interior. A Guide for the
Road to California, by the South Pass in the Rocky Mountains, and Sublett’s and
Headpath’s Cut Offs; Being a Much Better and Nearer Road Than the One Formerly
Traveled by the Emigrants. Containing a Correct Description of the Road, with the
Distances by Actual Measurement, Entering California by Crossing the Great Sierra
Nevada, at the Headwaters of the Yuba River (Galena: Power Press of H.H. Houghton &
Co, 1854), 3–4.
46
Augustus Ripley Burbank, Diary, June 11, 1849, Manuscript Division, Library of
Congress, Washington, D.C. Burbank may have inteded this act to be a romantic gesture
but it also gestured toward the legal relationship between husband and wife in which her
domicile was his domicile. In this way, the legality of marriage meant that wives,
whether left home or not, in essence virtually transported along with their husbands.
Hartog, Man and Wife in America, 106.
139

made visible and tangible the domestic relationship between himself and his wife,
rendered, in his estimation, none the weaker for his absence.
47

The affective bonds of family helped to pull American civilization westward.
South Pass was another such landmark at which emigrants imagined themselves as
connecting west to east, the far West with the settled United States. Like the imagined
line between civilization and savagery, South Pass marked a permanent divide where
travelers crossed over to the western half of the continent. At the top of the pass the
waters began to flow towards the Pacific instead of back to the Atlantic, marking the
moment at which overlanders moved closer to the Pacific than they were to the settled
United States. When emigrants marked their passage over this landmark they turned to
say goodbye not to the nation in general but rather to specific home and families. Bernard
Reid, watching the river move east declared "Adieu Sweetwater! speed thee toward my
home." In his popular account of overland travel, Alonzo Delano painted a dramatic
scene of his foray over the distance. Turning eastward for a final look his mind filled with
"thoughts of home and family." Overcome with yearning, Delano declared that he
"involuntarily stretched out my arms as if I would clasp them to my bosom."
48
For

47
For an excellent study describing a European colonial project of claiming land and
space through such strategies as inscribing names and creating landmarks see, D. Burnett,
Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
48
Bernard J. Reid "Journal recounting Bernard Reid's travels to California in 1849," July
19, 1849, Bernard J. Reid Collection, Special Collections, Santa Clara University, Santa
Clara, California; and Alonzo Delano, Life on the Plains and Among the Diggings: Being
Scenes and Adventures of an Overland Journey to California: with Particular Incidents
of the Route, Mistakes and Sufferings of the Emigrants, the Indian Tribes, the Present
and the Future of the Great West (Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1854), 116–17.
140

readers of Delano's popular account, this depiction underscored how the expansion of a
few EuroAmericans across the nation could tug on the bonds of familial affection and
virtually transcend space.
Overlanders, however, not only laid claim to participating in a virtual domesticity
but also to transporting the domestic with them. The trail demanded that overlanders
transport actual families and relationships across the plains. The demands of the journey
frayed domestic relationships and also highlighted the limits of the domestic ideal. At the
same time, the trail also opened the way for EuroAmericans to reproduce the family and
the domestic in these foreign spaces. Emigrants would move on from these places, but
sites of marriage and, especially, birth would forever identify the trail with American
domestic space.
Family units were the basic building block of overland companies.
49
On the trail,
the family generally included a couple and their children but could also encompass
grandparents, a single woman, and perhaps an uncle or nephew. In general, overlanders
defined families as people connected by blood and or marriage that shared property and
divided the labor of moving amongst themselves. Familial structure and formation, both
in settled society and on the trail, nonetheless extended through much deeper ties. For
instance, of the nine family groups in Martha Ann Freeman's train, four were part of her

49
John Mack Faragher has estimated that approximately half of all emigrants traveled in
companies composed only of their relatives, Faragher, Women and Men, 25–33.
141

extended family. Of those overlanders who traveled in nuclear family units, close to half
joined trains whose members were extended relatives.
50

As in more settled communities, families provided a sense of emotional stability
and physical security, a role that became increasingly important during the demanding
and often frightening journey across the continent. When Vincent Hoover returned late to
camp after looking for the company's oxen he found everyone in bed except for his
relatives, who were anxiously awaiting his return.
51
Similarly, when Virginia Ivins'
husband failed to return from his own livestock search she waited up with her newborn
baby boy while the rest of the company slept. Relatives drew strength from each other,
and attempted to maintain a semblance of the privacy they had enjoyed in settled
communities. Argonaut J. Goldsborough Bruff, for example, observed the "secluded
camp of a mere family party" a few miles in the distance from the teeming campground
where he and his company were resting.
52
For Bruff and other travelers such tranquil
scenes were evidence of emigrants' ability to maintain their civility and domesticity on
the plains.

50
Martha Ann Freeman, Reminiscence, pp. 2–3, The Society of California Pioneers, San
Francisco, California. Faragher says that most parties that extend beyond single family
are still based on kinship and other relations, Faragher, Women and Men, 33.
51
Vincent Hoover, "Diary," Vol. 5, December 1, 1849, Henry E. Huntington Library, San
Marino, California.
52
Virginia Wilcox Ivins, Pen Pictures of Early Western Days (Keokuk, Iowa: Private
Printing, 1905), 79; and J. Goldsborough Bruff, "Overland Journal," May 30, 1849, pp. 6,
Journal and drawings of J. Goldsborough Bruff, 1849-1853, The Henry E. Huntington
Library, San Marino, California.
142

On the trail emigrants not only strove to maintain the bonds of existing familial
relationships but also reproduced domesticity through marriages and birth. As mentioned
previously, marital unions formed immediately before the start of the journey added a
romantic and matrimonial cast to the migration.
53
Robert Galloway described how a
couple took advantage of the pause in traveling while one woman gave birth to be joined
in marriage. Martha Jane Gray's sister was married on top of Independence Rock in the
summer of 1852.
54
Standing atop this iconic landmark, Gray's sister and her new husband
joined in matrimony much like that described by the Democratic Review.
Birth, like marriage, cemented community ties. Giving birth on the trail literally
helped overlanders reproduce families as they traveled. Babies born on the trail provided
the opportunity for the community to bond together to protect these infants as new friends
and strangers pitched in to assist laboring women and new mothers. But even more than
marriage birth linked family to the western landscape. For some, births on the trail
provided otherwise ordinary citizens with the distinction of being the first "white" child
born in these spaces, a distinction which they inevitably celebrated. Charles Edward
Pancoast recalled how he and his party met the first white baby born in Arizona when
they arrived on the Gila in 1849. Pancoast and his company "insisted that the Baby

53
Honeymoon migrations were an American tradition. New couples often departed
within days or weeks of becoming legally wed. Unruh, Plains Across, 59; and Faragher,
Women and Men,19.
54
A. A. Cooper, Reminiscences, p32, Box 1, Galloway Family Papers, 1851-1981, MSS
730, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland, Oregon; and Martha Jane
Gray, Diary, 1852, p49, Overland Journeys to the Pacific Collection, MSS 1508, Oregon
Historical Society Research Library, Portland, Oregon.
143

(which was a girl) should be named 'Gila.'" The parents supposedly assented, and
Pancoast reflected, "I would go a long way to see that Gila Baby if I knew she were now
living."
55
Through this process individuals became marked with the historic moment and
place in which they were born, a decision, if we can believe Pancoast, influenced by their
communities as much as their parents. Emigrants not only celebrated these births on the
trail but also broadcast their circumstances back east. In June 1844 the New Orleans
Daily Picayune reported on the birth of a boy born en route to Oregon. Christened
"Oregon" after his family's destination, the newspaper crowed, "Go it, Snooks."
56

Cornelius C. Cox recorded a similar scene described by him to a new acquaintance in the
California mines. This man claimed that on the way to California, when ten miles from
wood, water, or grass, his wife went into labor he immediately "roled up his sleeves" to
deliver her of their child. One hour later the train rolled on. The man was very proud of
his son, declaring that he "is the finest Boy they have and calls him California."
57

Through naming these children after points of destination or places of birth, overlanders
further melded childbirth and the western journey as keystone moments in family history.

55
Charles Edward Pancoast, A Quaker Forty-niner: the Adventures of Charl. Edward
Pancoast on the American Frontier, eds. Anna Paschall Hannum, and John Bach
MacMaster (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930), 250–1. Emigrants
also freely applied the distinction of being "the first white" to numerous achievements,
including traversing new territory. However the idea of the being "the first white child"
marked the reproduction of EuroAmerican society and the reproduction of territorial
claim into new spaces. Nugent, Into the West, 67.
56
New Orleans Daily Picayune, June 30, 1844, quoted in Unruh, Plains Across, 55–6.
57
Cornelius C. Cox, "Notes and Memoranda of an overland trip from Texas to California
in the Year 1849," p73, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
144

Moreover, EuroAmericans likened the material world of overland travelers to that
of proper domestic spaces. Newspapers that took a positive view of this migration
idealized emigrants' abilities to maintain proper domestic comforts on the plains. In 1845
an Independence, Missouri journalist reported visiting a wagon where "an extremely nice
looking lady'" sat serenely sewing next to her bureau and mirror. Various ornaments hung
from the side: it was, said the editor, "'a perfect prairie boudoir.'"
58
Well onto the plains,
Edwin Bryant marveled at the civility of Nancy Thornton who received him into her tent
as if it was a "parlor." Years later, in a reminiscence presented at the Annual Meeting of
Southern Oregon Pioneers, former overlander William Colvig painted a more humble
picture of the contents of his family's wagon that they used to cross the plains to Oregon
in 1851. But he too described it as their "wagon home."
59

58
Unruh, Plains Across, 59–61; and Bryant, What I Saw, 90.
59
William M. Colvig, "The Covered Wagon Address Delivered by William M. Colvig at
the Annual Meeting of the Southern Oregon Pioneers, Jacksonville, Oregon, September
1st, 1898," 10-11, Ayer Collection, The Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois. Elliott West
has referred to the items families jammed into their wagons "as the essentials of their
heritage.'" Elliott West, “Family Life on the Trail West” History Today 42 (December
1992): 33–9.
145

Figure 4 Old-fashioned schooner wagon, c. 1936. This photo, taken by the Works Progress Administration,
suggests what an emigrant wagon would have looked like in the mid-nineteenth century. This wagon is believed
to have actually been brought across the plains to California by John Bemmerly in 1849. (Courtesy National
Archives, 69-N-19519.)
In some ways emigrant wagons did mirror the look, feel, and role of homes in
more settled EuroAmerican life. During the day men rode ahead on horseback to scout
camping grounds and water sources or walked alongside the masses of cattle typically
driven at the back of the wagon train. Bound by domestic expectations weary women and
children, as well as the aged and infirm, stayed closer to “home” and often spent full days
inside their wagons. While many women walked a good part of their journey, they tended
to walk alongside the wagons, which held the household goods and other equipment they
would need to prepare the noonday meal. Young children stayed close to their mothers,
146

playing in or around the vehicles. Thus, when Harriet Ward's son was called to do the
work of a young man, helping to drive the stock in the back of the train, she emphasized
that he was no longer seen around the wagon during the day.
60
Just as he would have at
home, this boy made the transition from home to the wider world as “a man’s work”
called.
When encamped, wagons clustered together creating what emigrants described as
"villages." The spaces in between and around the wagons allowed them to expand the
domestic realm during the evening hours and the night. Years after her journey Sarah
Royce, mother of famed philosopher/historian Josiah Royce, described to her son how
"where bushes, trees or logs formed partial enclosures, a kitchen or sitting room quite
easily suggested itself to the feminine heart, yearning for home.'"
61
In so doing, Royce
idealized the pioneer woman as the consummate paragon of domesticity; civility so
ingrained in her character that she was able to instantly transform the open western wilds
into appropriate domestic spaces. Albeit temporary, such spaces marked the West and
emigrants as mobile units of civilization.
Another memoirist similarly idealized the efforts of women to make their wagons
much like the private spaces of homes. A seasoned traveler, Mrs. Strong "would the
sooner adapt herself to her new way of living." To that end she had an inside cover
installed on her wagon "that could be fastened down to the wagon box on both sides and

60
Ward, Prairie Schooner Lady, 83, 96, 130, quoted in Faragher, Women and Men, 88–9.
61
Sarah Royce, A Frontier Lady: Recollections of the Gold Rush and Early California,
ed. Ralph Henry Gabriel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932), 8-9.
147

the rear end." An extra curtain at the front behind the driver's seat "could also be tightly
closed." Over all of this she instructed her husband to lay an extra cover that made the
wagon look like any other on the plains and so achieved "quite as much privacy as she
would find in a sleeping car."
62
In the perceptions of this memoirist absent the modern
technology of the railroad, resourceful overlanders were still able to achieve the desired,
modern comforts.
Wagons did afford a measure of privacy for what might otherwise be a
disturbingly public journey, but the close physical proximity of travelers limited these
attempts at creating personal space. Couples fortunate enough to own a wagon for their
exclusive use had the luxury of private space. Nonetheless, this intimacy was incomplete
and contested. Catherine Haun declared that for the months she and her husband traveled
across the continent their, "two horse-spring wagon was our bedroom." Lucy Rutledge
Cooke and her new husband initially slept in the tent as it was roomier than their wagon,
but when her mother-in-law decided to join them the couple retreated to the relative
privacy of the wagon even though "it's very crowded. . .and I have to lay baby across our
heads."
63
Helen Carpenter reveled in the spaciousness of her wagon, increased by special
"square bows" and a two-level construction with supplies packed between the floors and

62
Theron R. Gaston, "Reminiscences," Volume 1, p130, Ayer Collection, The Newberry
Library, Chicago, Illinois.
63
Catherine Haun, “A Woman’s Trip Across the Plains in 1849,” p 4, Henry E.
Huntington Library, San Marino, California; and Lucy Rutledge Cooke, Crossing the
plains in 1852 : narrative of a trip from Iowa to “The Land of Gold,” as told in letters
written during the journey (Fairfield, Wash.: Ye Galleon Press, 1988), 14.

148

the bed on the upper level, declaring it worthy of "a bride who should have more detail to
her outfit than an ordinary emigrant." Physical luxuries aside, Carpenter and her new
husband spent their entire "bridal trip" with their driver Henry sleeping under their
wagon, no doubt exposed to the intimacies of their union.
64

Thin barriers and cramped quarters also exposed company members to the more
disharmonious side of marital relations. Sounds permeated barriers believed to be
inviolable, broadcasting marital disputes to the rest of the company. One evening on her
journey to Oregon Martha Morgan listened with trepidation to a "tremendous fight"
between the couple in the neighboring wagon.
65
Lying in her tent, Keturah Belknap
overheard her next-door neighbor use words she deemed too profane to include in her
reminiscence. Curses were quickly followed by the sound of a muffled cry and "a heavy
thud as tho [sic] something was thrown against the wagon box." Even more disturbingly
the wife exclaimed, "you've killed it" leading Belknap to fear that the husband may have
injured their infant child. Even with this news, Belknap did nothing to intervene, instead
lying quietly inside her tent until the guard called the neighbor to relieve him at his post.
The next morning she learned the baby was still alive, taking the episode as a lesson of

64
Helen McCowen Carpenter, "A Trip Across the Plains to California in 1857," May 26,
1857, p3 Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. In a divorce case filed
between a couple who had recently emigrated to Montana the testimony of a man who
had been sleeping under the wagon shared by the wife and her lover was crucial to
proving her husband's charge of adultery, Paula Petrik, No Step Backward : Women and
Family on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier, Helena, Montana, 1865-1900 (Helena:
Montana Historical Society Press, 1987), 102–3.
65
Martha M. Morgan, A Trip Across the Plains in the Year 1849, with Notes of a Voyage
to California, by Way of Panama (San Francisco: Printed at Pioneer press, 1864), 16.
149

"how easy we can be deceived."
66
Belknap's reluctance to interfere suggests an effort to
maintain boundaries between private and public even as thin canvas partitions rendered
them physically meaningless.
The journey not only exposed marital discord to a wider audience but also
through its stresses contributed to augmenting disagreements between husbands and
wives. The woman Belknap listened to fighting with her husband had instigated the
dispute by declaring that because he refused to turn back, "she will go and leave him."
67

This woman did not leave her husband, but other spouses did abandon their partners on
the trail. Emigrants claimed that they could replicate and transport the domestic
relationships of home. In this they were perhaps more successful than they intended,
replicating both the culturally acceptable elements of these relationships while also
drawing attention to deviations from these ideals.
Overlanders' mobility and entry into an anonymous social world contributed to
familial and domestic instability. Traveling to California in 1850, James C. Riggin wrote
home to his wife and friends that along the Platte River on his way to Fort Kearny he met

66
“Keturah Penton Belknap,” in Women of the West, eds. Cathy Luchetti and Carol
Orwell, (St George, Utah: Antelope Island Press, 1982), 144. Domestic violence was not
unique or even necessarily exaggerated on the trail. In her study of New York in this
period, Mary Ryan identified wife beating as the most common violent crime. In the
United States judges tended to tolerate some violence by husbands against wives,
declaring their violence to be legitimate if they had been provoked. They also tolerated
greater violence in lower class households than in genteel ones, where wives could argue
that she had more legitimate expectation of nonviolent treatment. The private nature of
the home also tended to make the courts reluctant to interfere. See, Ryan, Cradle of the
Middle Class, 148.
67
"Belknap,” Women of the West, 144.
150

a man "running up & down the road a hunting her," and crying that "another man stole
her from him."
68

The possibility of spouses abandoning each other was apparently so prevalent that
it sometimes served as a cover story for single women traveling alone. Traveling
overland to Utah in 1850, Warren Foote's company encountered a single woman standing
by the roadside "a mile or two west of Fort Kearny." The woman regaled the passing
Mormons with a "pitiful" story that the majority of the company found unbelievable: the
woman claimed to be a victim of spousal abuse and abandonment. Foote nonetheless
reported that a single man of the train was "foolish enough to take her in." Though Foote
characterized the man's decision as foolish, the man no doubt saw an opportunity to
exchange board for sex. Shortly thereafter the man and the woman quarreled, he
abandoned the company, and the Captain ordered another emigrant to take her as far as
Fort Laramie.
69
The anonymity of the overland trail opened the way for women as well as
men to attempt refashion themselves and to engage in dalliances that would have been
more unacceptable in settled communities.
By bringing EuroAmericans west in unprecedented numbers, the trail forced
overlanders to confront marital ambiguity of the nineteenth century. Charles Edward
Pancoast watched an emigrant woman arrive in Arizona and suddenly identify her

68
James C. Riggin to Rebecca Jane Riggin and Friends, June 12, 1850, Riggin/Pettyjohn
Family Papers, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
69
Warren Foote, Autobiography and Journals 1837-1903, vol. 1, Mormon Pioneer
Overland Travel, 1847-1868, Church History, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day
Saint, (http://lds.org/churchhistory/library/source/1,18016,4976-5128,00.html).
151

missing first husband in the garb of a Spanish hidalgo. The two were overjoyed at finding
each other again: Joseph had served in the Mexican-American war and when his letters
did not reach her she assumed he was lost. The woman decided to stay with her
rediscovered first husband after her second husband eventually consented to permit her to
remain and keep their child.
70
That same year a son found his father, who he had
presumed dead, living in California with a new wife and children. Upon discovering that
her husband had lied about his marital status, the woman absconded to Oregon with the
children, only to have the judge rule that she was his wife in common law and thus the
rights of children belonged with him.
71
Even as it purported to uphold and replicate the
precepts of domesticity, moving west exposed fundamental tensions and concerns at the
heart of the legal foundation of marriage.
The trail also highlighted the prevalence of divorce and permanent separations
among EuroAmerican couples. While the historian Henrik Hartog has shown that the
courts provided one way for EuroAmericans to talk about the nature and meaning of
marital separation, the trail provided another public, cultural venue with which to work
out ideas about marriage and separation. Mobility was both a cause and a symptom of
these separations. Liberal divorce laws in western states like Indiana and, later, the
territory of Utah, encouraged unhappily married men to seek sanctuary in new places.
Women who refused to accompany their husbands on the path to the far West could be

70
Charles Edward Pancoast, A Quaker Forty-niner : the Adventures of Charl. Edward
Pancoast on the American Frontier, eds. Anna Paschall Hannum, and John Bach
MacMaster (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930), 273–4.
71
Hartog, Man and Wife in America, 87–91.
152

divorced on the grounds of abandonment. Stories like Pancoast's tale of the rediscovered
husband underscore the ways in which even as overlanders attempted to link their
migration to the familial ideal they emphasized the more impermanent realities of these
unions.
72

The material conditions of the trail also contributed to women's vulnerability to
sexual assault. Helen Stewart bemoaned that she and her sisters had no "lock and key for
our door" to keep out the "rabble" who came to court them.
73
Thus, even as Stewart gave
voice to the conceit that a canvas cover constituted a door, she also underscored its
limitations. While Stewart was never attacked, other women were less fortunate. One
emigrant reported how while the captain of the train was out on guard duty a man
"invaded the sanctity of his family tent." He crawled into bed with the wife, who quickly
identified the stranger and aroused the camp with "A frightful scream." The captain took
aim but the criminal was absorbed into the cover of darkness and the anonymous,

72
On divorces like these, and the importance of other means of financial support, such as
parents or extended family to these women claiming independence see, Robert L.
Griswold, Family and Divorce in California, 1850-1890: Victorian Illusions and
Everyday Realities (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), 86–7, 99, 108–
12. Hartog, Man and Wife in America, 20, and Chapter 9, “The Geography of
Remarriage.” On the perception of westerners as prone to divorce see also, Glenda Riley,
Building and Breaking Families in the American West, (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1996), 64, 116–21, 143–4; and Sarah Carter, The Importance of Being
Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada to 1915 (Edmonton:
University of Alberta Press, 2008).
73
Helen Stewart, Diary, 1853, 17, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino,
California. On the importance of class division and separation to maintaining stability
and civility on the frontier see, Petrik, No Step Backward, 62–3.
153

teeming masses of westering emigrants.
74
Such salacious stories describe how the
transitory nature of overland travel that required emigrants to live in temporary abodes
and amongst large groups of strangers disturbed boundaries of class and gender.
While these fissures and strains reveal the instability of EuroAmerican
civilization, overlanders attempted to cast their domestic relationships not as circles torn
apart by internal strain but rather as united domestic units. Their description of Indian
aggression and marriage proposals was one tool emigrants used to reaffirm their domestic
cohesion.

Figure 5. Emanuel Leutze, Indians Attacking a Wagon Train, (1863). This painting, like others of this genre,
posited the covered wagon as a mobile home under attack. While the men and the small boys are outside the
wagons, the women and girls sit inside for protection from the attacking Indians. While stories of the overland
trail revealed that Indians and emigrants alike could be responsible for breaching domestic boundaries on the
trail, popular culture emphasized the Indians as aggressors against the domestic sphere. (Courtesy, Art
Inventories Catalog, Smithsonian American Art Museum.)

74
J. Wesley Jones, Amusing and Thrilling Adventures of a California Artist, While
Daguerrotyping a Continent, Amidst Burning Deserts, Savages and Perpetual Shows and
A Poetical Companion to the Pantoscope of California, Nebraska & Kanasas, Salt Lake
& the Mormons, from 1500 Daguerreotypes by J. Wesley Jones, Detaling the Startling
Adventures of an Overland Journey of 8,000 Miles (Boston: Dix, 1854), 14.
154

Overlanders also wove tales of forceful Native American braves offering horses
and other valuables for the hand of a white woman in marriage. The story of Indian men
offering a variety of livestock, goods, and even their own Indian women, for marriage to
a white woman are an oft-repeated tale of the emigrant encounter with "savages."
75
Susan
Ellen Johnson recalled how she was almost snatched from her wagon by a Cheyenne
Indian who had proposed marriage earlier that day. Johnson described how the men in
her train had jokingly traded her to the man for "five ponies, a buffalo robe, and silver
ornaments on his hair." But, when he returned that evening the men explained that it was
a joke. The captain of the wagon train was able to prevent retaliation for this cruel
deception, but according to Johnson the man returned again that night to take her with
him, only to fail when a providential strike of lightning alerted the camp to the
intrusion.
76
By making light of these proposals and near captures emigrants helped to
portray them as impossible and thus reduced their threat to the domestic space of the trail.
Emigrants joked repeatedly about smitten Indian men offering to trade any number of
goods for white women. In Johnson's formulation the Indian is a harmless threat, a
confused, besotted man who doesn't acknowledge the stringency of the EuroAmerican

75
The stories have an element of carnival. Carnival temporarily inverted the social order.
In so doing it provided a social release while maintaining the status quo. M. M. Bakhtin,
Rabelais and His World, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). On overlanders
portraying these proposals and potential unions as "the fantasy of irrational minds," See
Glenda Riley, Confronting Race: Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815-1915,
(Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico Press, 2004), 143–4.
76
Susan Ellen Johnson, "Record of Susan Ellen Johnson," Mormon Diaries, vol. 11, 5, L.
Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University,
Provo, Utah.
155

racial hierarchy. Such tales domesticated the captivity narratives of nineteenth-century
Americans, transforming abduction into marriage proposals and always ending in the safe
maintenance of the white women within her mobile community.
Jokes about relationships between white men and Indian women, in contrast,
tended toward sly winks and stories about sexual attraction and relations. Even as female
overlanders had to be protected from the advances of Native American men, male
overlanders could safely engage in dalliances with native women. For men, sexual
alliances with women of color were part of the great western adventure. Titillating stories
of temporary unions between white men and Indian women entertained EuroAmerican
audiences and helped to confirm overlanders as authentic participants in the great
westering adventure.
77
Emigrants highlighted the racial diversity of cities in Missouri and
other places along the American frontier. Amongst the cacophony of whites, Mexicans,
and Indians, Theodore Talbot was careful to describe to his mother a "white man making
eyes at the Delaware Indian Maiden." EuroAmericans at home could also experience this

77
The works by Elliott West and Anne F. Hyde cited earlier are just the tip of the iceberg
of literature on interracial relationships and marriages in colonial spaces. For additional
works see, Jennifer M. Spear, “‘They Need Wives’ Métissage and the Regulation of
Sexuality in French Louisiana, 1699-1730,” in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in
North American History (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 35–59; Jennifer
Brown, Strangers in Blood : Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1980); John Mack Faragher, “The
Custom of the Country: Cross-Cultural Marriage in the Far Western Fur Trade,” in
Western Women: Their Land, Their Lives (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1988), 197–227; See also, Riley, Building and Breaking Families in the American
West, 73–112; and David Smits, “‘Squaw Men,’ ‘Half-Breeds,’ and Amalgamators: Late
Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Attitudes Toward Indian-White Race-Mixing,”
American Indian Culture and Research Journal 15, no. 3 (1991): 29–61. Smits has noted
a similar pull towards interracial sex as part of the western adventure among white Army
officers.
156

thrill from a distance by imagining relatives engaging in these amorous liasions with
Indian women. For instance, John Ball's nephew asked him if he was planning to stay in
Oregon and if so, ""Do you intend to marry a red sister?"
78
In a presentation before the
Los Angeles County Pioneers in 1901, J. M. Stewart recounted the tale of a young
Argonaut who, after what he thought was a one-time dalliance with "one of the good-
looking young squaws" found that she and her family considered them to be married.
When the woman appeared at his camp the next morning, prepared to join him on his
journey to California, the young man had to extricate himself from the arrangement by
handing over "his riding pony and all the money he had."
79
When whites remained in
control - of the experience and the narrative - these proposed and avoided unions helped
to increase the cultural value of moving overlanders westward, that was not only about
imposing the regime of American civilization but also about the adventure of traveling
through the "western wilds."
But even as overlanders made these jokes and comments, marriage was still very
much on the table for Native and EuroAmericans in this period. For decades the path to
economic power and prestige for EuroAmerican men had depended on intermarriage with
Indian women. Emigrants expected and looked forward to observing EuroAmerican
"mountain men" and their interracial families. However, more often than not, they did so

78
Theodore Talbot, Diary, Volume 1, May 21, 1843, Box 1, The Papers of Theodore
Talbot, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; and Brinmade to
John Ball, February 25, 1834 Box 2, Folder 5, John Ball Papers, Harold B. Lee Library,
Special Collections, Brigham Young University.
79
J. M. Stewart, “Overland Trip to California in 1850,” Publication of the Historical
Society of Southern California 5 (1901): 180.
157

only to deride them as existing outside of the bounds of proper domesticity. Catherine
Haun declared that Bridger's transformation from a white man to an Indian made him
more abhorrent than a "manly buck," and that his female partner and "half-breed"
children were "unfortunates."
80
Rebecca Ketcham reached a similar conclusion regarding
the marital alliance of Captain Grant, an employee of the Hudson's Bay Company, and
his Native American wife. Ketcham described she was astonished that the man could
marry a Native American woman. Even though Grant's wife and the girls looked "decent"
they were in "an Indian lodge, and nothing about them looked decent or comfortable."
Even through her astonishment, Ketcham was attuned to the fact that Captain Grant
addressed his mixed race family "pleasantly, even fondly."
81

Yet even as whites dismissed the possibility of interracial unions, some Native
Americans may have continued to see intermarriage as a viable means to form political
alliances with the new travelers. In 1854 the band of Cheyenne living along the North
Platte demanded that their agent immediately provide them with $4000, as well as the
guns and ammunition they had not yet received from their promised federal annuities,
and "one thousand white women for wives." Agent John Whitfield, who recorded this
conversation, does not comment on this bold demand further. But at the end of his report,
after also describing the decision of over 200 Cheyenne to run up to his post that night

80
Catherine Haun, “A Woman’s Trip Across the Plains in 1849,” p34, The Henry E.
Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
81
Rebecca Ketcham, “From Ithaca to Clatsop Plains: Miss Ketcham’s Journal of Travel,
Part II,” eds. Leo M. Kaiser, and Priscilla Knuth Oregon Historical Quarterly 62, no. 4
(December 1, 1961): 371-2.
158

and fire three guns he pronounced "this band of Cheyennes the sauciest Indians I have
ever seen."
82

The Cheyenne proposal suggests a very different type of family that may have
come to populate the American West. While historians have traditionally agreed with
overlanders that white families moving west represented a closing of interracial political
domesticity, for Indians it perhaps represented a new possibility. But for EuroAmericans
the idea of voluntary unions that even fostered love and affection among racial others was
more threatening than passing trysts with indigenous women, or even the idea of forcible
relations with female captives.
83

Mobility was a central problem of modern society because it threatened to
destabilize domestic relationships. In describing the decision to depart, overlanders and
their relatives gave voice to a language of undying familial affection and bonds that had
much in common with the language of recent immigrants, new urbanites, and other
mobile Americans of the period. Nonetheless, overlanders were better equipped to deal
with the problems posed by mobility. The longstanding identification of westward
settlement with the American family allowed them to argue that familial unity was based
on mobility. Emigrants contended that their migration was a movement of families, or the

82
Jonathan W Whitfield to Colonel A Cumming, Annual Report of the Commissoner of
Indian Affairs, 1854, quoted in, Elliott West, Way to the West, 113. West concludes that
while this statement could have been a joke, the Cheyenne included it with other practical
demands which suggests they were serious.
83
For a similar fear of marriage as opposed to sex between colonists and indigenous
peoples see, Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-
1797 (London; New York: Methuen, 1986); and Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes:
Travel Writing and Transculturation (London; New York: Routledge, 1992), 88–90.
159

path to familial reunification in a better place. Overlanders also paired this justification
with a parallel language of family, one that defended journeys and separations as
essential to eventual familial reunification, improvement, and happiness. The ability to
communicate across long distances through the postal system contributed to the
maintenance of familial bonds and buttressed overlanders' contentions that though
physically far they operated within domestic circles. Through this proclaimed
maintenance of unity emigrants deflected attention from the familial tension and
separation induced by their treks. This virtual domesticity was contested and partial but it
provided a feasible solution to physical separation. At the same time, overlanders' letters,
diaries, sketches, and relics introduced the foreign into the domestic. Overlanders
therefore contributed to the process of crafting familiar ideas of the far West, a region
that though nominally a part of the United States had yet to be fully incorporated into the
Union.
But it was not just what they shared with their family and friends at home but also
what they left behind on the trail that helped to mark the far West as American.
Overlanders did not just leave family members behind at home they also left family
members behind on the plains. EuroAmericans valued their attachment to the graves of
the dead perhaps as much as they valued their attachment to the living. The domestic
relationships embodied in overlanders' wagons would move along with the emigrant
trains, but they left behind markers and sites of EuroAmerican civilization in the graves
of loved ones. Relatives had a special relationship as well as responsibility to these dead,
but the care and meanings of these graves by virtue of their physical location and
160

connection with the great emigration made them objects of concern and significance to
the nation as a whole.
161

Chapter Four: Burying Race, Resurrecting Americans

As EuroAmericans moved west across the continent in the nineteenth century
they not only destroyed the landscape and natural resources on which Native Americans
depended but also their holy burial sites. Relic hunters and collectors ransacked Native
American tombs to fulfill demand for indigenous goods and skulls. Once these human
remains arrived in urban centers like Philadelphia, phrenologists and other "scientists"
manipulated measurements and descriptions of these remains to support their ideas of
racial hierarchy and white superiority. At the same time, the rural cemetery movement,
followed soon after by the carnage of the Civil War, mobilized first individual cities and
then the federal government to implement new standards of care for EuroAmerican
remains and gravesites. But no similar intervention occurred for emigrants on the
overland trail, causing overlanders to give voice to melancholy laments for the "lone
grave" left behind in the wilderness. These mournful descriptions of emigrant graves
existed alongside a parallel, albeit distinct, lament for the graves of the noble Native
Americans. The former was a representation of the vulnerability of the individual as well
as the tenuousness of the hold of American civilization in the far West. The latter served
as a sign of the presumed impending passing of an entire race. But on the trail it
sometimes proved difficult to distinguish between the graves and remains of overlanders
162

and Native Americans. This racial confusion disturbed overlanders who read poorly
tended emigrant graves as an indictment of their own civility.
1

Ultimately, however, the vulnerability of emigrant gravesites proved to be their
greatest strength. Overlanders' efforts to honor the EuroAmerican dead helped to create
sites of memory–places on the map that took on cultural and even political significance in
the EuroAmerican consciousness. In a real sense, the first EuroAmerican settlers in some
parts of the West were the dead left along the trail by the overlanders. And some sites of
burial, added to as successive groups of emigrants left their dead in the same place,
eventually became areas of settlement for the living. The dead thus turned some Western
places into sites of attachment for the families of those who had been buried there, and
for later migrants, travelers, and settlers who honored these burial places for the reason
that they contained, or were believed to contain, EuroAmerican predecessors. Moreover,
the understanding that emigrants had been unable to properly maintain graves that had
subsequently succumbed to the presumed ravages of Indians, wolves, and weather posed
the possibility that the West had been imbued with the bones of overlanders. Just as
Romantics spoke of EuroAmerican civilization built on a soil filled with Native
American remains, so did emigrant remains seem to permeate the West. Thus in death
overlanders achieved what they could not in life, they had become indigenous to the soil.

1
For studies of treatment of Native American remains and the Civil War dead see, Ann
Fabian, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2010); and Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering:
Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).
163

To date, the explosion of interest in cultural practices of death and dying has
produced work that is heavily focused on the eastern United States. Historians have
explored the rise of the rural cemetery movement, based in metropolitan centers like
Boston and New York, which helped to usher in a new era of care for the dead. The
West, in contrast, has been construed as a playground for scientists and military men who
directed a sustained desecration of indigenous graves and appropriated their corpses for
scientific and entertainment purposes.
2
Historians more or less agree that the Civil War is
the pivot on which American practices of death turned. The massive death toll of the
conflict produced an equally great cultural and political response that scholars have
identified as one of the key elements in the creation of a more modern American state and
the reunification of the war-torn nation. Dying across decades and scattered over
contested territory, civilian emigrant corpses posed a different type of problem and
required a different solution. While dead soldiers in the East restored the tissues of a war-
torn nation, emigrant graves helped to stretch that nation westward.
3

2
This is not to ignore the rich scholarship on death, dying, and cemeteries in other
colonial spaces. The following articles have proved particularly helpful in writing this
chapter, Elizabeth Buettner, “Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia in
Postcolonial Britain and India,” History & Memory 18, no. 1 (2006): 5–42; and Rebecca
M. Brown, “Inscribing Colonial Monumentality: A Case Study of the 1763 Patna
Massacre Memorial,” The Journal of Asian Studies 65, no. 1 (February 1, 2006): 91–113.
3
The frequent repetition of "America" in the titles of the literature on death and dying in
the nineteenth century, includes James Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death,
1830-1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980); Gary Laderman, The Sacred
Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799-1883 (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1996); and David Sloane, The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American
History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. The use of "America"
nonetheless belies their near total focus on northeastern funeral and burial practices. For a
study that touches on grave and burial practices in the South and the West see, Mark M.
164

While historians of the overland trail and environmental historians of the West
more generally have painted a picture of the trash discarded at emigrant campsites, they
have overlooked the cultural meanings of the corresponding debris of the dead.
Historians of the overland trail have noted the propensity of emigrants to worry and
bemoan the risks of dying in the wilderness. Nonetheless, mortality causes and rates on
the trail more or less mirrored those in the nineteenth-century United States. In his classic
account of this migration, the historian John Unruh has shown that overlanders
predominantly succumbed to the same forces that threatened their lives in established
communities. Disease claimed the vast majority of emigrant lives, while admittedly
inglorious accidents, such as shooting one's self in the stomach, caused the second
greatest number of EuroAmerican deaths along the trail. Even as EuroAmericans
occupied themselves by imagining loved ones, friends, and neighbors perishing at the
hands of wild savages, and, less frequently, drowning in roaring rivers, or succumbing to
dehydration on the Great American Desert, the vast majority wasted away from cholera
or bled out from a gunshot wound. According to Unruh's albeit conservative estimate, the
total mortality rate of travelers approximated that of EuroAmericans in settled states.
4

Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America's Culture of Death
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). Initially described as a period of increasing
division between the worlds of the living and the dead through such practices as
beautification of corpses and burials in landscaped cemeteries that looked more like rural
retreats than graveyards, historians now contend that death remained a central feature of
American culture throughout the nineteenth century.
4
During the 1849 cholera epidemic, for instance, crowded campsites clustered around a
single water source replicated conditions of urban centers such as New York City. Unruh,
who based his estimates on emigrant accounts of deaths and graves, was careful to note
that his conclusion regarding mortality rates was debatable. His numbers, for instance, do
165

How many people died, like how many people traveled, is nonetheless impossible to
definitively determine.
Many emigrants, however, argued that crossing the continent required enduring
special mortal risk. Stories of savage Indians and treacherous landscapes inflated
EuroAmerican concerns about dying in the wilderness. The mortal threats of "western
wilds" was such a common feature of EuroAmerican culture that Theodore Talbot could
assure his family in 1862 that now that he had returned from the plains and enrolled in
the Union Army she need no longer concern herself with his mortal well-being.
5
The
cumulative threat of the "western wilds" was generally understood to be a three-pronged
assault by Indian, wolves, and weather. Indians, as Unruh has shown, posed much less of
a threat than emigrants imagined. Weather was more likely to kill emigrants, and the
1846 Donner Party tragedy proved a warning of the dangers of being trapped in the
mountains, a fear of starvation that drove emigrants' day-to-day endeavors. But far more
emigrants succumbed to diseases, the most prevalent of which was cholera. This disease
did not originate on the plains but rather traveled west with the emigrants where their
crowded campsites and polluted water sources, much like the unsanitary conditions of

not account for the disproportionate numbers of young people on the trail and thus the
possibility that the trail in fact increased mortality risk for this demographic. See Unruh,
Plains Across, 408–13, 526nn74–5.
5
Theodore Talbot to Sister, Christmas, 1860, Box 2, The Papers of Theodore Talbot,
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Not all travelers ascribed
such deathly qualities to the western wilderness. For assertions that emigrants were just
as likely to die at home see, for example, E. Douglas Perkins, "Sketches of a trip from
Marietta Ohio to the Valley of the Sacramento in Spring, Summer of 1849," June 19,
1849, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
166

nineteenth-century cities, spread the bacteria from train to train and from emigrants to the
indigenous population. But although disease proved the most deadly factor on the trail,
overlanders emphasized their concerns of being trapped by snow in the mountains.
During the approximately six months it took to cross the continent, many overlanders felt
themselves to be in a race against time and mortality.
Even as mortality rates brought the trail experience more or less in line with
EuroAmerican experiences in settled places, the ability to care for the dying and protect
the dead were severely limited during the journey. Time and resource constraints often
prohibited proper care for the sick, injured, and dying. After arriving safely in Oregon,
Charlotte Whipple proudly wrote her sister that the morning after giving birth she and her
company had continued on, not delaying even "one hour on my acct." While Whipple
touted her ability to travel on "without any unfavorable result," for others premature
departure undoubtedly hastened their demise. When the wheels of a wagon crushed a
man in Amos Josselyn's company, they were forced to travel on to find water for
themselves and their injured partner. They laid the wounded man in one of the wagons,
but had to stop every few minutes so he could "get his breath."
6

While Josselyn declared that he and his company had no choice but to travel on,
other narrators described how companies made decisions for the good of the group at the
expense of the ailing individual. The captain of John McAlister's train decided not to

6
Charlotte L. Whipple to Mary Ann, November 9, 1852, Charlotte Lambert Whipple
Diary and Family correspondence, 1847-1888, Manuscripts and Archives, New York
Public Library, New York; and Amos P. Josselyn, "Journal of Amos P. Josselyn, April 2,
1849 to Sept. 11, 1849, Zanesville, Ohio, to Sacramento Valley," May 1, 1849, Ayer
Collection, The Newberry Library, Chicago.
167

delay the company for a dying woman, as he believed that she might survive a few days
more. The captain, however, failed to accurately predict the time of her demise, and when
the woman worsened a couple of hours later the company immediately corralled. Within
ten minutes, she had perished. Attention to the dying woman's condition allowed her
companions to at least provide her a brief moment of peace, but not all companies were
so cognizant of their fellow travelers' pending deaths. The head of the commercial train
known as the "Pioneer Line" left an ill passenger to travel alone in a wagon until one day
"as the train came into camp [he] was found in a baggage wagon dead!"
7

7
John McAlister, "A Record of Me and Mine – 1851-1853," August 18, 1851, The Henry
E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California; and Bernard J. Reid, "Journal recounting
Bernard Reid's travels to California in 1849," July 31, 1849, Bernard J. Reid Collection,
Special Collections, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California.
168

Figure 6. A Desperate Situation by Charles Nahl (1891), In portrayals of death and dying animals shared the
stage along with humans. Travelers worried about finding adequate resources for themselves and their oxen,
without whom they risked being stranded in the wilderness. It may have been the carcasses of dead oxen that
most frequently blocked the roadways but in these remains emigrants read their own fate.
8
(Courtesy NYPL
Digital Gallery.)

In the face of such aberrations, overlanders attempted to craft death scenes and
narratives that conformed to cultural norms. The Christian model of the "good death"
proscribed a home-based death. Ensconced in the comfort of his bed, the peaceful
sufferer would willingly accept his impending demise and impart a few final spiritual
lessons to an intimate circle of family and friends. It is not surprising, then, that in his
guidebook promoting migration to Oregon across the overland trail Loren Hastings
painted a scene of a dying blacksmith (who had been shot by another member of the

8
This image by Charles Christian Nahl appeared in Virginia Reed's reminiscences of her
trip across the plains, "Across the Plains in the Donner Party (1846). A Personal
Narrative of the Overland Trip to California," Century Illustrated Magazine 42, no. 3
(July 1891): 420.
169

company) in which the man remained sensible of his approaching death. With his final
breath the blacksmith urged his listening company members to follow the teachings of
Christ.
9

Hastings' death narrative drew on a series of conventions and scenes that was as
much about a particular genre of American writing as it was about the actual experiences
and deaths of these emigrants. In the death scene ideal, close family would gather around
the dying relative to experience and share their final moments. These death narratives
smoothed over the idiosyncrasies, peculiarities and, perhaps, aberrations of
EuroAmericans' dying moments. These written narratives provided something that being
present could not, ready-made cultural accommodation that had already reframed or
recast these aberrations for the benefit of distant relatives. Thus, while John Pratt Welsh
spent sleepless nights worrying about his partner's lack of recognition of his impending
demise, he could assure the man's parents that although he had been "too wild to talk
with" in the hours leading up to his death in the previous weeks he had spoke often of
home and his mother.
10
To make this connection, Welsh had had to let his mind wander
over the past few weeks of hard travel, searching for memories of statements that could
help mitigate the pain of his loss. When he finally put pen to paper, only a few lines

9
On the importance of a home-based death see, Faust, Republic of Suffering, 6–17.
Lansford W. Hastings, The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California: Containing
Scenes and Incidents of a Party of Oregon Emigrant : a Description of California, with a
Description of the Different Routes to Those Countries, and All Necessary Information
Relative to the Equipment, Supplies, and the Method of Traveling (Cincinnati: George
Conclin, 1845), 10.
10
John Pratt Welsh, "Diary," Volume 1, May 25, 1851, The Henry E. Huntington
Library, San Marino, California.
170

separated the gap between the man’s thoughts of home and his demise. Not having lived
the hours, days, and minutes as Welsh had, his mother saw only a small space separating
the letters, and the connection between the two already made.
EuroAmericans, of course, gave voice to a language of regret and despair that
they were not able to experience these deathbed scenes. One of the greatest stated fears of
mobility was not simply that EuroAmericans would never see their families again but
also that they would miss sharing their final moments. Properly construed,
EuroAmericans should pass away surrounded by close family and friends. But modern
mobility denied many EuroAmericans, not just overlanders and their families, this
connection. Death narratives thus became perhaps as important as the final deathbed
scene for a cultural necessity of celebrating and mourning the dead.
Overlanders were even more constrained in their appreciation of deathbed scenes
than were their counterparts in the settled United States. On the trail the demands of the
journey meant that emigrants waited with baited breath not so much for final parting
words but rather for the signal that life had ended so they could travel on. Welsh, for
instance, did not attend to his dying companion's final moments in a peaceful, pastoral
campground. Instead the man perished in their wagon on the banks of the Platte, amidst
the tumult of lowing oxen, neighing horses, cracking whips, splashing wheels and
hooves, as the great cavalcade of emigrants moved across the river. When Welsh's wagon
was poised to cross he suspected his partner was on the brink of death and so asked the
171

ferrymen if he would wait. And so they paused "for the final throe then hurry the wagon
across."
11

Cultural production of the overland trail, however, tended to depict the near dead
stretched out on the prairie rather than corpses jolting along in wagons as they made their
way across an uneven, roaring stream. Moving the near dead with the company posed
greater trauma than allowing them to remain behind. Transporting the dying not only
contributed to their physical discomfort but could also be blamed for unnaturally
hastening the travelers' demise. It was better, many companies thought, to leave the near
dead behind, but not alone. Oftentimes to alleviate the delays induced by the dying,
companies left one or two lightly packed travelers to stay with the near dead. This scene
became increasingly common during the peak years of gold rush travel in 1849 and 1850
when cholera raged across the plains (as it did in the settled United States) and the lure of
California gold inspired unprecedented numbers of travelers, nearly 70,000 in just those
two years alone, to make their way along the trail. Charles Benjamin Darwin, an
enthusiastic chronicler of these years of travel, passed many of these death scenes. Along
the North Platte he saw a man who lay on a blanket in the shade cast by his company's
wagon with his head wrapped in a second blanket to keep off the sun and mosquitoes.
Two of his company members sat by his side, waiting for him to perish so they could
rejoin their company ahead.
12

11
Ibid., May 25-6, 1851.
12
Unruh, Plains Across, 120; and Charles Benjamin Darwin, Journal, Vol 1, June 18,
1849, p108, HM 16770, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
172

This difficulty of caring for the near dead is dramatized in an image entitled
"Death Scene on the Plains." First published in the Sacramento Daily Union in 1854, the
image shows a group of emigrants gathered around a dying men stretched on the ground.
A dog in the foreground raises a mournful howl, while the closest male mourner buries
his face in his hands in an expression of grief. But even as the woman in the center of the
image clasps her hands and leans back on her fellow female companions for support, the
man to her right holds a shovel in his hand. In the background appear a string of wagons
turned toward west with the oxen yoked up and ready to move on. Thus, even as this
image romanticized the grief of overland travelers, it also captured the ways in which
travel demands pushed emigrants to bury the dead quickly. When ill company members
appeared near death their messmates frequently prepared their graves, sometimes within a
few feet of their dying companions.
13

But despite images like these affirming emigrants' valiant efforts to mourna and
care for the dying as they traveled, Darwin, like many other emigrants to the California
gold fields during these and other years also accused overlanders of improper attendance
to the dying and dead. A few weeks before seeing the properly (under the circumstances)
cared-for man on the banks of the North Platte mentioned previously, Darwin passed
scene after scene of seemingly abandoned or improperly interred corpses prompting him

13
Unruh, Plains Across, 138.
173

to accuse emigrants of having no "thought for the poor sufferer before them" but to "roll
his carcass out of the path to gold.”
14

Darwin was not the only emigrant to make such claims. Rumors swirled across
the plains of dying travelers abandoned in the wilderness, giving widespread voice to
fears of dying alone. These rumors also manifested overlanders' insecurity about their
claim to civility. Roundly dismissed by fellow emigrants, and in the press more
nationally, overlanders who did not attend to the dying and the dead could also be
charged as criminals. A Salt Lake court ultimately acquitted an Iowa man of leaving a
sick passenger to perish alone in the wilderness, but the charge suggests that care for the
ailing could be a legal as well as a cultural responsibility.
15

Overlanders described contractual bonds like the one that linked this Iowa man
with his deceased passenger as more fragile than those of love and affection. Whereas at
home family and friends could help to tend to the sick, on the trail this required a
commitment of company members and added another burden to a journey that had many.
In the gold fields men could stop working but on the trail they often did not have the
luxury of remaining behind. Some emigrants tried to enter hospitals at the forts they
passed on their way but with their own resources stretched thin the army turned many
away. Being ill accentuated fears about being far away from family and friends.
Emigrants as well as cultural commentators more generally argued that the rush to the

14
Darwin, Journal, Vol 1, May 22, 1849, p68, HM 16770, The Henry E. Huntington
Library, San Marino, California.
15
Unruh, Plains Across, 214.
174

California gold fields, where many young men traveled without family or friends, instead
purchasing passage from trains like the Pioneer Line, or contracting with individual
strangers to reach the gold fields, produced the greatest divergences from proper care for
the dying and the dead. Images of abandoned and exposed corpses strewn along the
roadside suggested an egregious social failure. Allegations of base treatment of the dead
thus called emigrant civility into question.
The human destruction of the trail inspired a communal effort to mitigate the
effects of this cultural aberration. When emigrants strove to care for the dead they wanted
to protect both the physical remains and identity of the deceased. This twin object was
part of the burial process in settled communities as well, but on the trail the one did not
necessarily follow from the other. Headstones because more important as signals and
markers on the trail, not only to memorialize a known deceased but also to ask for more
information on their identity. Passing travelers read of such efforts on notes tacked to
hastily constructed headstones honoring the anonymous fallen. For instance, alongside an
epitaph "In memory of a strange lady" appeared the names of three Illinoisans who
described how they had found and buried a woman with "auburn hair," decayed and
partially missing front teeth, and a "plain Gold ring" on her finger. The men recorded
their names and destination in the hopes a friend or relative would contact them to
identify the woman and claim her ring.
16
On a similar monument, Silas Newcomb learned
how a wagon train ahead had cared for a man they found dying alone. He was so far gone

16
Charles O. Loomis, "Memorandum of Travels to California,' June 26, 1852, Braun
Research Library, Southwest Museum, Los Angeles.
175

that he could not communicate with them but from his clothes and a few belongings they
concluded that he must have been a tailor by trade. Newcomb bemoaned in his journal,
"Who has lost thus unnoticed, a father, husband, brother or son?"
17

In their efforts to care for the dying and the dead emigrants sometimes called on
the assistance of Native Americans. When John H. B. Neill's party accidentally shot
another traveler that they mistook for an Indian, they left the badly wounded man in the
care of an "agreeable" Indian.
18
When A. A. Cooper's company lost a man at the Snake
River crossing, the Indians at the ferry "helped valiantly" to recover the body. When the
body was not recovered, the party "made up a purse" and handed it to the ferryman with
the orders to "give to the indians if they would continue the search till they found and
burried [sic] the body."
19
Indians and emigrants also occasionally mourned together.
Traveling through the Bear River Valley, Duniway watched a group of Indians, most
likely Shoshone, pass her train with the body of a man who had died from a fall. As the
Indians passed, one of them "directed our attention to the body and then passed by us
with a heart touching wail."
20
Decades after his overland journey C. L. Christensen

17
Silas Newcomb, Journal, August 12, 1850, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San
Marino, California.
18
Michael Tate, Indians and Emigrants: Encounters on the Overland Trails (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), 102.
19
A A Cooper, "Journey Across the Plains, 1863," Galloway Family Papers, 1851-1981,
MSS 730, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland, Oregon.
20
Abigail Scott Duniway, Overland Journal, July 16, 1852, Abigail Scott Duniway
Papers, 1852-1915, MSS 432, Oregon Historical Society Research Library. While
historians and anthropologists have tended to focus on EuroAmerican aversion to Indian
mourning ceremonies, this was not always the case.
176

remembered how the "husky Sioux women" who, along with their village had been
traveling in parallel with his train for the past few weeks, comforted his mother after his
father had been accidentally shot by another overlander. "It was wonderful to see the
sympathy and pity and weeping for mother by those large, husky women of the great
Sioux nation, out in the wilderness on the plains of Nebraska."
21

Yet instances like these did little to alter the prevailing conviction that relatives
and company members buried on the trail remained vulnerable to the ravages of Indians,
wolves, and weather. Scattered and protruding human bones, clumps of hair, and bits of
clothing believed to have been unearthed from vulnerable graves covered the paths of the
advancing wagon trains. These remains mixed and mingled with the trash of thousands of
passing companies, but it was the debris of the dead that epitomized emigrant
vulnerability. Mrs. Raymond's encounters with "shallow graves, which oftentimes were
dug open by coyotes and wolves" who left "bleaching bones" strewed across the ground
during her first journey across the plains led her to guard against such a fate for herself.
On her second trip west the consumptive Mrs. Raymond packed a "metallic coffin" along
with her other belongings. After expiring in her wagon while watching the sunset over
Fort Laramie, her husband and the rest of her party buried her in the coffin.
22

21
C. L. Christensen, "History of C. L. Christensen as He Told It," Pioneer History
Collection, Pioneer Memorial Museum, Salt Lake City, Utah, Mormon Pioneer Overland
Travel, 1847-1868, Church History, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints,
http://lds.org/churchhistory/library/source/1,18016,4976-18544,00.html.
22
Harlow Chittenden Thompson, "Across the Continent on Foot in 1859: A Record of
Personal Experiences," pp.33–4, Ayer Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois.
Although embalming, the idea of preventing body from decay, did not gain serious
177

Travelers also attempted to protect bodies by concealing emigrant graves.
Overlanders piled rocks, stones and branches over these burial sites. One Mormon family
burned sage on top of a grave to try to mask the smell of the decaying corpse from
scavenging wolves. Some companies even buried deceased members in the road, hoping
that the traffic overhead would render the burial site invisible and thus inviolable. Other
companies ran their wagons over roadside graves to provide a more secure tomb.
Abraham Henry Garrison recalled how he watched the wagons of his company run over
his brother's freshly made grave. Of the train, Garrison's was the only wagon that went
around the camouflaged body.
23
In their efforts to protect the physical corpse overlanders
sometimes destroyed the social identity of the deceased as well as the location of the
burial.
Recent changes in how EuroAmericans in settled communities cared for their
dead made the efforts to protect the corpses of overlanders all the more imperative.
Beginning in the 1830s, a contingent of middle and upper class EuroAmericans began to
promote a new type of cemetery. Known as the rural cemetery movement, these men and
women advocated creating graveyards just outside of city limits in order to protect the
health of the living as well as promote better memorials for the dead. This movement

popularity and cultural acceptance until later in the century, overlanders had specific
ideas about the need to maintain the physical integrity of the corpse.
23
John Coleman, Vicious: Wolves and Men in America, (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2004), 148, 169-71. Abraham Henry Garrison, "Reminiscences of A. H. Garrison,
His Early Life, and Across the Plains And of Oregon from 1846 to 1903," Recollections
and correspondence, 1893-1908, MSS 874, Oregon Historical Society Research Library,
Portland, Oregon.
178

removed graves from close proximity to cities and homes but it also made them more
accessible. Meandering footpaths and strategically placed benches encouraged long
visits, while lush greenery and tranquil surroundings increased the aesthetic appeal.
Gravesites became so identified with romantic, pastoral landscapes that hearing the notes
of a "lone Whippoorwill" as he sat writing in his journal apart from the hubbub of camp
on the trail in Wyoming made Argonaut Silas Newcomb's think of his mother's grave left
behind in Madison, Wisconsin.
24

The idea of the defenseless wilderness grave predated this rural cemetery
movement. The trope of the "lone grave" provided overlanders with the framework to
bemoan both the isolation of the dead from family and friends as well as the vulnerability
of unattended tombs. The concept of the "lone grave" had a long and enduring history
that reached well beyond the confines of the overland trail. However, because the trail
emerged at a combined moment of cemetery reform, fears of familial mobility, and need
to settle the far West, the "lone grave" became an enduring symbol of the trail and of the
process by which EuroAmericans claimed the vast interior of the continent. Before the
exposed, disinterred and unmarked bodies of Civil War soldiers served as rallying point
for a reunited nation, the wilderness graves became in many ways the iconic stand-in for
the trail as well as EuroAmerican expansion. The "lone grave" encapsulated the sacrifices

24
For specific discussions of the rural cemetery movement see, Stanley French, "The
Cemetery as Cultural Institution: The Establishment of Mount Auburn and the 'Rural
Cemetery' Movement," Death in America, ed. David E Stannard (Philadelphia:
Philadelphia University Press, 1975), 69–91; and Laderman, Sacred Remains, 44, 69–71.
Silas Newcomb, Journal, May 17, 1850, The Henry E. Huntington Library. San Marino,
California.
179

of emigrants who traveled the trail to settle a new country. This sacrifice was both
individual, in the form of giving up life, and familial, as the solitude of the grave meant
that family members had been permanently disconnected from their loved ones.
25
For this
reason, Margaret White Chambers recalled how during her journey she hoped that if all
of her relatives could just survive until they reached Oregon, one there near her new
home she could see them laid to rest near her new home "without a tear."
26

While the trope of the lone grave highlighted the isolation of emigrant burials,
overlanders rarely buried bodies in isolated spaces. Instead, emigrants interred their dead
in what I will term "grave clusters." During the height of the cholera epidemic in 1849
Bernard Reid visited a group of "3 graves of the same company, from Bristol, Indiana,
Ellis Russell aged 53 - June 14 - Saml P Judsun, Aged 49 - June 15th - N T Phillip -aged
32- June 17th - all cholera."
27
That same year Charles Darwin's company laid a member
to rest beside three graves that "had been filled since June 10th."
28
Waiting to depart from
Wyoming, Phebe Davis anguished over burying her daughter alone on the prairie. Yet

25
One of the most famous descriptions of a lone grave came from Charles Wolfe's poem,
"The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna." For a reproduction of the poem see, Jon
Stallworthy, The Oxford book of war poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984),
83.
26
Margaret White Chambers, "Reminiscences, 1851," p10, Overland Journeys to the
Pacific Collection, MSS 1508, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland,
Oregon.
27
Bernard Reid, Journal, June 23, 1849, Bernard J. Reid Collection, Special Collections,
Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California.
28
Charles Benjamin Darwin, Journal, Vol. 1, June 18, 1849, HM 16770, The Henry E.
Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
180

when Davis and her family left for Utah a few weeks later thirty other cholera victims lay
alongside her child.
29
This fact provided some consolation for Davis, who could imagine
her daughter as part of a larger community of deceased EuroAmericans.
While the years of the cholera epidemic made it relatively easy to construct group
burials, emigrants mafde special efforts to create these clusters. Although graveyards at
forts provided some emigrants with final resting places, for the most part emigrants
created these clusters without the assistance of the state. Proximity to western settlements
facilitated these burials. Dying close to towns and settlements travelers could be "buried.
. .respectably." One overlander was even buried in a graveyard near a Methodist
Episcopal Meeting house. Such arrangements consoled overlanders because they knew
that their loved ones would not lie alone.
30
But the dead did not have to be buried in a
town to have company. To Darwin, "it seemed near home comparatively to be buried on
the platte" in "a companionship of graves & town of dead who all & each night find
someone to whom he was linked by a bond of sympathy."
31
While Darwin evoked an
image of deathly conviviality, these clusters provided solace for the living, not the dead.
The massive numbers of migrants helped to assure that many places across the trail

29
Will Bagley and Rick Grunder, eds., "Phebe Ann Woolley Davis's Hard Road to Utah
and Back, 1864–1865,” Overland Journal 27, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 48–78.
30
J. R. Starr, Diary, 1850, p33, Starr Family Papers, MSS 2473, Oregon Historical
Society Research Library, Portland Oregon; and Undated Note to George H. Himes, Box
3, Oregon Historical Society Archives, Oregon Historical Society Research Library,
Portland, Oregon.
31
Charles Benjamin Darwin, Journal, Volume 2, August 4, 1849, Henry E. Huntington
Library, San Marino, California.
181

would be marked by more than one grave. At Ash Hollow, a popular camping ground in
western Nebraska, so many bodies had been interred that one traveler declared it to be "a
regular graveyard."
32
These grave clusters physically and figuratively embodied the
community connection and communal experience of the trail.
The creation of these clusters represented not only an effort by overlanders to
bury their dead in close proximity to one another, but also an effort by successive waves
of emigrants to bury their dead alongside others, even the unknown. Near the Bear River
in 1863, for example, F. E. W. Patten and company discovered a cluster of six graves of
emigrants who had died on their way to California from 1850 to 1853. When a child in
Maria Shrode's company died the father delayed burying the child until they reached the
graves of the Oatman family who had been killed by Indians seventeen years earlier and
buried in the Mojave Desert. Thus, like cemeteries in the United States, these clusters
accumulated the dead over time. And, as with more formal cemeteries in settled parts of
the country, these successive burials historicized these clusters. Dates of death on these
graves were not only marks of when individuals perished but also of the EuroAmerican
presence on the landscape. These graves, more than wagon ruts and other emigrant
debris, provided successive overlanders with definitive chronological markers of
EuroAmerican presence. More than any other remnant of the trail, graves highlighted the
historical longevity of EuroAmericans presence on the landscape.
33

32
William Harris Goltra, Recollections, p2, Overland Journeys to the Pacific Collection,
MSS 1508, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland, Oregon.
33
F. E. W. Patten, Diary, p18, Box 4, John S. Gray Research Papers, 1942-1991, The
Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois; Maria Shrode, "From Texas to California," ts,
182

As in settled communities, overlanders made a special effort to visit these
clusters. Elizabeth Maria Campbell remembered that her mother "went to visit all the
graves she saw" during their overland trip. When Esther Belle Hanna visited one newly
made grave she brought flowers "as a mark of my respect for the departed whoever it
may be." Many travelers described these visits as a duty, rather than a choice. Abigail
Scott Duniway branded her failure to visit and record the information on the graves she
had passed over the course of a few days "negligent."
34

But the task of visiting these graves was not an easy one. The sheer numbers of
graves overwhelmed some overlanders. Henry Wadsworth declared that graves "became
so numerous as hardly to attract a passing notice, unless in the immediate vicinity of our
camping grounds." For some, this inattention suggested something more sinister. In 1863,
Helen Carpenter detected similar processes of hardening against the dead in her oxen as
well as fellow human travelers. Just as the oxen no longer took note of their dead
brethren on the roadside, neither did people, "for the little trails leading to lonely graves
are not so well worn as those seen heretofore." Carpenter hoped the difficulties of the
journey that "each day is robbing us of all sentiment" would not make herself and her

pp.87-8, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. On the maintenance
of the Oatman graves and massacre site in the nineteenth century see Brian McGinty, The
Oatman Massacre: a Tale of Desert Captivity and Survival (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 2005), 193–4.
34
Elizabeth Maria Campbell to George H. Himes, Reminiscence, February 23, 1904, Box
3, Oregon Historical Society Archives, Oregon Historical Society Research Libarary,
Portland, Oregon; Esther Belle McMillan Hanna, Canvas Caravans ed. Eleanor Allen
(Portland, Or: Binfords & Mort, 1946), 28; and Abigail Scott Duniway, Journal, August
20th, Abigail Scott Duniway Papers, 1852-1915, MSS 432, Oregon Historical Society
Research Library, Portland, Oregon.
183

fellow travelers "permanently changed."
35
Fears that not visiting graves represented a
social breakdown shows how much communal responsibility emigrants felt toward the
dead. Such laments also served to portray the vast geographic space of the trail as
covered with the graves and remains of emigrants.
Even as community members felt greater responsibility to tend to emigrant graves
and thus honor the emigrant fallen than they did the tombs of citizens in the settled
United States, relatives of the deceased were expected and did take the lead in caring for
these sites. The successive waves of migration across the trail facilitated families' efforts
to tend to their distant loved ones. When Thomas White started across the overland trail
he was as intent on visiting the grave of his son who had died on his way to California as
he was on reaching Oregon himself. White accomplished both of his goals. In Iowa, as a
preacher led a prayer White and his family "kneeled at the Grave, of my much loved
Boy." The departure of friends and neighbors provided EuroAmericans with the
opportunity to commission others to help watch over these tombs. Susan Drew recalled
that before leaving Kentucky a neighboring family, "begged my Father to visit the grave"
of a son they had left on the plains a year earlier.
36
Though far, these graves provided
viable sites of attachment for family members.

35
William Wadsworth, The National Wagon Road Guide, from St. Joseph and Council
Bluffs, on the Missouri River, via South Pass of the Rocky Mountains, to California, (San
Francisco: Whitton, Towne, 1900), 62; and Helen McCowen Carpenter, "A Trip Across
the Plains to California in 1857," July 3, 1857, p43, The Henry E. Huntington Library,
San Marino, California.
36
Thomas White, To Oregon in 1852, Letter of Dr. Thomas White, La Grange County,
Indiana, Emigrant, ed. Samuel Porter Williams (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society,
1964), 10; and Susan Isabel Biles Drew, "Crossing the Plains in 1853," p6, Overland
184

While successive travelers could help to maintain these gravesites, these new
travelers also contributed to changes in the western environment which increased the
difficulty of identifying and maintaining these sites. C. D. Adams, the brother of the man
who died in Samuel Matthews' company, commissioned an emigrating neighbor to visit
and tend his brother's grave. Adams provided his neighbor with Matthews' description of
the tomb as "on the north side of the road. . .about 4 miles west of the junction of the
Independence road with that from St. Joseph." Adams' neighbor eventually located the
spot, but informed him "the Road Runs to the south from 1/4 to 1/2 of a mile in
Consequence of a bad Ravene [sic]." Some graves could not be found at all. While
encamped at the spot where he believed he had buried "A Lady by the name of Eleson
who died with the colary [cholera]" three years earlier, neither Mr. Parks nor his
companions "could. . .find the grave."
37
Such stories described emigrant remains
permanently lost to the soil.
For EuroAmericans who could not travel west or send friends to search for their
loved ones' final resting places, overlanders recorded grave locations with the intent of
publishing the lists in newspapers as well as their published letters and book-length
narratives of their travels. Near the Bear River in 1849 Charles Stackhouse encountered
an anonymous man meticulously recording the details of every grave he passed. When

Journeys to the Pacific Collection, MSS 1508, Oregon Historical Society Research
Library, Portland, Oregon.
37
H Gregory to C. D. Adams, May 30, 1850, Benjamin F. Adams Papers, Western
Americana Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University;
and Edwin R. Bird, Journal, July 4, 1854, Edwin R. Bird Journal and Letters, 1854-1855,
Ayer Collection, The Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois.
185

Stackhouse enquired into his motivations, the man replied that he was creating his record
to honor the deceased and communicate their final resting places to family and friends at
home.
38
While most families expected and received details of the burial site of deceased
loved one from friends and company members, the possibility of lost letters and that
travelers could be separated from friends at the time of death made an unpublicized death
and burial a very real possibility. Trail travelers were the primary source for information
for publicized notices of emigrant deaths. One such list compiled by emigrant John H.
Hays first appeared in a St. Joseph, Missouri newspaper in 1852 from which it was
widely reprinted in papers across the eastern seaboard.
39

Although disseminating this information was a far cry from being able to bury
loved ones at home, EuroAmericans had already become habituated to accommodating
similar deviations. Cenotaphs, markers erected to honor a dead person whose remains lay
elsewhere, had become a common means to honor those who died at sea and in other
circumstances that made it impossible to recover or transport the body. During the Civil
War, memorial lithographs, printed forms that provided blank space on a monument for
the family to enter the name and other pertinent information regarding the deceased,

38
On the Bear River in 1849 emigrant Charles Stackhouse encountered "a man from
Oregon who was recording all grave inscriptions, planning to publish the information
back East," quoted in Merrill J. Mattes, Platte River Road Narratives: a Descriptive
Bibliography of Travel over the Great Central Overland Route to Oregon, California,
Utah, Colorado, Montana, and Other Western States and Territories, 1812-1866
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), entry 632.
39
St. Joseph Weekly Gazette, Dec 1, 1852, p.2 c.7; The information for the deceased
varied, depending on the information provided on the headstone, thereby underscoring
the ad-hoc nature of reports of emigrants’ deaths Unruh, Plains Across, 407.
186

afforded families with a physical object to direct their care for the dead.
40
Overlanders
recognized a similar cultural value in their lists of graves. When Argonaut J.
Goldsborough Bruff submitted his manuscript of his overland journey to the New York
Publishing Company Harper and Brothers in 1853 he declared that while his
"topographical itinerary" would interest travelers past and future, the grave record would
attract the many more numerous readers who would learn the location of their lost loved
ones' final resting places in his manuscript. Bruff promised that if published his journal
would reclaim the dead for their grieving survivors, making it "as though they [dead
emigrants] had been deposited with pious care, and memorialized in marble, in the
graveyards of their native villages."
41
Emigrants' identities, if not their physical remains,
could be projected East where they would be properly memorialized.
While such information may have provided a semblance of comfort that these
overlanders could be metaphorically buried with "pious care," on the plains emigrants
portrayed graves left in the wilderness as under constant siege from Indians, wolves, and
weather. Overlanders blamed wolves, Indians, and the ravages of weather, the major
elements of savagery, for disinterring fallen emigrants and destroying their memorial
markers. There is perhaps no more common depiction of the overland trail than that of

40
On the erection of cenotaphs see, for example, Hester Blum, "American Graves,
Pacific Plots," American Literary Geographies: Space and Cultural Production, 1588-
1888, eds. Martin Brückner and Hsuan L. Hsu (University of Delaware Press, 2007):
149–170. On memorial lithography see Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country, 179.
41
J. Goldsborough Bruff, "Introduction: Chapter Written Later for Overland Journal,"
pp.5–7, Journal and drawings of J. Goldsborough Bruff, 1849-1853, Henry E. Huntington
Library, San Marino, California. Harper's, citing Bruff's refusal to shorten the manuscript,
declined to publish his account.
187

white wagons and people under attack by tomahawk-wielding "savages." Few emigrants,
however, encountered violent indigenous peoples and fewer still died at the hands of the
peoples whose lands they aspired to possess. Tales of homicidal savages nonetheless
provided stock episodes in overland accounts that helped emigrants make a case for their
thrilling adventures and enduring sacrifices. Along the trail, graves sometimes became
the medium through which emigrants projected this alleged Indian violence.
42
Arrows
sticking out of grave mounds were one oft-cited indication of this violence. But, graves
did not need arrows to become warnings to passing emigrants. An 1849 article in The
New York Daily Sun printed a letter from an overlander that described a similar
monument to a victim of Indian violence. His company buried the body on the "top of a
conspicuous mount," to attract the attention of passing emigrants. For those expected
visitors they left "on the grave. . .a written warning, against leaving the main body of the
company in the Indian country."
43

42
Overlanders certainly memorialized these deaths, but headstones on the trail could
serve multiple purposes. Fake headstones were also used to marks "caches" the spot of
goods buried for later retrieval. Unruh, Plains Across, 305.
43
September 7, 1849, New York Daily Sun, Box 15, New York, Ralph P. Bieber
Collection, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
188

Figure 7. Similar warnings appeared on other trails, like this headstone on the Santa Cruz road in Arizona.
(Courtesy, John Ross Browne, Adventures in the Apache Country: a Tour Through Arizona and Sonora, with
Notes on the Silver Regions of Nevada (Harper & bros., 1871), 233.)

On the trail gravestones were not so much sentimental monuments as they were
symbols and warnings of violence. Gravestone markers in settled communities did
sometimes incorporate signs of death, in the form of skulls like the one above from the
Santa Cruz road. However, these representations symbolized death rather than violence
per se. In America, the use of tombstones as symbols of violence was a western
phenomenon that spoke to the singular role of graves in contested territory.
But while these markers made explicit the causal relationships between Indian
violence and a dead white body in the ground, every grave held within it the possibility of
indigenous violence. According to the trope of the lone grave, these were sites of
potential attack by Indians. Thus the dead, even more than the living, fulfilled the
political project of characterizing the citizens of an aggressively expanding nation as the
consummate victims of indigenous peoples.
189

At the same time material constraints of the trail also made emigrant graves more
like those of Indians. Near the site of the former Donner party encampment, Henry Bigler
and his company visited the grave of a companion who had died the previous year. The
man had died while left behind with a small fragment of his company who had had to dig
his grave using only hatchets. A year later, he noted that the corpse "smells loudly."
According to ideas of the period, smells signaled bad airs known as "miasmas" which
could infect the human body.
44
Cholera victims posed the greatest threat to the health of
travelers and indigenous peoples. When a man in John Williams' company died of the
disease, the leader of a neighboring Indian community prohibited the company from
burying the corpse near their village, so they hauled his body three miles before burying
him.
45
Similarly, when Helen McCowen Carpenter's aunt noticed a sickening stench
while paying her respects at the grave of an unknown traveler, she urged her companions
to stay back from the infectious spot. Travelers speculated that those who came to close
to the shallow graves of cholera victim had contracted the fatal disease from the dead.
46

44
Henry Bigler, Autobiography of H. W. Bigler, Book A, September 11, 1847, p118,
Box 2, Diaries of Henry William Bigler, Mormon File, c. 1805-1995, The Henry E.
Huntington Library, San Marino, California; and Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health
of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New
York: Basic Books, 2002), especially Chapter 4, “Airs,” 109–33.
45
John T Williams, “Journal of John T Williams, 1850,” Indiana Magazine of History 32,
no. 4 (December 1, 1936): 399.
46
Samuel Chadwick, Diary, p78, Manuscripts and Archives, New York Public Library,
New York, New York. Health issues were acknowledged problem of poorly maintained
cemeteries. Laderman, Sacred Remains, 69–71.
190

The idea of emigrant graves as stinking health hazards mirrored EuroAmerican
complaints about sites of indigenous remains. Emigrants frequently expressed disgust at
what they described as putrid Native American graves. Joseph Wood described how he
went to take a relic from an Indian corpse that another emigrant had pulled down from a
tree. However, when he reached the corpse it "smelt so bad" that he retreated without
securing his prize. The practice of laying corpses to rest above ground or mounded in
earth allowed smells from decaying corpses to permeate the air. Rather than burying their
dead in the earth, Indians of the plains such as the Cheyenne, Pawnee, and Sioux created
platform burials, or scaffold burials. To construct these the men placed four forked
wooden poles, seven to eight feet high, in the ground then laid poles across and sideways
to create a solid surface on which they placed the tightly wrapped, mummified corpse. If
they did not have enough wood available then Indians might also place bodies directly in
trees.
47

While putrid graves led overlanders to criticize both emigrant and Native
American sites, the fear of animals ravaging mortal remains created common cause with
Indians. Passing a Sioux platform burial near Fort Laramie in 1854, William Woodhams
declared the Sioux must have decided to secure the body on the platform in order to
protect it from the wild animals to "eat up every body" put into the ground. In so doing,
Woodhams evoked a cross-racial problem where "every body" regardless of race

47
Joseph Wood, Journal, Vol. 1, June 14, 1849, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San
Marino, California. For a discussion of Native American deathways see, George Bird
Grinnell, The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Ways of Life, Vol. 2 (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1972), 163.
191

remained vulnerable to the ravages of the animals of the plains.
48
Helen McCowen
Carpenter declared the first "Indian hanging cemetery," she despicable. However, for
Carpenter the indigenous custom made more sense after seeing "human bones scattered
about" her camp. Acknowledging the ravages of wolves, she admitted that burying bodies
in the trees is the "only thing for them [Indians] to do."
49

Emigrants not only occasionally conceded the propriety of Indian burials; out of
material necessity they also adapted elements of indigenous burial practices. While some
emigrants, like the terminally ill Mrs. Raymond, attempted to prepare for the possibility
of dying on the plains, most companies relied on whatever materials they could collect at
the gravesite to bury the body. When Benjamin F. Adams' company was unable to
procure enough wood for a proper coffin the men dug a grave of the "usual depth,"
probably six feet, then made "an excavation. . .shaped like a coffin" in which they placed
the body.
50
Before the burial they tightly wrapped the corpse in a comforter then covered
it with an oilcloth coat for extra protection. In addition to comforters and coats,
overlanders used a variety of old clothing as well as buffalo robes and even bark to

48
William H. Woodhams “The Diary of William H. Woodhams, 1852-1854 : the Great
Deserts or Around and Across,” ed. Charles W. Martin Nebraska History 61, no. 1
(1980): 64.
49
Carpenter, "A Trip Across," pp.13–4, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino,
California. There is as of yet no evidence that overlanders attempted to approximate
indigenous burial methods. This may have been due both to their aversion to these
methods as well as their lack of time and resources. Shallow graves were vulnerable, but
were the best that Euro-Americans could do given time constraints.
50
Benjamin F. Adams to Sir, December 13, 1849, Benjamin F. Adams Papers, 1849-
1850, Western Americana Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale
University.
192

encase bodies that at home would have been enclosed in wooden coffins. When a new
mother and her hours-old infant perished near Bear River, Catherine Haun's company
"wrapped" the bodies "together in a bed comforter and wound. . .with a few yards of
string that we made. . .of a cotton dress skirt" before depositing them in the "desert."
They appeared, she declared, "quite mummyfied [sic]."
51

In this age of "Egyptomania," Haun's description of mummified EuroAmerican
bodies would have quickly brought to mind the mummified remains of ancient Egyptians
and Native Americans. Although Egypt drove much of the interest in ancient mummified
remains, Native Americans provided corpses of similar states of preservation and, in the
minds of some, antiquity. Remains like these provided EuroAmericans with objects of
both scientific interest and fascinating entertainment. Mummy shows and displays in the
East popularized these Egyptian and Native American mummies. But it was the West to
which EuroAmericans directed the bulk of their efforts to collecting and "discovering"
these corpses. Many overlanders would have been aware of John Townshend's popular
1843 narrative of his adventure in Oregon in which he described stealing a mummified
indigenous woman, a marvel because in terms of her preservation she was "equal to any I
had seen from the catacombs of Thebes."
52
Haun's likening of emigrant remains to

51
Catherine Haun, “A Woman’s Trip Across the Plains in 1849,” p37, The Henry E.
Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
52
John Kirk Townsend, Narrative of a Journey Across the Rocky Mountains, to the
Columbia River, and a Visit to the Sandwich Islands, Chili, &c. with a Scientific
Appendix (Philadelphia; Boston: H. Perkins ; Perkins & Marvin, 1839), 236; and Fabian,
Skull Collectors, 81, 103–7, 110–11, 121.
193

mummies thus raised the possibility that in death some emigrant corpses assumed
physical characteristics of the racial other.
Bits and pieces of unidentifiable bones scattered along the trail added to this sense
of racial instability. Some emigrants confidently applied the techniques of phrenology,
the examination of skulls to determine character and racial attributes, to skulls they
encountered on the trail. Darwin, for instance, read the "narrow" forehead of an Indian
corpse he found as a sign of low intelligence.
53
While Darwin read this skull to confirm
his conviction in Indian inferiority, other emigrants read skulls to determine their race.
One emigrant, finding a "well bleached human skull" at his camp decided that its
seeming lack of intelligence and other characteristics meant it must be "a Pawnee skull."
While Darwin seemed uninterested in which Indian skull he was describing, this reading
confirmed how much emigrants distinguished between the groups of Indians they
encountered on their journey.
54

Even as emigrants declared that they based their techniques on the "science" of
phrenology, they also relied on contextual clues to define racial status. Coming upon a
"white human skull set up on a stick at the road side" and covered with messages from
passing emigrants one traveler decided "it was probably an Indian skull."
55
The political
power of emigrant remains seemed to depend on the ability of passing travelers to

53
Darwin, Journal, Vol 1, pp. 13–15, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino,
California.
54
W. S. McBride, "Journal of an Overland trip from Gashen, Ind. to Salt Lake City," p23,
The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
55
Ibid., p80.
194

identify them as such, but the material disorder of the trail often made it impossible to
distinguish between Native American and emigrant remains.
Yet even when they believed they had identified emigrant remains, overlanders
did not always treat them respectfully. Despite Helen Carpenter's protests, the "boys" in
her train made the "skull of a white person" they had found near camp a target for their
pistols.
56
In his reminiscence, Benjamin Hayes described how on the road from El Paso
to Salinas he and his party picked up a skull "doubtless a victim of Indian hostility" and
after passing it around "for examination" stuck the skull atop a cactus branch. Another
overlander encountered a similarly treated "skull that had been carried more than two
hundred miles from the place where it was first written on, as there was an account of the
name of whose skull it once was, killed by Indians."
57

While using bones as target practice suggested a total lack of reverence for
emigrant remains, collecting and displaying human bones was one way nineteenth-
century EuroAmericans attempted to connect with and honor their dead. Along the trail,
overlanders frequently "picked up. . .bones" from the Donner Party encampment "as
souvenirs of the sad spot."
58
Thrown into emigrant saddlebags or tossed inside wagons,

56
Helen McCowen Carpenter, "A Trip Across the Plains to California in 1857," p28, The
Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California; and Benjamin Hayes, Pioneer
Notes from the Diaries of Judge Benjamin Hayes (Los Angeles, CA: Privately Printed,
1929), 26.
57
George Miller West "A Portion of the Memoirs of G. M. West," nd., Butler-Smith
Family Papers, MSS 2623, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland Oregon.
58
Darwin, Journal, vol. 2, p78–79, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino,
California. This act of taking souvenirs from famous graves occurred across America. In
the 1850s the local community had to move the grave of Jane McCrea because visitors
195

the bones of emigrants intermixed and mingled with the pebbles, pressed flowers and
other mementoes of the trail. Once collected, they may also have blended with Indian
bones and relics stolen from Indian graves.
Bones and relics from Indian gravesites were even more sought after than items
collected from emigrant tombs. When writing her reminiscence forty years after her
journey, Ada Millington declared that she still had the "strand" of "white, blue, red and
black beads" she and her company had "strung" with beads they stole from what appeared
to be the remains of two Indian burials.
59
Even as bones and relics could have become
confused in emigrants' saddlebags, overlanders held very different expectations of their
meanings. Through the appropriation of items like these, overlanders made indigenous
possessions part of their efforts to memorialize and possess their experiences in the far
West.
The recognition of potentially violent repercussions for disturbing Indian graves
led some emigrants to try to prevent such desecration. Even as emigrants collected these
mementoes, they remained aware of the potentially negative repercussions of their
actions. Laura Brewster Boquist asked the men of her train who retrieved "beads and
other souvenirs" from a Sioux grave along the Platte to return the "sacred mementos."
When they refused she declared, "This thoughtless disregard by white people, of the most

were destroying the tombstone. Jeremy Engels and Greg Goodale, “‘Our Battle Cry Will
Be: Remember Jenny McCrea!’: A Précis on the Rhetoric of Revenge,” American
Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2009): 95–6.
59
Ada Millington, “Journal Kept While Crossing the Plains,” ed. Charles G. Clarke
Southern California Quarterly 59, 1 (Spring 1977): 43–4.
196

sacred rites of the Indians, has doubtless added much to the trouble between races."
60

Another traveler reproached a "young medical student" who with his companions
"commenced climbing the tree and proceeded to rip open the skin and examine the
remains" for violating the grave lest he desired to bring retribution upon an innocent
traveler. The medical student refused and boasted "he had opened every grave he had
found on his journey."
61

The dominant strain of American culture fostered a belief in Indian graves as
appropriate material for EuroAmerican scientific and religious inquiry. In nineteenth-
century America, Indian graves and ghosts symbolized the vestiges of a dying race at the
same time that their haunting presence lent a historical authenticity to the American
landscape. Nineteenth-century EuroAmericans posited their nation's growth as one
predicated on the deaths of the supposedly "vanishing Indian." As overlander Thomas
Farnham put it, "The Indians’ bones must enrich the soil, before the plough of civilized
man can open it."
62
To the east, Indians appeared more dead than alive. Wellman Packard
opened his reminiscence of his trip across the overland trail by stating that after entering
"Indian territory" he and his company did not encounter many "live Indians for some

60
Elisha Douglass Perkins alleged that the army for desecrating indigenous graves
apprehended a company of Pennsylvania emigrants. There is some evidence that in 1849
the army may have arrested emigrants for desecrating Indian graves. Unruh, Plains
Across, 231n123.
61
Ibid., 309.
62
Thomas J. Farnham, Travels in the Great Western Prairies, The Anahuac and Rocky
Mountains, And in the Oregon Territory (Poughkeepsie: Killey and Lossing, Printers,
1841), 55.
197

time." But just a few yards past the last western settlement they discovered "the remains
of an Indian brave" who they "let. . .lie alone in his glory."
63
Exalting dead Indians helped
EuroAmericans to portray them precursors to American civilization.
So too did emigrant graves and remains serve as precursors to EuroAmerican
settlement in the West. Both Native and EuroAmericans used visible graves and other
sites of death to mark the landscape. Along the trail, sites like "Indian Grave," "Grave
Creek," "Tragedy Springs," and "Scott's Bluff" provided some of the most notable
landmarks for passing emigrants. As they had in places farther east, and as colonial
surveyors were doing around the world in the nineteenth century, overlanders established
landmarks to enfold new places into the American political and cultural domain.
64
When
John Charles Frémont and his party arrived at Independence Rock in 1842, the rock was
already "thickly inscribed" with the names of EuroAmerican travelers and explorers and,
frequently, the year they had visited. "Amidst the names," Frémont "made on the hard
granite the impression of a large cross." He declared that his cross, which he first chiseled
in the granite then covered with "Indian rubber," transformed the rock into a monument
to the "many who have long since found their way to the grave, and for whom the huge

63
Wellman Packard, Early Emigration to California, 1849-1850 (Bloomington, Ill: M.
Custer, 1928), 3.
64
Jean O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); and D. Burnett, Masters of All They
Surveyed : Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000).
198

rock is a giant gravestone."
65
Cenotaphs usually appeared in cemeteries like Mount
Auburn where, like Bruff's list of graves, they metaphorically brought the dead home.
But with this act Frémont created a cenotaph, and one of the first American mass
memorials, outside of the settled United States. By focusing his commemoration of these
early explorers on the wilderness landscape, Frémont attempted to embed Independence
Rock, and the far West more generally, into the cultural landscape of nineteenth-century
America. In so doing, he also portrayed the West as a vast region filled with the remains
of EuroAmericans, a land already settled by the fur trader and emigrant dead and waiting
for the coming of American settlement.
In the decades following the close of the overland trail, emigrant graves served a
similar purpose. The rhetoric of former overlanders and pioneers portrayed the far West
as a landscape permeated with emigrant remains. In his 1881 address to the Society of
California Pioneers, Augustus C. Taylor admonished the younger generation "to. . .Ever
remember that the road opened to your advancement and success has been watered by the
blood and corduroyed with the bones of thousands of brave men. March slowly, speak
pleasantly and reverently, and tread lightly on the ashes of the old Pioneers."
66
Two

65
John Charles Frémont, The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains (New York:
Miller, Orton, and Mulligan, 1856), 106–8.
66
Society of California Pioneers, The Society of California Pioneers Thirty-first
Anniversary ... Celebrated by a Grand Barbecue at Isabela Grove, Santa Cruz, Cal.
September 9, 1881 (San Francisco: B.F. Sterett, Printer, 1881), 13. I would like to thank
Brenda Frink for bringing my attention to this quote. Frink's work has been helpful to my
thinking about gender and memory, Brenda Denise Frink, “Pioneers and Patriots: Race,
Gender, and Historical Memory in California, 1875-1915” (PhD diss., Stanford
University, 2010).
199

decades later in his reminiscence written for the Society of California Pioneers, former
overlander Henry Atkins described seeing, "the bones of so many pioneers lay bleaching
in the blazing sun" on his journey and declared, “Shall we say to those who fell on the
way come look upon the state and condition of the Pacific Coast now." Atkins called to
dead emigrants to look upon the progress their sacrifices had helped bring to the Pacific,
thereby incorporating them into the achievements of American progress. While Native
American bones were supposed to be silent fertilizer for American civilization, emigrant
bones could be rhetorically resurrected to observe American progress.
67

On the ground along the overland trail, emigrant graves and bones provided
foundation points for new EuroAmericans settlements and inspired interest in the
emigrants who had come before. According to George Crofutt's transcontinental railroad
guide, the site of overlander Lucinda Duncan's grave near Beowawe, Nevada is "the
point. . . now used as a burial ground by the people living in the vicinity."
68
Graves on
private land similarly worked as historical markers and to inspire reverence for
EuroAmerican predecessors. Wyoming rancher John Gadsden discovered an emigrant
grave under a “Juniper or Cedar tree” near “a sparkling little stream with sage brush
banks” on his cattle ranch south of Green River City. The discovery prompted Gadsden
to inquire of the community's oldest resident whether he had any recollection of the

67
Henry B. Atkins, "Henry B. Atkins Letters, 1901," pp.2–3, The Society of California
Pioneers, San Francisco, California.
68
Henry Williams, The Pacific Tourist. Williams’ Illustrated Trans-continental Guide to
Travel, from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Containing Full Descriptions of Railroad
Routes ... A Complete Traveler’s Guide Of (New York: H.T. Williams, 1876), 185.
200

grave. The man could only provide a few details. Nearly forty years later, and long after
he had moved from the ranch, Gadsden continued to think of the grave. When John
Colton's articles on the Jayhawker Party of 1849, a group of emigrants who had gotten
lost in Death Valley on their way to California, attracted his attention, he wrote Colton to
see, “if any relatives were living and most especially how emigrants came to come over
that awful trail.”
69
Through his interaction with the grave of one individual emigrant,
Gadsden became interested in the process of an entire migration. These discovered
remains helped him to connect with a deeper EuroAmerican past.
As they had during the years of trail travel, EuroAmericans also tried to
communicate the location of these graves to families back East. In 1891 the Boston Daily
Globe reported how the Winslow brothers of Massachusetts had learned the exact
location of their father's final resting place.
70
On behalf of the inhabitants of Fairbury,
Nebraska the Reverend F. Goldsmith wrote to the place of origin listed on George's
tombstone to inform his descendants of the location of his grave. At the time of his death

69
John Gadsden to John B Colton, February 4, 1913, Folder 43, Box 8, Jayhawker
Collection, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. The Oregon-
California Trails Association has since erected a marker at Malinda Jane Armstrong's
grave near Fort Bridger. http://www.octa-
trails.org/learn/virtual_trail/cherokee_trail/armstrong_grave.php, (Accessed April 5,
2009).
70
"Tale of a Lonely Grave," The Boston Daily Globe, February 18, 1891. In 1912 George
W. Hansen of Fairbury Nebraska and George Winslow's sons had a granite monument
erected on the site. George W. Hansen, "A Tragedy of the Oregon Trail," Collections of
the Nebraska State Historical Society, ed. Albert Watkins, vol. 17, (1913), 110–26. See
also George Winslow, Pioneer Gravesite, Oregon-California Trails Association,
www.octa-trails.org/learn/people_places/grave_winslow_george, (accessed January 18,
2010).
201

George's company had told the Winslows that they had buried him somewhere between
St. Joseph and Fort Laramie, a distance of approximately 620 miles by the overland
route. A few years later the president of the Nebraska State Historical Society traveled to
Massachusetts to meet with Winslow's two sons and collect a bronze tablet to add to a
more enduring marker erected by the community. With this marker, the residents of
Fairbury attempted to provide a corrective to the scores of unmarked emigrant graves.
But even though these sites may have been unmarked this does not mean that they
were not remembered. Along the trail in the mid-nineteenth century, overlanders failed to
align burial practices on the plains with those in settled communities. But in failing they
succeeded in painting the West as a region permeated by emigrant bones and blood. In so
doing, they achieved what they could not in life: they became indigenous to the soil.
202

Chapter Five: Pioneer Identity and the Nature of Historical Authority

The shaping of memories of the overland trail began long before the completion
of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 was said to mark the "closing" of wagon travel
across the continent. As they made their way west, overlanders layered the trail with
memories as thick as the dust that coated their wagons, turned white men black, and
made seeing men blind. Just after crossing the western edge of Missouri in 1848, Edwin
Bryant "strayed to a stone monument" which he discerned had been "erected by an
emigrating company, commemorative of their departure for Oregon."
1
Emigrants'
conviction in their historical importance inspired many overlanders to record their
journeys, and to send their records back home. Some of these memories and stories had
more influence than others. Anecdotes etched on buffalo skulls and grave monuments, or
hastily scratched onto fragmentary papers then pinned to trees along the wayside,
broadcast particular narratives across the plains. Some of these stories found their way
into published accounts circulated in local newspapers and popular narratives like those
of John Charles Frémont and Edwin Bryant that were published contemporaneously to
overland travel, and that reached national and international audiences.
Narratives and texts were just one of the ways overlanders collected and
disseminated memories of the trail. As we have seen, emigrants sketched places and
peoples they encountered, chiseled and tarred their names onto iconic edifices like
Independence Rock and collected flowers, seeds, rocks and bones as relics and

1
Bryant, What I Saw, 31.
203

mnemonics of their six-month long treks. At the turn of the century, EuroAmericans thus
used many of the same strategies that they had employed during the years of trail travel,
writing memoirs, visiting trail sites, creating visual images and collecting and displaying
material objects, to remember and commemorate the trail experience. In the late
nineteenth century, goods that had connected overlanders to home, bibles, a treasured
violin, or an ordinary household item like a pan or a flat iron, now became symbols of
this migration. These ordinary household goods recalled not only the trail experience but
also made tangible both emigrants' ascription to domesticity as well as to a deeper family
history.
History, scholars have told us, was redefined over the course of the nineteenth
century. Historical time had been perceived as a continuous stream: people and places of
the past did not appear to be disconnected or distant from the present. But in the modern
era, in part because of the major revolutions and changes that roiled both Europe and the
United States from 1789 to 1815, history now appeared as segments, distinct periods
bound in time and place. Thus the view of history changed radically from something that
seemed close and familiar to something distant and unique. In other words, by the early
nineteenth century, Europeans and EuroAmericans no longer saw the past as something
much like the present but rather something quite different. This new conception expanded
the definition of what counted as history. Whereas before grand events and moments
constituted the extent of historical study, the realm of the everyday person and life now
204

took on a historical cast. Social and human experience was now understood to have
changed over time.
2

This new interest in the differences in social experience meant that ordinary
objects, people, and events took on new meaning as they acquired historical specificity.
The decision to collect and display ordinary objects taken along the trail as well as
overlanders' recognition and acknowledgment of their own personal histories exemplify
this new understanding of history. Former overlander Origen Thomson gave voice to this
new understanding in the preface to his 1896 reminiscence when he declared, "were it not
for the personal milestones along down life's vista," the journey "would seem like a
distant dream." The distinct segments of Thomson's life, separated by "personal
milestones," helped him to order his own personal trajectory and to gain a historical
perspective on his journey. Now, as he returned across the route in a Pullman car, he
could indulge in nostalgic reverie for his past journey.
3

Nostalgia derived from the modern perception of history as the continual
production of the new. The historian Peter Fritzsche has defined nostalgia as the shared
experience of a break from the past. This break creates a feeling of loss for a firsthand
connection with past experience. Ultimately, it is the realization of the loss or break and

2
Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 1–10.
3
Origen Thomson, Crossing the Plains. Narrative of the Scenes, Incidents and
Adventures Attending the Overland Journey of the Decatur and Rush County Emigrants
to the “Far-off” Oregon in 1852. Printed from a Diary of Daily Events Kept by the Late
Origen Thomson; with an Introductory Chapter by Mrs. Camilla T. Donnell, and a
Thrilling Narrative of a Buffalo Hunt and Battle Royal with Mountain Wolves, by Mr.
Sutherland McCoy (Greensburg, Ind.: Orville Thomson, 1896), 7.
205

the reflection on that loss which creates nostalgia. Nostalgic melancholy was thus a
symptom as well as a means to address the rupture with the past. In the mid-nineteenth
century, overlanders' nostalgia tended toward thoughts of home and family. In the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries their nostalgia shifted to that for the experience
of the trail.
4

This nostalgia for the overland trail had an element of what the scholar Renato
Rosaldo has termed "imperial nostalgia." "Imperial nostalgia" is a mourning for the loss
of something that one has destroyed. In their memoirs and recollections many
overlanders mourned for the loss of the "wild west" of "untamed' wilderness populated by
Indians. At the same, they celebrated their migration as helping to bring EuroAmerican
civilization to the far West.
5
In their writings, overlanders thus cast themselves as
historical actors. But they did not stop there. In the act of writing and documenting their
experiences many overlanders also believed themselves to be historians.
Overlanders made these claims to historical causation and production at the same
time the idea of "professional" history was beginning to take hold. Professional historians
called for excising emotions and nostalgia from history in favor of cold hard facts and
"scientific" interpretations. These ideas, much like the idea of nostalgia, were part of a
transatlantic conversation that originated in Europe. Many of the first professional
American historians trained overseas where they learned the methodologies of men like

4
Peter Fritzsche, “Specters of History: On Nostalgia, Exile, and Modernity,” The
American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (December 1, 2001): 1587–1618. See also,
Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present.
5
Renato Rosaldo, “Imperialist Nostalgia,” Representations, 26 no. 1 (1989): 107–9.
206

German national Leopold Von Ranke. Nonetheless, these American students seem to
have also imbued this understanding of history with their own interpretation. German
historians did not consider history "science," but Americans, according to the historian
Peter Novick, seem to believe that they did. Late nineteenth-century historians launched a
pursuit for objectivity, which they described as the quest to uncover the reality of the
past. This perception of history attempted to draw sharp lines between categories like fact
and value and the highly prized albeit elusive ideal of "objectivity."
6

Examining the memories and histories of the overland trail reveals the limits of
this professional historical project. While some of these professional historians took up
the topic of the overland trail in this period, the history and memory of the overland trail
was primarily the domain of former overlanders and amateur historians. Overlanders'
writings reveal that they thoroughly embraced modern ideas of history and nostalgia. At
the same time, they conceived of history and memory as intertwined rather than
oppositional. In this popular perception of history the difference between history and
memory was not the difference between fact and fiction. Overlanders recognized both
their experiences in the past while on the trail as well as their memories of those
experiences as thoroughly subjective. Thus, not only did the line between memory and
history blur but also did the perception of the two necessarily change over time as the self
changed and developed.

6
Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: the “Objectivity Question” and the American
Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 1–36.
207

The search for objectivity may have driven the projects of a handful of
professional historians, but the majority of EuroAmericans gave voice to a different type
of historical project. This was a historical project that recognized EuroAmerican men,
women, and children from a variety of backgrounds as having historical authority.
Moreover, even as many overland narratives drew hard lines between race, pitching
Native and EuroAmerican experience as oppositional, other EuroAmericans treated
Native American voices of the trail as having significance. Some memoirists also offered
suggestive points of interaction and memory with Native Americans that went beyond the
trope of "violent savages."
The overland trail was one of many past events on which turn-of-the-century
EuroAmericans focused their commemorative energies. Social change at the turn of the
century intensified nostalgia for recent events like the Civil War as well as the more
distant colonial past. Historians have analyzed the various uses to which different
constituents employed the past in this period to deal with the rapid changes in the present.
All of these movements brought something unique to the table: the Arts & Crafts
movement looked to a much deeper past that was not necessarily wholly American, the
colonial revival hoped to enshrine a prominent period of history identified with New
England, and Civil War commemoration helped to transform a nationally divisive
conflict into a narrative of reunion and regeneration. These historians, however, have
208

been less concerned with what ordinary people were saying about the relationship history
and memory.
7

Historians have touched on the memories of settlers and pioneers. They have
demonstrated that memory and commemoration helped to incorporate western places into
the American nation, and to cohere a sense of the West as a place, thereby creating a
regional, western identity.
8
Former overlanders, David Wrobel has also shown, argued
that "the remembered journeys" of reaching the West across the overland trail in "more
trying times" was essential to fully appreciating these places in the present. Although
Wrobel acknowledged the importance of these journeys, he cast the trail as yet another
piece of western heritage and regional identity. But the overland trail occupied one of if
not the central place in commemoration of the western past and the creation of a regional,
Western identity. In journeying to Oregon and California, overlanders traveled through
much of the land identified as "the West." In the late nineteenth century their routes,
graves, and other sites created a shared past for much of the western United States.

7
For studies of these movements see, T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace:
Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1981); Laurel Ulrich, The age of homespun: objects and
stories in the creation of an American myth (New York: Knopf : Distributed by Random
House, 2001); and David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
(Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001).
8
Phoebe S. Kropp, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); David M. Wrobel, Promised Lands:
Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West (Lawrence: University Press
of Kansas, 2002); Johnson, Roaring Camp; Rohrbough, Days of Gold; Daniel Glassberg,
“Making Places in California,” in Sense of History: the Place of the Past in American
Life, (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 165-202; and Frink,
"Pioneers and Patriots."
209

The past overlanders claimed to share was one of suffering and sacrifice. Wrobel
has noted that "hardship" emerged as a prominent theme of overland reminiscences.
Moreover, he has suggested that former overlanders based their claims to relevance and
significance to the present on their previous hardships and adventure; namely that they
had earned both a true western identity and claimed to develop the West through their
trials. Some overlanders did compete with each other over their past experiences,
suggesting that some journeys were more valuable than others. George Currey in his
1887 occasional address to the Oregon Historical Society, "every genuine old pioneer is
in honor bound to have had the hardest time on the plains of any other person living or
dead."
9
Nonetheless, memoirs of the trail should not be reduced to the reiteration of
"hardship" they can tell us much more about EuroAmericans, Indians, and the late
nineteenth century.
Overlanders considered themselves to be members of what they believed to be a
select subset of the American populace: men, women, and children who had helped to
pave the way for American settlement. There were, as Currey put it, "pioneers." Some
historians, including Clyde Milner, have attributed political motives to this identity.
According to Milner, a true pioneer was one who had endured Indian attacks. Thus, he
argued, Montana settlers constructed journeys that included those attacks in order to join
the pioneer cohort. The historian Michael Kammen and other scholars has suggested that
this shared pioneer identity developed amongst overlanders and other western settlers as

9
George B. Currey, "Occasional Address," in Reunion Oregon Pioneer Association.
Annual, Transactions of the Fifteenth Annual Reunion of the Oregon Pioneer Association
for 1887 (Portland, Ore.: Press of Geo. H. Himes, 1887), 39.
210

they shared stories and experiences of their journeys and the early years of settlement in
their new homes. Although Milner attributed political motives to the creation of this
shared community, this pioneer identity was not always overtly political. When Ellen
Waldo moved to Oregon in 1892 to care for her aunt she and her new neighbors bonded
by sharing stories of their journeys to the Pacific. Waldo entered these stories in her diary
as she introduced her new friends. One had come by sea in 1854 and endured a harrowing
shipwreck before her family safely reached Salem. Another arrived overland in 1847
from Iowa, an arduous journey during which she lost her mother and buried her on the
trail. Waldo's aunt, who, she explained had more money, had an easy time of it describing
the journey as an "extended picnic."
10

Although men, women, and children like Waldo's new neighbor who traveled to
Oregon and California by sea in the early days of the territory and state joined pioneer
societies and called themselves pioneers, pioneer identity was more closely aligned with
the journey across the overland trail. In 1901, Oregon Journalist Asahel Bush, who
arrived from Massachusetts by ship in 1850, told George H. Himes, the secretary of the
Oregon Historical Society, that it was "not natural" to label ship passengers like himself
with pioneers. With this statement, Bush gestured toward a shared sense of understanding
of a "pioneer" as one who had traveled overland. The term pioneer had its roots in a

10
Clyde A Milner, “The Shared Memory of Montana Pioneers,” Montana: The Magazine
of Western History 37, no. 1 (1987): 2–13; Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory :
the Transformation of Tradition in American Culture, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 1991),
219; Abner Sylvester Baker, "The Oregon Pioneer Tradition in the Nineteenth Century: A
Study of Recollection and Self-Definition," (PhD diss., University of Oregon, 1968), 6–7,
33–42; and Sarah Ellen Waldo, "Diary," volume 12, January 27, 1893, Barker-Edes-
Noyes Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts.
211

military term for foot soldiers that proceed ahead of the army. Moreover, in the American
context traveling westward across land rather than by ship was seen as being a more
iconic American experience. EuroAmericans characterized d overland migration, not
migration by sea, as the driving force behind national expansion. By being able to lay
claim to this true pioneer identity, overlanders occupied a special place in American
history and memory.
11

Yet, overland trail narratives not only articulated a specifically American identity,
in their reminiscences and memoirs as well as through collecting, creating and displaying
material artifacts, monuments, and visual culture, overlanders initiated a discussion about
broader concerns regarding the relationship between memory and history. Although
historians have lavished much attention on former overlanders' repetitive accounts of
hardships and Indian attacks, their commemorative production extends beyond such rote
iterations. Overlanders did not simply repeat such tropes verbatim; they made choices
about including them and sometimes put their own twist on the trail experiences. In the
process they weighed in on pressing issues of commemoration, archiving, and historical
memory.
Recovering these more individual voices furthers the project of pushing "memory
studies" beyond sociologist Maurice Halbwach's study of "collective memory" towards
an understanding of memory that acknowledges the divergences between individual and
collective memory while also attending to the different constituencies of memory: the

11
Asahel Bush to George H. Himes, April 1, 1901, Box 3, Oregon Historical Society
Archives, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland, Oregon.
212

interplay between producers and receivers as well as the recognition that multiple
traditions frequently shaped their pursuits. Scholars of memory have begun to explore
other realms of "remembrance" and "collected memories," terms that permit for the
existence of more individual memories that are recognized as distinct from the group but
also in conversation with it. The modern phenomenon of nostalgia was both a product of
and a formative force in elevating the importance of the individual self in this era. By
helping to establish temporal differences between each individual’s life experiences as
well as between the individual and other human beings, nostalgia contributed to the
modern phenomenon of creating an individualized self.
12
Overland reminiscences explore

12
This study therefore furthers the efforts of scholars to push memory studies beyond
predominantly politlical interpreations of uses of the past to examining the historical
specifities of cultural memory. On this point see, for example, Matt K Matsuda, The
memory of the modern (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Iwona Irwin-
Zarecka, Frames of remembrance : the dynamics of collective memory (New Brunswick
[N.J.]: Transaction Publishers, 1994); and Keith Tony Beutler, “The memory revolution
in America and memory of the American Revolution, 1790-1840,” (PhD diss.,
Washington University, St. Louis, 2005). While much of the scholarship on memory has
focused on how the most dominant members of a given culture constructed memory to
promote and enhance their social power, new work is drawing attention to people on "the
margins" and demonstrating the persistence of alternative memories that defied the
dominant framework. For recent achievements on this front in the analysis of Civil War
memory see, Barbara A. Gannon, The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the
Grand Army of the Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); and
James Alan Marten, Sing not War: the Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in
Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Other
scholars are pursuing the creation of memory at more local levels, exploring the
memories among mutliple communities and across multiple forms – oral, land and
monuments, as well as texts. Phoebe S. Kropp, California Vieja : Culture and Memory in
a Modern American Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Christine
DeLucia, “The Memory Frontier: Uncommon Pursuits of Past and Place in the Northeast
After King Philip’s War,” Journal of American History 98, no. 4 (March 1, 2012): 975–
997.
213

these individualized selves even as their writings fall under the larger rubric of trail
memoirs and reminiscences.
As mentioned previously, the commemoration of the overland trail at the turn of
the century illustrated a strong continuity with earlier commemorative practices. For
instance, in keeping with ideologies of the early and mid nineteenth century, overlanders
described their memories as embodied in their physical selves. John B. Colton, a member
of the Jayhawker Party that had nearly perished on their way to the California Gold
Fields in 1849, organized an annual, well-publicized reunion of his party each year. One
year, Colton asked a friend to send him a piece of sage from the plains to facilitate the
pioneers' memories. Such "fragrant remembrances," combined with collective process of
memory and retelling helped to fuel memory at the Jayhawker reunion. Overlanders were
also marked with unique remembrances of their overland experiences. Like Civil War
soldiers, many former overlanders bore the physical marks and scars of their journeys
across the plains. Margaret White Chambers declared that the scars of a burn she got in
preparing the first meal of the trip had "stamped" that evening "on her memory."
13
These
examples emphasize the importance of the senses and physical body to connecting with
the past experiences of the trail. In so doing, they suggest how overlanders became
embodied authorities of the trail experience.

13
John B Colton to Jim Baker December 18, 1907, Box 4, Jayhawker Collection, The
Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, Califrnia; and Margaret White Chambers,
Reminiscences, p26, Overland Journeys to the Pacific Collection, MSS 1508, Oregon
Historical Society Research Library, Portland, Oregon.
214

Notwithstanding these embodied memories, relics of the overland trail helped to
connect broader audiences with the experience of the journey west just as they had for
families at home who received missives from the trail. Handling letters and journals
marked with the dirt of the Humboldt Desert or water-stained from a "dip in the Platte"
helped to connect the paper to the journeys they described. This blurring between textual
record and artifact was also represented in the signatures that overlanders left as they
made their way across the continent. Just as during the years of the trail families had
searched for names of relatives who had gone before so now did some overlanders take
their wives and young children, perhaps born after the close of the overland trail, to look
for their signatures engraved decades earlier.
14

Just as signatures along the trail helped to commemorate journeys in the mid and
late nineteenth centuries so did some former overlanders create commemorative objects
of the trail like those they may have taken with them to remind them of previous homes.
In 1898 George Himes joined a quilting party of "Old Settlers" organized by his sister.
After gathering for a meal the group stitched their names, and perhaps their year of
arrival in a quilt.
15
With this act Himes and his party created a type of friendship quilt

14
On the link between holding diaries and feeling a proximity to the trail see, Alfred
Lambourne, The Old Journey: Reminiscences of Pioneer Days (Salt Lake City: Geo. Q.
Cannon & Sons Co., 1897), 20–4; and Margaret Elizabeth Irvin, "Covered Wagon Days,"
p10, Overland Journeys to the Pacific Collection, MSS 1508, Oregon Historical Society
Research Library, Portland. Oregon.
15
George H. Himes, Diary, August 23, 1898, George H. Himes Papers, 1852-1952, MSS
1462, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland, Oregon.
215

much like those overlanders folded into their wagons before leaving home for the far
West.
Yet, commemoration of the overland trail was also facilitated by a powerful new
tool, the railroad. As the railroads spread their iron bands across the continent they also
told stories of the travelers who had come before. Along the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa
Fe Railway that paralleled the Santa Fe Trail, railroad promoters aligned the experience
of the modern journey with the historic period of the route when traders, trappers and
mule train caravans crowded the landscape. Indians proved particularly important to the
tourism of western railroads. For instance in 1898 The Fred Harvey Company
commissioned Walter Hough of the Bureau of American ethnology to publish a pamphlet
on "The Moqui Snake Dance" to promote their route and provide to railroad tourists to
read as they steamed westward. Moreover, at railroad stations across the Southwest
passengers posed for photos with Indians and purchased basket, creating portable visual
and material tokens that they could take home a piece of the past they had seen on their
foray into the West. To the North, Olin D. Wheeler, the publicist and chief advertising
executive of the Northern Pacific Railway, spent four years accompanied by a band of
photographers exploring the Lewis and Clark trail in order to mark and record their
camps and other sites of historical interest along the Northern Pacific's route.
16
The

16
Hal K Rothman, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West
(Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1998), 71. Shelby J. Tisdale, “Railroads,
Tourism, and Native Americans in the Greater Southwest,” Journal of the Southwest 38,
no. 4 (December 1, 1996): 433–462; and Olin D Wheeler and Northern Pacific Railroad
Company, Indianland and wonderland: once roamed by the savage Indian and the
shaggy buffalo, now dotted by ranches, towns and cities and cropped by countless flocks
and herds : a region of wonderful phenomena, reached by the Northern Pacific Railroad
216

overland trail provided the Central and Union Pacific Railroads, the first transcontinental
railway, with a similar built-in touristic and historic value. Railroad travel across the
continent initiated a conversation between railroad companies, passengers, some of
whom were former overlanders, and their audiences about the contrast between the past
and the present.
17

The logic of mid-nineteenth-century westward expansion dictated that the railroad
would supplant the wagon trains. Thus for many the passing of the Pacific Railroad Act
in 1862 marked the imminent demise of the overland trail and a new age of civilization
for the far West. But in railroad advertising and in actual life, overland trail experiences
made cross-plains railroad travel an exercise in nostalgia. In so doing, the railroad helped
to perpetuate memories of the overland trail and allow even greater numbers of
EuroAmericans access to this experience.
18

(St. Paul: Chas. S. Fee, General Passenger and Ticket Agent, Northern Pacific Railroad,
1894).
17
This tourism provided one way to combat anxiety about the "closing of the frontier."
Tourists believed that sojourns to distant places and encounters with exotic others could
serve as a substitute for the frontier experience. See, for example, James R. Grossman,
ed., The Frontier in American Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1994).
18
This was a modernity, a symbol of progress, that at the same time the literature argued
that it irrevocably transformed the landscape and the contours of the nation, also provided
a vehicle and a window into the past. Historians of trail tourism have made much of
travel through the west, and tourism in general, as an entree into the past, but for the
overland trail it was just as much the actual act of traveling as it was viewing particular
sites that made the past, present, and the possibilities of the future, so prescient.
217

Figure 8. John Gast, American Progress, 1872. Published by George A. Crofutt. (Courtesy, Prints and
Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09855.)

When historians depict nineteenth-century American ideas of progress they most
frequently employ the above image by John Gast. George A. Crofutt, a prolific publisher
and writer of tourist literature, commissioned the image for a transcontinental railroad
guide. In the image Gast depicts the historical progression of American civilization
across the continent. First the Indians and the buffalo moved west followed by the
emigrant wagon trains and California Argonauts, who are then succeeded by the modern
technology of the transcontinental railroad. In keeping with modern ideas of history, Gast
marked successive historical periods on the plains. Nonetheless, at the same time that his
image depicted the modern idea of historical rupture and difference, by visually depicting
218

all of these groups in the same frame American Progress also fostered a nostalgic
connection with the past.
19

The transcontinental railroad similarly became a vehicle of nostalgia. The
overland trail provided the Central and Union Pacific Railroads, the two companies that
composed the transcontinental railroad, with a ready-made contrast to the speeding,
gleaming modernity of the steam-powered railroad. Railroad promoters compared the
modern method of passenger car travel to the antiquated wagon trains in order to make
their railroads seem better than ever. Although in actual operation the speed and safety of
railroads were often at cross-purposes, comparisons to wagon trains helped railroads to
argue that they had both in great supply. Railroad brochures and guides reminded
passengers that the "tiresomeness" of railroad travel was nothing to that of the wagon
trains that had moved at a "snail's pace." One passenger took this comparison to heart
declaring, "I hardly think I will complain of the tiresome way, when these people were
months on the same road, which the iron horse now rushes over in so short a time."
20

Even railroad accidents paled in comparison to the dangers of violent "savages" and
stretches of desert with little water or grass that had threatened, and then sealed, the fate
of many unfortunate would-be emigrants. This "strange contrast" of wagon and railroad
travel provided passengers with a reminder of how far the West and the country had

19
For an analysis of Gast as well as an upholding of this image as an exemplary
encapsulation of the American ideology of progress see, Stephanson, Manifest Destiny,
66–7. Gast's image adorns the front cover of Stephanson book as it does many books on
nineteenth-century American expansion.
20
S. F. P. Stepping Westward: Sketches of Travel, 15, Rare Books Division, New York
Public Library, New York, New York.
219

come since the days of the "old overland trail."
21
The train trip did inspire more
EuroAmericans to read about the experience, and railroad promoters helped to make sure
that they would. A review of one overland reminiscence in the Southern Pacific's Sunset
Magazine declared, "In these days of palatial cross continental travel. . .reminiscences of
pioneer hardships have a peculiar charm."
22
But the railroads declared that thinking
about the overland trail did more than just historicize cross-continental plains travel by
rail. What the railroads were selling, essentially, was the ability of the train to promote a
connection with the past.
Overlanders reiterated this idea of the strange contrast between railroad travel
and the cross-plains wagon travel but they also drew firm lines between the experiences
of railroad passengers and their earlier trips via wagon train. Ensconced in the relative
comfort of Pullman cars with a "good bed" and "plenty to eat," as Mrs. J. T. Gowdy

21
On the promotion of western tourism in this period, and the importance of the railroad
to bringing wealthy travelers west see, Earl Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West : the
Tourist in Western America (Lincoln, Neb.,: University of Nebraska Press, 1990);
Marguerite S Shaffer, “‘See America First’: Re-Envisioning Nation and Region through
Western Tourism,” The Pacific Historical Review 65, no. 4 (1996): 559–581; and Hyde,
An American Vision. Wrobel has also recognized the frequent comparisons between
railroad travel and that of "wagon days," Wrobel, Promised Lands, 104–7.
22
In a scrapbook on family history Sarah Aram pasted this short notice of the publication
of her father's life history in Sunset Magazine: Scrapbook, Aram Family Papers The
Henry E Huntington Library, San Marino, California. The railroad helped to create
interest in the overland trail and provided a captive audience for these sites and stories.
Train travelers also had the opportunity to pick up literature as well as guidebooks
describing and memorializing the sacrifices and exploits of the pioneers to read on the
train such as the railroad edition of C. F. McGlashan's History of the Donner Party I
know this from C. F. McGlashan to Eliza Poor Donner Houghton. September 13 1880,
Box 2, Papers of Sherman Otis Houghton, 1828-1914, The Henry E. Huntington Library.
San Marino, California.
220

described it in 1906, passengers had never been compelled as emigrants like John B.
Colton had been to "drink any alkali." Alkali was short for alkaline water, a bitter
substance that some emigrants drank out of necessity.
23
Overlanders had been, in the
words of Alfred Lambourne, "partakers" of the journey while a railroad passenger was
simply a "beholder of the scenery." With this distinction Lambourne articulated what
historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch has described as the modern transformation of railroad
travel. The railroad not only allowed travelers to speed across the plains, it also removed
them from the environment that had made the journey once so difficult and thus so
memorable. As Lambourne put it, the journey "must now be read; it cannot be
experienced."
24

Lambourne and other overlanders had a stake in drawing these strong lines
between the journey by rail and the journey by wagon across the plains. They wanted to
make sure that nostalgia for the overland trail did not become equated with experience.

23
Anna Eliza Kemp Gowdy, ""Crossing the Plains Personal Recollections of the Journey
to Oregon in 1852," pp. 14–5, Rosenstock Collection, Autry Library Collection, Autry
National Center, Los Angeles, California; and John B. Colton to William L. Manly, 6
December 1898, Box 5, Jayhawker Collection, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San
Marino, California.
24
Alfred Lambourne, The Old Journey, 30, "Preface" (np). On the railroad as causing
travelers' loss of sensory engagement with the landscape see, Wolfgang Schivelbusch,
The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century
(Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 1986), 54–6. This type of distinction,
that one can not understand the journey unless they had experienced it was a line drawn
at the time as travel as well. Lambourne may not have been aware of it, but he was
repeating an old adage of the trail that had been around since wagon trains first started
rolling across the great plains – that those who did not travel could not understand the
journey through reading about it. Lines that had once separated travelers from their
contemporaries now separated them from the later generations. The trail was certainly
historic.
221

By drawing these boundaries they protected their own claim to participation in a unique
American historic event.
Yet even as overlanders attempted to distinguish between the present and the past,
some acknowledged an interplay between the railroad journey and their past experience.
The rail experience itself altered some overlanders' perceptions of earlier trips across the
plains. Former emigrant C. H. Crawford "never felt any alarm" about this journey across
the plains in 1851 until he made the trip by rail. Watching the trail from his car window,
"the past loomed up" with its attendant dangers of "savages, mosquitoes, black gnats, and
alkali dust." Comforts of the railcar present made the pedestrian hardships of the past
seem greater than they had formerly appeared. What had at the time seemed a path to a
better life or a great adventure now made Crawford "shudder."
25

Moreover, former overlanders facilitated the ability of train passengers to access
the past experience of overland travel. Overlanders' memories of the journey served as a
type of historic guide for their fellow passengers. Attempting to make the simple journey
across the plains, these men and women became authorities of an earlier, past experience.
One passenger, finding it difficult to imagine the "toil, fatigue and dreary monotony" that
travelers had endured before the completion of the railroad initiated a conversation with
two ladies on the train that made this same journey in 1852. The revelation that the train

25
Charles Howard Crawford, Scenes of earlier days in crossing the plains to Oregon and
experiences of western life. (Petaluma, Cal.: J.T. Studdert, Book and Job Printer, 1898),
2.
222

now passed over in one day what had taken their new acquaintances more than a month
in 1852, helped to make the past, "seem more real."
26

But even as the presence of overlanders made the overland trail seem more real, it
did not make passengers equate railroad journeys with wagon train travel. On the
contrary, the one reinforced the entirely different experience of the other. Railroad
travelers who had not crossed the plains by rail could never tap into an earlier experience
of hardship by way of comparison (of time or experience). Nonetheless, at the outset of
their journeys, some passengers couched their trips as a means to realize dreams of
western travel long deferred. A Brooklyn merchant who had yearned to join the rush to
California as a teenager found himself on a California-bound train at the age of forty,
finally satisfying, "the longings of my youth."
27
A passenger from Providence opened his
railroad diary with a similar description of how he had "often wished. . .I could make the
journey across the plains. . .in the regular emigrant style with trains."
28
Once on the
plains, however, the passenger was thankful for the modern comforts of the railroad and
rejoiced that he had never undertaken the journey by wagon. Instead of fulfilling his
youthful desire to travel in "emigrant style" he discovered that he very much appreciated

26
I J Baldwin, Diary, 1873," p25, I. J. Baldwin Collection, The Colorado Historical
Society, Denver, Colorado. [not sure where seem more real is from but got first quote]
27
Anonymous, Diary, 1872, Leopold Bierwirth Collection, New York Historical Society,
New York, New York. , date not known. Elizha Atkins was a director of the Union
Pacific Railroad and this diary may have been written by his wife, Mary E Freeman
Atkins.
28
I J Baldwin, Diary, 1873," pp.31–2, I. J. Baldwin Collection, The Colorado Historical
Society, Denver, Colorado.
223

the modern comforts of the railroad. He made peace with his earlier desire to undertake
the overland journey, although perhaps not in the way he expected.
The power of imagination nonetheless helped some railroad passengers to
envision that they approximated the experiences of earlier pioneers. Charles McGlashan,
the author of the History of the Donner Party (1879), held in his mind the simultaneity of
his own experience and what he imagined that of Eliza Donner had been. As he traveled
eastward by rail, McGlashan carried one of her recent letters in his pocket and allowed
his thoughts to frequently turn to her as he "crossed the old Emigrant road." In a letter he
wrote to Eliza from a stopping point on his journey, he asserted that along the route
"there were many things that your childish eyes must have gazed at in wonderment, just
as I gazed at them this week."
29

Railroad passengers like McGlashan who had a personal connection to former
overlanders found it easier to describe their journey as approximating that of their
acquaintances. Relatives of former overlanders may have perhaps felt an even stronger
ability to approximate the earlier overland journeys of their relatives. After emerging
onto the Great Plains in her railroad car, Kate Ball Powers declared, "I understand better
what [my father] meant by the endless prairie." One imagines that she had heard the
phrase often, but seeing was understanding. The train carried her west through space but
also, Powers imagined, into the past of her father's earlier experience. Moreover, by

29
C. F. McGlashan to Eliza Donner Houghton, August 18, 1898 , Box 2, Papers of
Sherman Otis Houghton, 1828-1914, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino,
California. On tourists tracing the routes of former explorers as a form of play acting that
allowed them to lay claim to this earlier experience as they memorialized it see, Kropp,
California Vieja, 100–2.
224

focusing on the spatial similarity of her journey and her father's, rather than the distance
of years separating the two, she helped them to seem closer than they were. Powers could
not literally travel back in time, but she aligned her journey with her father’s as closely as
space as well as time would permit, writing parenthetically that it was “Strange that I
should have started on my trip across the plains 57 years after father and. . .on his 97[th]
birthday."
30
Through thinking of her father Powers historicized her westward trip and in
so doing rendered it more meaningful.
The thought of former overlanders riding the rails not only opened a window onto
the past, but also inspired Americans to embrace what had become modern: themselves
and the nation. For EuroAmericans at the turn of the century overlanders not only
represented past achievement, but also made palpable national and individual progress. In
1903, James Brier, who as a young child had endured the traumatic journey of the
Jayhawker Party through Death Valley, wrote to Jayhawker John B. Colton
congratulating him "on being able to give the present day such history and compare the
present mode of travel." Referring to Colton's recent "whirlwind" trip across the west by
the "iron-trail," Brier concluded, "one wonders while looking backward, how people
adapt themselves to such changes."
31
The idea of Colton and other former overlanders
riding the rails helped to portray EuroAmericans as able to not only exist but flourish in

30
Kate Ball Powers, "Trip To California," MSS 1741; John Ball Papers; 20th Century
Western & Mormon Manuscripts; L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee
Library, Brigham Young University.
31
James M Brier to John B Colton, February 25, 1908, Box 6, Jayhawker Collection, The
Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
225

distinctive historical epochs. These epochs were of course not so distinct as Brier
described them. Colton quite possibly rode the rails in the east long before he ever
traveled by wagon across the plains. Nonetheless, the idea of overlanders seamlessly
transitioning from wagons to Pullman cars helped to order the historical evolution of the
individual and the nation. At the same time, this construction provided a reassuring
example of human and social progress, a comforting vision of modernity that was not a
calamitous disruption of life or a violent split from the past but rather a transition easily
achieved.
EuroAmericans were comfortable with the type of equivocation that allowed Brier
to make a decisive statement about Colton's unambiguous transition from wagon to
railroad travel. For Brier, the detail that railroads existed before the trail was less
important than the contrast Colton's journey by wagon and rail created in Brier's mind. So
too did railroad passengers embrace fantastical stories of overland travel. Charles Allen
Sumner recorded the response of a fellow passenger to tales woven by former California
pioneers sitting near them, "'It don't make any difference whether their yarns are true in
every particular or not---they spin good on the homestretch.'"
32
Just as for Brier the
contrast between rail and wagon, not the details of it, were important so too were the
"yarns" rather than the particulars the important takeaway for these passengers.
But even as Sumner recorded this exchange, the notion of "historical accuracy"
was changing. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the formation of the

32
Charles A Sumner, ’Cross the plains. The overland trip. A narrative lecture (San
Francisco: Bacon, 1876), 16.
226

first professional historian organization—the American Historical Association was
founded in 1884 and held its first meeting at Chicago's World Fair in 1893—and what
some have described as the rise of the historical profession.
33
Professional historians, as
noted earlier, upheld the ideal of "objectivity." This shift not only drew lines around
historical methodology but also who could practice history. Increasingly, women became
seen as incapable of producing history. Men, educated primarily in east coast institutions,
were designed to be the new custodians of history. Their modern methods of evidence
analysis as well as collection of artifacts and source material evolved in parallel to the
collection and dissemination of stories of the overland trail.
Some of these professional historians took up the topic of the overland trail. In his
frequently cited address on the "Significance of the Frontier" at the 1893 meeting of the
American Historical Association in Chicago, historian Frederick Jackson Turner asked
his audience to conjure up those ancestors far and near: "Stand at Cumberland gap and
watch the procession of civilization. . .Stand at South Pass in the Rockies a century later
and see the same procession."
34
Although Turner has received the most attention from
historians, he was part of a cluster of new professional historians who touted the
accomplishments of overlanders. Professor Frederick G. Young of the University of

33
On the rise of the historical profession in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries and the importance of objectivity see, Novick, That Noble Dream.
34
John Mack Faragher, ed., Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: The Significance of the
Frontier in American History and Other Essays (New York: Holt, 1994), 39. Although
Turner's "frontier thesis" is the most frequently cited discussion of significance of
westward expansion to late nineteenth-century EuroAmericans, his work was just one
thread of a widespread discussion of the importance of the frontier experience.
227

Oregon made a similar claim to Turner in 1900, declaring the Oregon Trail to be "the
most representative American achievement."
35

That same year Young, who dedicated much of his career to promoting Oregon
history and particularly that of the Oregon Trail, traveled the route by bicycle with his
colleague Joseph Schafer. The men couched their journey as a means to collect
reminiscences from settlers along the route as well as to mark sites of the "Old Oregon
Trail." Even as they portrayed their journey as a simple data-collecting mission, they
began their travels in the East and then headed west. Perhaps purposefully Young and
Schafer not only went out to collect data on the overlanders but also followed in their
westward steps. Young's hope of finding settlers to tell their stories of the journey proved
fruitless, but even if he had found emigrants with stories it is unlikely that they would
have provided him with the "facts" he claimed to desire.
Just as Young's work of professional history lapsed into subjectivity so did works
on the trail by overlanders and other amateur historians straddle the line between history
and memory. In their prefaces, former overlanders frequently emphasized that they had
published their personal recollections only at the earnest requests of family and friends.
This was true, the vast majority of emigrants wrote their accounts in response to
solicitations from family, friends, and historical societies and pioneer organizations. But
it was also a convention. Through emphasizing that they had only written in response to
these “earnest solicitations" memoirists described their reluctance to publish as stemming

35
Frederick A. Schafer, With Bicycles over the Old Oregon Trail in 1900: the Diaries of
Prof. Frederic G. Young & Dr. Joseph Schafer (San Diego: F.A. Schafer, 1992), 33.
228

from humble modesty.
36
In so doing they identified their accounts with a genre of
autobiography and memoir wherein ordinary individuals buttressed claims for
authenticity and modesty through claiming that they had written only at the behest of
others. Moreover, some of these "humble" writers made claims for a slightly larger
audience. As in the case of one memoirist who dedicated his book "To the pioneers they
will restore the fast fading recollections of events in which their experiences were to a
large extent very similar to my own."
37
In so doing the author circumscribed the audience
and thus the presumed significance of his work at the same time he identified his market.
Still other overlanders made specific claims for their books as works of history. In
the preface to his 1904 account E L Gallatin declared:
When one writes a history of one's own life, it is supposed that that one must have
something of more than ordinary interest to relate or must through some public
capacity belong to History. This is not necessary, however, if the History is not
forced upon the public. Then it is private property as any other effects that one
may leave behind. I, for one, would be very happy to have a brief history of the
lives of my own father and mother and of their parents but they left nothing of
genealogy that can be traced even one generation.
38

Even more overlanders made claims for their memoirs as works of History (even
when they did not always capitalize the word). Forty years after the fact, the Foster

36
For these claims to modesty as an effort to claim authenticity see, Ann Fabian,
"Amateur Authorship," in The Industrial Book, 1840-1880, ed., Scott E. Casper et al
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 407–15.
37
David Augustus Shaw, Eldorado; or, California as Seen by a Pioneer, 1850-1900
(B.R. Baumgardt, 1900), Preface.
38
E. L. Gallatin, What Life Has Taught Me (Denver, Colo: Jno. Frederic, printer, 1900),
2.
229

family printed and bound the story of their family's 1849 overland trek as a Christmas gift
for their children and grandchildren. In doing so they claimed to provide their
descendants with the "most interesting of histories, of their Grandparents who had
sacrificed and endured hardship to make it possible for their descendants to enjoy their
"lovely California homes." In making the journey and settling California, they had, they
declared helped to make the "world better."
39
C. H. Crawford made a similarly expansive
claim for his journey and life story. Crawford explained that his friends convinced him
that his memoir was worthy of publication because it was an "actual history that helps to
tell about the settlement of the great west" as opposed to an autobiography, which he
thought an "egotistical" exercise.
40

In some cases, the identification of these overland accounts as history meant that
they required someone with a special skill set to produce them. In the late nineteenth
century, family history was beginning to take on an aura of professionalization even as it
remained amateurish. In the case of the Aram family, one of the earliest overland arrivals
in California, it was a New York cousin who compiled both the family genealogies as
well as edited Joseph Aram’s reminiscences of his role as leader of the overland party.
The cousin, who was involved locally with his Oneida county historical society and had

39
The didactic lesson of this memoir was that the grandchildren should also "strive to
make the world better for your living in it, as they have." Roxana Cheney Foster, "The
Foster Family: California Pioneers of 1849, 1889," Dedication, The Henry E. Huntington
Library, San Marino, California.
40
Crawford, Scenes of earlier days, Preface.
230

published a number of papers on local history, was chosen because, in the minds of
Aram's niece he was "the only one of the family living now who could do so."
41

So did other family chroniclers aspire to follow a more rigorous historical
method. When Calista Willard Scott, a granddaughter of Alexander H. Willard who
traveled with Lewis and Clark, became interested in family history she followed the
principles of historical method suggested by professional historians. She declared her task
as making herself able to provide "inquiring parties" with "authentic information I
became so much impressed with the importance of families keeping records and data. .
.of generations passing away, that I felt an inspiration to spend the next few years
collecting all the information possible from my own family and pioneers left of those
times."
42

Even as the examples of Scott and Aram served to link family and overland
history with the interests of professional methodologies and standards other accounts
drew them apart. Helen McCowen Carpenter supplemented her reminiscence with that of
her brother who had traveled the trail three years before her company crossed the plains. .
A portion of her diary had been burned in a house fire years before. Instead of omitting
that section, Carpenter elected to quote from her brother's diary. Her brother had not
traveled with her party, but rather made the trip three years previously. Carpenter

41
Elizabeth Hall to Sarah (Aram) Cool, February 3, 1909, Aram Family Papers, The
Henry E. Huntington Library. San Marino, California. Col James Thompkins Watson
gave at least one address to the local Oneida County Historical Society.
42
Calista Willard Scott to Eliza Poor Donner Houghton, May 20, 1896, Box 1, Papers of
Eliza Poor Donner Houghton, 1820-1978, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino.
California.
231

included her brother's account and added some of her own recollections as "notes of
incidents, as places described may bring to mind."
43
Carpenter's decision suggests the
extent to which the history of the trail was at once collective and familial. Through this
elevation of the importance of memory versus the actual "facts" of the overland
experience, helped to elevate the historical authority of overlanders who, while they
could not share their actual journeys with late nineteenth-century EuroAmericans, to
share their memories, and thus create new memories of these journeys in their respective
audiences.
Former overlanders gave repeated voice to this idea of lived historical authority.
In dedicating her 1906 memoir Mrs. J. T. Gowdy wrote, "there may be inaccuracies. .
.but it is all as it seems to me."
44
William Green Murphy acknowledged a similar gap
between his recollections of his time trapped in Sierra Nevada and the minutiae of that
experience. He told Eliza Donner Houghton that sometimes when preparing his lectures
on his experiences he "refused to refresh my memory as to the song that was sung, or the
quotation to be verified - preferring to state it as it has remained with me for so many
years."
45
So too did Nancy Bogart tell Oregon journalist Frederick Lockley,

43
Helen McCowen Carpenter, Diary, p40, Catalog Entry Description, California State
Library, Sacramento, California, http://catalog.library.ca.gov.
44
Anna Eliza Kemp Gowdy, ""Crossing the Plains Personal Recollections of the Journey
to Oregon in 1852," pp. 14–5, Rosenstock Collection, Autry Library Collection, Autry
National Center, Los Angeles, California.
45
William Green Murphy to Eliza Poor Donner Houghton, May 28, 1896, Box 2, Papers
of Eliza Poor Donner Houghton, 1820-1978, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino.
California. Murphy continued, "Of course, as to history of facts relating ot the essence of
hte narrative, I shall always inform myself to the utmost.'"
232

I've often been asked if we did not suffer with fear in those days but I've said no,
we were not old enough and did not have sense enough to realize our danger we
just had the time of our lives; but since I've grown older and could realize the
danger and feelings of the mothers, I often wonder how they really lived through
it all and retained their reason.
46

With this statement Bogart emphasized the mutability of her memory of the trail. In so
doing all three of these overlanders shifted attention from their actual experience to the
memory of the journey, as it existed in the late nineteenth century. In so doing, they
underscored that they were sharing recollections, not experiences. Moreover, they
suggested that value of their recollections was in perpetuating their memories, not some
sort of "detached" and unchaning history. In so doing, they suggested that the years
between their overland experiences and the creation of their recollections enriched and
strengthened rather than threatened to undermine, the cultural value of their texts and
speeches.
This was a commemorative authority that overlanders were often unwilling to
concede to outsiders, be they easterners or professional historians. Former overlander
John Minto thanked Professor Frederic G. Young for a recent paper on Oregon history.
Minto declared that it should "have extensive circulation East of the Rockies" where it
would educate easterners on the topic of Oregon settlement. But, he continued, "I am
inclined to think you will have to meet the charge of 'too much red in the bush' from
eastern critics who were born too far away from the time and sene [sic] of glorious

46
Nancy Hembree Bogart, "Reminiscences of journey across the plains in 1843 with Dr.
Marcus Whitman’s caravan and early life in Oregon," p2, Box14, Frederick E. Lockley
Collection, 1849-1949, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
233

action." According to Minto, easterners were too far removed from these events and
places in order to be able to recognize the veracity of westerners' accounts. First-hand
experience or at least proximity to these scenes was necessary to understanding them.
47

While Minto drew a regional divide, other former overlanders claimed the divide
lay between those who had experienced the journey and those who had not. In 1915 Eliza
Poor Donner Houghton wrote to John B. Colton declaring that the history of the trail
could never be written by professional historians. As one she put it, "conditions of the
country were so unique that only those who experienced them, can describe them, I often
pity the would be historian who whets up his imagination, and give the public a
sensational rehearsal of California's Early day thrills, which has not even a foundation
stone correctly laid."
48
In this formulation, historical authenticity depended not on
objectivity but rather subjectivity. In giving voice to these promotions they made pioneer
identity the authority of history writing.
These voiced limitations of historical authority grew even more stringent in
relationship to the story of the Donner and Jayhawker Party, two of the most traumatic
events (for EuroAmericans) of the trail experience. John Groscup of the Jayhawker Party
expressed a similar sentiment to Houghton declaring that nothing can "make strangers
feel and see what wee [sic] past threw [sic]." With "the tears are running down my face
while I am Penning [sic] these lines to show to our children what we have Past threw

47
John Minto to Prof F G Young, May 3, 1901, Box 1, John Minto Papers, MSS 752,
Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland, Oregon.
48
Eliza Poor Donner Houghton to John B. Colton, May 2, 1915, Jayhawker Collection,
The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
234

[sic]."
49
Even as he asserted the impossibility of sharing his experiences with strangers,
Groscup reaffirmed his commitment to trying to share them with his children. In so
doing, he helped to draw lines around who could understand these deeply felt
experiences.
50

So too did the children of overlanders lay claim to a unique ability to inherit the
overland experience, emotional trauma and all. Calista Willard Scott declared that the
50th anniversary of the Donner Party's departure California in 1846 made her "shed
tears" as she had "seldom ever done. . .before." Writing to Eliza Donner Houghton just a
few days after the commemoration, Scott explained her emotional response to the
account of the anniversary in the Los Angeles Times as a result of awakening "slumbering
half forgotten memories of. . .listening to the pioneers of 48 [and] 49,. . .relating their
pleasures and hardships on that long journey across the plains." Scott recalled sitting at
"her mother's knee" while her parents and their guests talked of their overland journeys.
51

49
John Groscup to John Colton January 25, 1905, JA 501, Box 4, Jayhawker Collection,
The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. The contrast between pre and
post-railroad travel also provided pithy comparisons for newspaper articles such as one
headline, "Left Independence on Pony; Back on Train" celebrating the return of a woman
for the "Old Plainsmen's Reunion" who had ridden across the Plains as an 8-year-old in
1853. Jayhawker Scrapbook Volume 6, Jayhawker Collection, The Henry E. Huntington
Library, San Marino, California.
50
While the material in this chapter currently privilegse the story of the Donner and
Jayhawker Parties over other traumatic events, examining other events will greatly enrich
this analysis. The event that became known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre suggets
an especially fruitful avenue of research.
51
Calista Willard Scott to Eliza Poor Donner Houghton, May 20, 1896, Box 1, Papers of
Eliza Poor Donner Houghton, 1820-1978, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino.
California. But not all former overlanders shared their stories with their children. Henry
Doty of the Jayhawkers told T. S. Palmer that his father rarely, if ever, spoke about the
235

Just as overlanders' "grandmother's stories" had made Indian threats real before
overlanders ever started across the plains, so had Scott's time at "her mother's knee" show
history as something felt. Thus even as C. F. McGlashan, the author of a history of the
Donner Party, described himself to Eliza as a "plain, stoical historian" in an attempt to
win her confidence, Scott cited proximity as a buttress to her historical authority."
52

To Houghton and other former overlanders an affective and emotional connection
was the hallmark of authenticity. Thus, even as these overlanders laid to claim to being
part of and writing "History," they also declared that their individual and collective
histories belonged to themselves, their families, and pioneer societies, not some broader,
amorphous and possibly critical public, nor to the domain of burgeoning professional
historians. These claims were no doubt due in part to efforts to maintain their own
historical and social relevance. Yet, in doing so, overlanders gave voice to an
understanding of history very different than the "objectivity" currently in vogue among
professional historians. By questioning who had the right to tell their stories, particularly
the dark stories of the Donner and Jayhawker Parties, overlanders gave voice to the idea
that the traumas endured which had forged their identities were too deeply felt to ever be

tragedy. Henry Doty to T. S. Palmer, p87, T. S. Palmer Papers, The Henry E. Huntington
Library, San Marino, California.
52
C. F. McGlashan to Mrs. S. O Houghton, April 6, 1879, Box 1, Papers of Sherman Otis
Houghton, 1828-1914, The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino. California.
McGlashan was a journalist but he was not a professionally trained historian and did not
complete any higher education.
236

properly treated by outside historical observers. Moreover, these were traumas that
existed largely apart from any recognition of the trauma and pain of indigenous peoples.
53

Indians, however, were at the center of many overland reminiscences. Perhaps the
most oft-cited feature of these narratives are their descriptions of "Indian attacks."
Fabricated and embellished accounts of "Indian attacks" were also common among
overlanders during the years of trail travel. During the years of trail travel, rumors of
Indian attacks scratched onto buffalo skulls or recounted around campfires after a hard
day's journey were regarded by many as truth because they confirmed unquestioned
expectations of Indian violence.
54
The passing of time did little to dilute, and possibly
intensified, these fears. And the absence of evidence could easily become the evidence of
absence. Thus could late nineteenth-century writers like Society of California Pioneers of
New England secretary Nichols Ball casually refer to those early days when “trains of
California Pioneers traversed these wide plains in imminent peril from roving Indians,
who watched with stealthy cunning to kill the emigrant and his helpless family for the
treasures of their wagon.”
55

53
On Native American and American history as a story of trauma and pain see, Ned
Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).
54
See, for example, Glenda Riley, “The Specter of a Savage: Rumors and Alarmism on
the Overland Trail,” The Western Historical Quarterly 15, no. 4 (October 1, 1984): 427–
444.
55
Nicholas Ball, The Pioneers of ’49: A History of the Excursion of the Society of
California Pioneers of New England, from Boston to the Leading Cities of the Golden
State, April 10-May 17,1890 (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1891), 16.
237

This identification of the overland journey with Indian attacks augmented claims
to an authentic frontier experience. But they ironically undermined such claims at the
same time. Because Indian attacks were such a stock feature of overland accounts, some
memoirists felt compelled to include them in their recollections to meet reader's
expectations, and perhaps their own.
56
In some sense, an overland account that did not
mention Indians, or, especially, violent Indians, would have appeared less than authentic
and thus the author less authoritative (though both the account and the author would have
been more so). As historian Clyde Milner has shown, tales of encounters with murderous
Indians on the overland journey to Montana helped to create a turn-of-the-century shared
sense of experience and community among these pioneers. Milner suggests that Montana
pioneers made Indians "appear" and "disappear" from their memoirs at will in order to
transform their daily journals "into an example of pioneer history."
57
To claim authority,
therefore, overlanders fabricated and exaggerated their experiences as expectation
dictated.
Evidence suggests that memoirists of the overland trail felt a similar compulsion.
In his magisterial account of the overland trail, the historian John Unruh revealed the
fallacies of overlanders' recollections of Indian scalpings, attacks, and massacres,
portrayals that shaped public memory of the trail well into the twentieth century, and
helped to deflect attention from individual as well as state-sponsored EuroAmerican

56
On the need to add or embellish certain experiences to claim "Pioneerhood" see James
W. Feldman, “Pioneer Memory: Retrospective Views of the Early Overland Trail,”
(Bachelor's thesis, Amherst College, 1993).
57
Milner, “The Shared Memory of Montana Pioneers.”
238

violence against indigenous peoples. Former overlanders however, did not simply make
these things up for racially and politically motivated reasons. In the late nineteenth
century, the cultural script read that overlanders would encounter violent Indians. And so
many did, in second or third hand tales that they reproduced and embellished in their
written recollections. This collective refashioning, however, does not obviate the more
individual as well as familial methods overlanders used to craft their reminiscences. As
noted earlier, historians and theorists of memory have begun to rethink the power and
dominance of "collective memory." In so doing, point a direction beyond the idea that all
overlanders had explicitly political, racial motives in creating their reminiscences. Former
overlanders did demonstrate a tendency to exaggerate and fabricate stories of indigenous
violence, and they had real consequences for interpretations of American history and the
perception of indigenous people.
Yet, overlanders were not the sole possessors of memories of the overland trail. In
her 1883 autobiography, the Paiute leader Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins described the
violence emigrants and their wagon trains brought to her homeland. Hopkins described
how their coming made her and her people so fearful that even a puff of wind blowing
dust through the valley created fear that the white people had come. Hopkins' narrative
was a printed version of the lectures she was giving across the Northeast in an effort to
raise awareness among EuroAmericans of the plight of her people. While Hopkins
directly indicted individual emigrants and their wagon trains, in A Century of Dishonor
(1881) Helen Hunt Jackson blamed the government for their crimes against Native
Americans. Drawing on reports of Indian agents and army leaders, Jackson linked
239

violence along the trail between emigrants and Indians to the failure of the federal
government to supply Indians such as the Cheyenne and Pawnee with their rightful
annuities. These two accounts describe two radically different interpretations of emigrant
responsibility.
58
Hunt admittedly wrote to inspire the government to change its policies
while Hopkins envisioned her audience to be middle-class EuroAmericans. These
different approaches are indicative of the multiple interpretations of trail memory and
history at the turn of the century. This is a story that cannot be relegated to one
constituency or one voice but is rather one deeply embedded in the multiracial and
multicultural history of the United States.

58
Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Life among the Piutes, their wrong and claims. (Boston:
For sale by Cupples, Upham, 1976), 6–15; and Helen Hunt Jackson, A century of
dishonor; a sketch of the United States government’s dealings with some of the Indian
tribes; (New York: Harper & Bros., 1881), 66–87.
240

Bibliography

I. Archival and Manuscript Sources

Autry Library, Autry National Center, Los Angeles, California

Rosenstock Collection.

American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts

Burr, David Auguste. Papers.

Grant-Burr Family Papers.

Misc. Mss. "H."

Mayo, A. D. Western Emigration and Western Character.

Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, California

Lorton, William B. Papers.

McKinstry, George. Papers on the History of California, 1846-1865.

Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

Adams, B. F. Papers.

Castleman, P. F. Diary.

Dorsey, Thomas. Diary.

Jordan, David. Journal.

Rothwell, William Renfro. Papers.

Pixley, Agur Correspondence.

Tiffany, P. C. “Diaries.”

Van Dorn. T. J. Diary.

Braun Research Library, Autry National Center, Los Angeles, California
241

Eliot. Robert. Journal.
Loomis, Charles O. Memoranda.
California Historical Society, San Francisco, California
Call, Asa Cyrus. Diary.
Clackamas County Family History Society, Oregon City, Oregon
Ringo Family File.
The Colorado Historical Society, Denver, Colorado
Alvard, Mary. Contract.
Baldwin, I. J. Reminiscence
L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah
Ball, John. Papers.

Boquist, Laura. Autobiography.

Kuhn. Joseph. Letters.

Mormon Diaries.

The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California
Aram Family Papers
Anable, Henry Journal
Bailey, Mary Stuart. Journal.
Beeching, Robert. Journal.
Bieber, Ralph P. Collection.
Billington Crum Whiting Papers.
Bristow, Elijah. Letters.
242

Bruff, Joseph Goldsborough. Journal and Drawings.
Burch, John C. Autobiography.
Carpenter, Helen McCowen. Diary.
Chillson, Lorenzo. Diary.
Cox, Cornelius C. Journal.
Cutting, Howard. Journal.
Darwin, Charles Benjamin. Journals.
DeWolf, David. Letters.
Foster, Roxana Cheney. The Foster Family.
Harris, Benjamin Butler. Journal.
Haun, Catherine. Reminiscence.
Hoover, Vincent. Journals.
Houghton, Eliza Poor Donner. Papers.
Houghton, Sherman Otis. Papers.
Jayhawker Collection.
Jewett. Mendall. Journal.
Laselle, Stanislaus. Diary.
Lockley, Frederick E. Collection.
McAlister, John. Journal and "A Record of Me and Mine".
McBride, W. S. Journal.
McGee, Joseph. Memoirs.
Mormon File, c. 1850-1995.
243

Murrell, George McKinley. Correspondence.
Nichols. Samuel. Collection.
Palmer, T. S. Papers.
Pennell Usher Family Papers.
Perkins, E. Douglas. Journal.
Redman. J. T. Reminiscence.
Riggin/Pettyjohn Family Papers.
Smith, John. Journal.
Tell, William Parker. Journal.
Welsh, John Pratt. Journal.
Wood, Joseph. Journal.
Library of Congress

Beale Family Papers.
Burbank, Augustus Ripley. Diary.
Lander. Frederick W. Papers.
Talbot, Theodore. Papers.
Turner. Justin G. Autograph Collection.
Thompson, Clark Wallace. Papers.
Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts
Barker-Edes-Noyes family papers.
Parkman, Francis. Papers.
Peirce, John. Papers.
Missouri History Museum, St. Louis. Missouri
244

Norvell, James W. Reminiscence.
Manuscripts and Archives, New York Public Library, New York, New York
Bierwith, Leopold. Collection.
Chadwick, Samuel. Diary.
King. A. C. Diary.
Whipple, Charlotte. Collection.
Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois
Ables. T. J. Letter.

Ayer Collection.

Brooks, Alden Finney. Journey.

Brown, Robert J. Journal.

Jennings, Samuel. Letters.

Reed-Kendall Family Papers.

Rodgers Family Papers.

Oregon Historical Society, Portland, Oregon
Butler-Smith Family Papers.

Chambers, Margaret White. Reminiscence.

Connor. T. J. Diary.

Diaries and Reminiscences Collection.

Himes, George H. Papers.

Minto, John. Papers.

Overland Journeys to the Pacific Collection.

Shaw, Alva Compton Riggs. Papers.
245

State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri
Evans, James W. Letter.
Society of California Pioneers, San Francisco, California
Atkins, Henry. Letters.
Coffey, Alvin. “Autobiography and Reminiscence of Alvin Aaron Coffey,
Mills Seminary P.O.,”, 1901.
Freeman, Martha Ann. Letter.
Special Collections, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California
Reid, Bernard J. Collection.
Special Collections and Archives, Utah State University, Logan, Utah
Anderson, John C. Diary.
Winterthur Library, Winterthur, Delaware
Wilson-Warner-Corbit Family Papers.

II. Electronic Collections

Making of America Collection, Cornell University Library.

Mormon Pioneer Overland Travel, 1847-1868, Church History, The Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-Day.

Online Archive of California.

Trails of Hope: Overland Diaries and Letters, 1846-1869, Brigham Young University.

III. Newspapers

The Boston Daily Globe

San Francisco Chronicle
246

San Francisco Examiner

St. Joseph Weekly Gazette

IV. Published Primary Sources

Abbott, Jacob. The Engineer (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1856).

Abert, J. W. Report of an Expedition Led by Lieutenant Abert, on the Upper Arkansas
and Through the Country of the Camanche Indians, in the Fall of the Year 1845.
Washington, 1846.

Ackley, Mary. Crossing the Plains and Early Days in California Memories of Girlhood
Days in California’s Golden Age. San Francisco: Author, 1928.

Adams, Cecilia. The Oregon Trail Diary of Twin Sisters Cecilia Adams and Parthenia
Blank in 1852: the Unabridged Diary. Medford OR U.S.A.: Webb Research Group,
1990.

Aldrich, Lorenzo D. A Journal of the Overland Route to California! and the Gold Mines.
Lansingburgh, N.Y: Alexr. Kirkpatrick, 1851.

Allen, A.J. Ten Years in Oregon. Travels and Adventures of Doctor E. White and Lady
West of the Rocky Mountains; With Incidents of Two Sea Voyages via. Sandwich Islands
Around Cape Horn ; Containing Also a Brief History of the Missions and Settlement of
the Country-Origin of the Provisional Government-Number and Customs of the Indians
Incidents Witnessed While Traveling and Residing in the territory-Description of the Soil,
Production and Climate of the Country. Ithaca, NY: Mack, Andrus, & Co.

Allyn, Henry. “Journal of Henry Allyn, 1853.” Transactions of the Forty-Ninth Annual
Reunion of the Oregon Pioneer Association (1924): 372–435.

Anderson, Thomas F. “‘Old-Home Week’ in New England.” New England Magazine 34,
August (1906): 673–85.

Applegate, Jesse A. A Day with the Cow Column in 1843: Recollections of My Boyhood.
Chicago: Caxton Club, 1934.

Ball, Nicholas. The Pioneers of ’49: A History of the Excursion of the Society of
California Pioneers of New England, from Bostonto the Leading Cities of the Golden
State, April 10-May 17,1890. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1891.
247

Bancroft, Hubert Howe. California Inter Pocula. San Francisco: The History Company,
1888.

Beadle, J. Western Wilds, and the Men Who Redeem Them : an Authentic Narrative.
Cincinnati: Jones Bros., 1878.

Bear, Luther Standing. My people, the Sioux. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska
Press, 1975.

Beckwourth, James Pierson. The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth :
Mountaineer, Scout and Pioneer and Chief of the Crow Nation of Indians.
Edited by T. D. Bonner New York: Harper Brothers, 1856.

Belknap, Kitturah. “Keturah Pelton Belknap.” In Women of the West. Edited by Cathy
Lucchetti and Carol Orwell. St. George, Utah: Antelope Island Press, 1982.

Black, Mary. The Oregon & Overland Trail Diary of Mary Louisa Black in 1865.
Medford OR: Webb Research Group, 1989.

Bowles, Samuel. Across the Continent: A Summer’s Journey to the Rocky Mountains, the
Mormons, and the Pacific States. New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1866.

Browne, John Ross. Adventures in the Apache Country. Harper & Brothers, 1869.

Bryant, Edwin. What I Saw in California. Philadelphia: G. S. Appleton, 1849.

Clappe, Louise Amelia Knapp Smith. The Shirley letters from the California mines, 1851
- 1852. New York: Knopf, 1961.

Clark, Bennett C. “Diary of a Journey From Missouri to California in 1849.” Edited by
Ralph P. Bieber. Missouri Historical Review 23 (1928): 3-43.

Clark, John Hawkins. Overland to the Gold Fields of California in 1852: the Journal of
John Hawkins Clark. Edited by Louise Barry. Topeka: Kansas State Printing Plant, 1942.

Clark, Thomas Dionysius. Gold Rush Diary, Being the Journal of Elisha Douglass
Perkins on the Overland Trail in the Spring and Summer of 1849. Lexington: University
of Kentucky Press, 1967.

Cooke, Lucy Rutledge. Crossing the Plains in 1852: Narrative of a Trip from Iowa to
“The Land of Gold” As Told in Letters Written During the Journey. Fairfield,
Washington: Ye Galleon Press, 1987.
248

DeWolf. David. "David DeWolf; Diary of the Overland trail, 1849, and letters, 1849-50,
of Captain David De Wolf," Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society for the
year..., Vol. 3 (1925): 221.

Crawford, Charles Howard. Scenes of earlier days in crossing the plains to Oregon and
experiences of western life. Petaluma, Cal.: J.T. Studdert, Book and Job Printer, 1898.

Crofutt, George A. Crofutt’s Overland Guide. Consisting of over Six Thousand Miles of
Main Tours, and Three Thousand Miles of Side Tours, Also Six Thousand Miles by Stage
and Water. Descriptive--illustrated. Saint Louis: Chas. E. Ware, 1892.

Currey, George B. "Occasional Address," in Reunion Oregon Pioneer Association.
Annual, Transactions of the Fifteenth Annual Reunion of the Oregon Pioneer Association
for 1887. Portland, Ore.: Press of Geo. H. Himes, 1887.

Delano, Alonzo. Life on the Plains and Among the Diggings; Being Scenes and
Adventures of an Overland Journey to California: With Particular Incidents of the Route,
Mistake and Sufferings of the Emigrants, The Indian Tribes, the Present and Future of
the Great West. Buffalo: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1854.

Denig, Edwin. Five Indian Tribes of the Upper Missouri: Sioux, Arickaras, Assiniboines,
Crees, Crows. 1st ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961.

“Emmanuel Leutze, The Artist.” Lippincott’s Magazine of
Literature, Science and Education 2, no. November (1868): 533–8.

Fairchild, Lucius. California Letters of Lucius Fairchild. Edited with notes and
introduction by Joseph Schafer. Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin,
1931.

Farnham, Thomas J. Travels in the Great Western Prairies, The Anahuac and Rocky
Mountains, And in the Oregon Territory. Poughkeepsie: Killey and Lossing, Printers,
1841.

Ferguson, Charles D. The experiences of a Forty-niner during thirty-four years’
residence in California and Australia. Edited by Frederick T. Wallace. Cleveland, O.:
The Williams publishing company, 1888.

Ferris, Mrs. Benjamin G. The Mormons at Home: With Some Incidents of Travel from
Missouri to California, 1852-3. In a Series of Letters. New York: Dix & Edwards, 1856.

Frémont, John Charles. Narrative of The Exploring Expedition to The Rocky Mountains
In the Year 1842 And to Oregon and North California In the Years 1843-44. New York:
Miller, Orton, & Mulligan, 1856.
249

Frizzell, Lodisa. Across the Plains to California in 1852; Journal of Mrs. Lodisa Frizzell.
Edted by Victor Hugo Paltsits, and New York: The New York Public
Library, 1915.

Gaines, Georgia Willis Read and Ruth. The Gold Rush Journals, Drawings, and Other
Papers of J. Goldsborough Bruff, Captain, Washington City and California Mining
Association. New York: Columbia University Press, 1944.

Gallatin, E. L. What Life Has Taught Me. Denver, Colo: Jno. Frederic, printer, 1900.

Goldsmith, Oliver. Overland in Forty-Nine: The Recollections of a Wolverine Ranger
After a Lapse of Forty-Seven Years. Detroit: The Author, 1896.

Hanna, Esther Belle. Canvas Caravans. Edited by Eleanor Allen. Portland, Or: Binfords
& Mort, 1946.

Hansen, George W. "A Tragedy of the Oregon Trail," Collections of the Nebraska State
Historical Society. Edited by Albert Watkins. Vol. 17 (1913).

Hastings, Lansford W. The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California: Containing
Scenes and Incidents of a Party of Oregon Emigrant : a Description of California, with a
Description of the Different Routes to Those Countries, and All Necessary Information.
Cincinnati, G. Conclin, 1847.

Harlan, Jacob Wright. California ’46 to ’88. San Francisco: Bancroft Company, 1888.

Harris, Benjamin Butler. The Gila Trail: The Texas Argonauts and the California Gold
Rush. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960.

Hayden, Mary Jane. Pioneer Days. San Jose, CA: Murgotten’s Press, 1915.

Hayes, Benjamin. Pioneer Notes from the Diaries of Judge Benjamin Hayes. Los
Angeles, CA: Privately Printed, 1929.

Hebard, Grace Raymond. Washakie: An Account of Indian Resistance of the Covered
Wagon and Union Pacific Railroad Invasions of Their Territory. Cleveland: Arthur H.
Clark Company, 1930.

Heiskell, Hugh. A Forty-niner from Tennessee: the Diary of Hugh Brown Heiskell. ed. ?
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998.

Hopkins, Sarah Winnemucca. Life among the Piutes, their wrong and claims. Edited
by Mrs. Horace Mann. Boston: Cupples, Upham, 1883.
250

Ivins, Virginia Wilcox. Pen Pictures of Early Western Days. Keokuk, Iowa: Private
Printing, 1905.

Jackson, Helen Hunt. A century of dishonor; a sketch of the United States government’s
dealings with some of the Indian tribes. New York: Harper & Bros., 1881.

Jones, J. Wesley. Amusing and Thrilling Adventures of a California Artisht, While
Daguerrotyping a Continent, Amidst Burning Deserts, Savages and Perpetual Shows and
A Poetical Companion to the Pantoscope of California, Nebraska & Kanasas, Salt Lake
& the Mormons, from 1500 Daguerreotypes by J. Wesley Jones, Detaling the Startling
Adventures of an Overland Journey of 8,000 Miles. Boston: Dix, 1854.

Kelley, Hall J. A Geographical Sketch of That Part of North America, Called Oregon
Containing an Account of the Indian Title;--the Nature of a Right of Sovereignty;--the
First Discoveries;--climate and Seasons;--face of the Country and Mountains--natural
Divisions, Physical Appearance and Soil of Each;--forests and Vegetable Productions;--
rivers, Bays, &c.; Island, &c.; Animals;--the Disposition of the Indians, and the Number
and Situation of Their Tribes;--together with an Essay on the Advantages Resulting from
a Settlement of the Territory. To Which Is Attached a New Map of the Country. Boston: J.
Howe, 1830.

Ketcham, Rebecca. “From Ithaca to Clatsop Plains: Miss Ketcham’s Journal of Travel.”
Edited by Leo M. Kaiser, and Priscilla Knuth. Oregon Historical Quarterly 62, no. 3
(1961): 237–287.

Lambourne, Alfred. The Old Journey: Reminiscences of Pioneer Days. Salt Lake City:
Geo. Q. Cannon & Sons Co., 1897.

Langworthy, Franklin. Scenery of the Plains, Mountains and Mines: Or A Diary Kept
Upon the Overland Route to California. Ogdensburgh: J. C. Sprague, 1855.

Lienhard, Heinrich. New Worlds to Seek : Pioneer Heinrich Lienhard in Switzerland and
America, 1824-1846. Edited by John C. Abbott. Translated by Raymond J. Spahn.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999.

Lockley, Fred. “Recollections of Benjamin Franklin Bonney.” The Quarterly of the
Oregon Historical Society 24, no. 1 (March 1, 1923): 36–55.

Love, Nat. Life and Adventures of Nat Love, Better Known in the Cattle Country as
“Deadwood Dick,” by Himself; a True History of Slavery Days, Life on the Great Cattle
Ranges ... Based on Facts, and Personal Experiences of the Author. Los Angles, Cal,
1907.

251

Mayo, A. D. Western Emigration and Western Character Albany: n.p., n.d. [1841
1899].

McGlashan, C.F. History of the Donner Party. A Tragedy of the Sierra. San Francisco:
A.L. Bancroft & Company, Printers, 1880.

Millington. Ada. “Journal Kept While Crossing the Plains,” ed. Charles G. Clarke
Southern California Quarterly 59, 1 (Spring 1977): 43-7.

Minto, John. "The Occasional Address," in Transactions of the Fourth Annual Re-Union
of the Oregon Pioneer Association. Salem, Or.,: E. M. Waite, Steam Printer and
Bookbinder, 1877.

Olmstead, Frederick Law. The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton
and Slavery in the United States, Based upon Three Former Volumes of Journeys and
Investigations. 2 Vols. New York: Mason Bros., 1861.

Packard, Wellman. Early Emigration to California, 1849-1850. Bloomington, Ill: M.
Custer, 1928.

Pancoast, Charles Edward. A Quaker Forty-niner : the Adventures of Charl. Edward
Pancoast on the American Frontier. Edited by Anna Paschall Hannum, and John Bach
MacMaster. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930.

Parkman, Francis. Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life; or, The California and Oregon
Trail. New York: George P. Putnam, 1852.

Parsons, C.G. Inside View of Slavery, or, A Tour Among the Planters. Boston: J. P. Jewett
and Co. Cleveland: Jewett, Proctor and Worthington, 1855.

Raynolds, W.F. Report on the exploration of the Yellowstone River Relative to the
Equipment, Supplies, and the Method of Traveling. Cincinnati: George Conclin, 1845.

Reed, Virginia. 'Across the Plains in the Donner Party (1846). A Personal Narrative of
the Overland Trip to California." Century Illustrated Magazine 42:3 (July 1891): 409-27.

Royce, Sarah. A Frontier Lady: Recollections of the Gold Rush and Early California.
Edited by Ralph Henry Gabriel. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932.

252

Schmölder, B. The Emigrant’s Guide to California, Describing Its Geography,
Agricultural and Commercial Resources. Containing a Well-arranged List of the
Commodities Most Desirable for Exporting to That Country, with a Table of the Duties.
Also, Some Useful Information for Commanders of Vessels, and for the Overland
Travelers Through Texas. Together with a Valuable Map, on Which the Various Routes
Are Traced, and an Authentic sketch of San Francisco; to Which Is Appended the
Governor of California’s (Colonel Mason’s) Official Despatches Concerning the Gold
Districts. London: P. Richardson, 1849.

Scott, Abigail. "Journal of a Trip to Oregon," Covered Wagon Women: Diaries and
Letters from the Western Trails, 1840-1890, Volume 5. Edited by Kenneth L Holmes and
David Duniway. Glendale. Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1986.

Shaw, David Augustus. Eldorado; or, California as Seen by a Pioneer, 1850-1900. B.R.
Baumgardt, 1900.

Smedley, William. Across the Plains in ’62. Denver, 1916.

Smet, Reverend P J De. Western Missions and Missionaries: a Series of Letters... New
York: T. W. Strong, 1859.

Smet, Pierre-Jean de. Life, Letters and Travels of Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, S.J.,
1801-1873: Missionary Labors and Adventures Among the Wild Tribes of the
North American Indians. New York: F.P. Harper, 1905.

Society of California Pioneers. The Society of California Pioneers Thirty-first
Anniversary ... Celebrated by a Grand Barbecue at Isabela Grove, Santa Cruz, Cal.
September 9, 1881. San Francisco: B.F. Sterett, Printer, 1881.

Steele, John. The Traveler’s Companion Through the Great Interior. A Guide for the
Road to California, by the South Pass in theRocky Mountains, and Sublett’s and
Headpath’s Cut Offs; Being a Much Better and Nearer Road Than the One Formerly
Traveled by the Emigrants. Containing a Correct Description of the Road, with the
Distances by Actual Measurement, Entering California by Crossing the Great Sierra
Nevada, at the Headwaters of the Yuba River. Galena: Power Press of H.H. Houghton
& Co, 1854.

Stewart, J. M. “Overland Trip to California [1850].” Publications of the Historical
Society of Southern California 5 (1901):176–85.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life Among the Lowly. Boston: J. P.
Jewett and Company; Cleveland: Jewett, Proctor and Worthington, 1853.

253

Sumner, Charles A. ’Cross the plains. The overland trip. A narrative lecture. San
Francisco: Bacon, 1876.

Thompson, William. Reminiscences of a Pioneer. San Francisco, 1912.

Thomson, Origen. Crossing the Plains. Narrative of the Scenes, Incidents and Adventures
Attending the Overland Journey of the Decatur and Rush County Imigrants to the “Far
off” Oregon in 1852. Printed from a Diary of Daily Events Kept by the Late Origen
Thomson; with an Introductory Chapter by Mrs. Camilla T. Donnell, and a Thrilling
Narrative of a Buffalo Hunt and Battle Royal with Mountain Wolves, by Mr. Sutherland
McCoy. Greensburg, Ind.: Orville Thomson, 1896.

Townsend, John Kirk. Narrative of a Journey Across the Rocky Mountains, to the
Columbia River, and a Visit to the Sandwich Islands, Chili, & C., with a Scientific
Appendix. Northwest Reprints. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1839.

Wadsworth, William. The National Wagon Road Guide, from St. Joseph and Council
Bluffs, on the Missouri River, via South Pass of the Rocky Mountains, to California.
Wagner-Camp, Plains and Rockies ;; 313; San Francisco: Whitton, Towne, 1900.

Ward, Harriet Sherrill. Prairie Schooner Lady: the Journal of Harriet Sherrill Ward,
1853, (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1959).

Weld, Theodore Dwight. American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses.
New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839.

Wheeler, Olin D, and Northern Pacific Railroad Company. Indianland and
wonderland: once roamed by the savage Indian and the shaggy buffalo, now dotted by
ranches, towns and cities and cropped by countless flocks and herds : a region of
wonderful phenomena, reached by the Northern Pacific Railroad. St. Paul: Chas. S. Fee,
General Passenger and Ticket Agent, Northern Pacific Railroad, 1894.

White. Thomas. To Oregon in 1852, Letter of Dr. Thomas White, La Grange County,
Indiana, Emigrant. Edited by Samuel Porter Williams. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical
Society, 1964.

Williams, Henry. The Pacific Tourist. Williams’ Illustrated Trans-continental Guide to
Travel, from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Containing Full Descriptions of Railroad
Routes ... A Complete Traveler’s Guide Of. New York: H.T. Williams, 1876.

Williams, James. Life and Adventures of James Williams, A Fugitive Slave: With a Full
Description of the Underground Railroad (San Francisco: Women’s Union Print, 1873).

254

Williams, John T. “Journal of John T. Williams, 1850.” Indiana Magazine of History 32,
no. 4 (December 1, 1936): 393–409.

Woodhams, William H. “The Diary of William H. Woodhams, 1852-1854 : the Great
Deserts or Around and Across.” Edited by Charles W. Martin. Nebraska History 61,
no. 1(1980): 1-101.

Young, F. G. “The Oregon Trail.” Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society 1, no. Dec
(1900): 339–70.

Young, Frederic G, Joseph Schafer, and Frederick A Schafer. With bicycles over the old
Oregon Trail in 1900 : the diaries of Prof. Frederic G. Young & Dr. Joseph Schafer. San
Diego: F.A. Schafer, 1992.

V. Secondary Sources

Adas, Michael. “From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon: Integrating the Exceptionalist
Narrative of the American Experience into World History.” The American Historical
Review 106, no. 5 (2001): 1692–1720.

Allen, Barbara. “Landscape, Memory, and the Western Past.” Montana: The Magazine of
Western History 39, no. 4 (1989): 71–75.

Allen, Martha Mitten. Traveling West: 19th Century Women on the Overland Routes. El
Paso, Texas: Texas Western Press, 1987.

Allen, Thomas. A Republic in Time : Temporality and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-
century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

Allmendinger, Blake. “Beckwourth’s Pass,” in Imagining the African-American West.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005 1–12.

Alter, J. Cecil. Jim Bridger. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962.

Altschuler, Glenn C. and Stuart M Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and their Politics
in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Anderson, Benedict R. O’G. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London ; New York: Verso, 2006.

Anderson, Martha. Black Pioneers of the Northwest, 1800-1918. Seattle Wash.:
Martha E. Anderson, 1980.
255

Anderson, Ruth. “Music on the Move: Instruments on the Western Frontier.” The
Overland Journal 5, no. 2 (1987): 27–34.

Anderson, Virginia DeJohn. “King Philip’s Herds: Indians, Colonists, and the Problem of
Livestock in Early New England.” The William and Mary Quarterly 51, no. 4.
(October 1, 1994): 601–624.

Andrews, Thomas F. “Lansford W. Hastings and the Promotion of the Salt Lake Desert
Cutoff: A Reappraisal.” The Western Historical Quarterly 4, no. 2 (April 1, 1973): 133-
150.

Andrews, Thomas G. Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War. Harvard
University Press, 2010.

Appleby, Joyce. Inheriting the Revolution : the First Generation of Americans.
Cambridge Mass.: Belknap Press, 2000.

———. The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism. W. W. Norton & Company,
2010.

Axtell, James. Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of North America. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Bagley, Will. So rugged and mountainous: blazing the Oregon and California trails,
1812-1848. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010.

Bakhtin, M. M. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Balleisen, Edward J. Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in
Antebellum America. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Banner, Stuart. American Property: a History of How, Why, and What We Own.
Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 2011

Barry, Louise. The Beginning of the West; Annals of the Kansas Gateway to the
American West, 1540-1854 (Topeka: Kansas State Historical Society, 1972).

Beasley, Delilah Leontium. The Negro Trail Blazers of California: a Compilation of
Records from the California Archives in the Bancroft Library at the University of
California, in Berkeley; and from the Diaries, Old Papers, and Conversations of Old
Pioneers in the State of California ... R. and E. Research Associates, 1919.

Bederman, Gail. Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the
United States, 1880-1917. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.
256

Bell, James Christy. Opening a highway to the Pacific, 1838-1846. New York: Columbia
University, 1921.

Berglund, Barbara. “"The Days of Old, the Days of Gold, the Days of ‘49": Identity,
History, and Memory at the California Midwinter International Exposition, 1894.’” The
Public Historian 25, no. 4 (Autumn 2003): 25–49.

Bergman, G. M. “The Negro Who Rode With Fremont.” Negro History Bulletin 28, no. 2
(1964): 31-8.

Bieber, Ralph P. Southern Trails to California in 1849. The Southwest Historical Series,
5. Glendale, Cal., 1937.

Billington, Ray Allen. America’s frontier heritage. New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1966.

———. The Far Western Frontier, 1830-60. Albuquerque NM: University of New
Mexico Press, 1956.

———. Words that won the West, 1830-1850. New York: Foundation for Public
Relations Research and Education, 1964.

Blackhawk, Ned. Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American
West. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Blansett, Eual D. Jr. and Jeannette L. Molson. The Torturous Road to Freedom: The Life
of Alvin Aaron Coffey. Linden, California: Self-Published, 2009.

Blight, David. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001.

Blum, Hester. "American Graves, Pacific Plots," American Literary Geographies: Space
and Cultural Production, 1588-1888. Edited by Martin Brückner and Hsuan L. Hsu.
Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 2007.

Boag, Peter. Environment and Experience Settlement Culture in Nineteenth-century
Oregon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Brooks, James. Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest
Borderlands. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press for the
Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2002.

Brown, Jennifer. Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country.
Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1980.
257

Brown, Rebecca M. “Inscribing Colonial Monumentality: A Case Study of the 1763
Patna Massacre Memorial.” The Journal of Asian Studies 65, no. 1 (February 1, 2006):
91–113.

Brown, Richard. Knowledge Is Power: the Diffusion of Information in Early America,
1700-1865. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Bryant, Edwin. What I saw in California. Edited by L. Osborne. Palo Alto: L. Osborne,
1967.

Buettner, Elizabeth. “Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia in Postcolonial
Britain and India.” History & Memory 18, no. 1 (2006): 5–42.

Burke, Diane. On Slavery’s Border: Missouri’s Small-slaveholding Households, 1815-
1865. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010.

Burnett, D. Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El
Dorado. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Calloway, Colin G. One Vast Winter Count: the Native American West Before Lewis and
Clark. History of the American West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.

Carter, Robert W. “‘Sometimes When I Hear the Winds Sigh’: Mortality on the Overland
Trail.” California History 74, no. 2 (1995): 146–161.

Carter, Sarah. The importance of being monogamous: marriage and nation building in
Western Canada to 1915. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2008.

Cashin, Joan. A Family Venture: Men and Women on the Southern Frontier. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991.

———. “Black Families in the Old Northwest.” Journal of the Early Republic 15, no. 3
(1995): 449.

Clark, Christopher. “Rural America and the Transition to Capitalism.” Journal of the
Early Republic 16, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 223–236.

Coleman, Jon. Vicious: Wolves and Men in America. New Haven: Yale University Press,
2004.

Confino, Alon. “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method.” The
American Historical Review 102, no. 5 (1997): 1386–1403.

258

Conn, Steven. History’s Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the
Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Connerton, Paul. “Seven Types of Forgetting.” Memory Studies 1, no. 1 (January 1,
2008): 59–71.

Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: W. W.
Norton, 1991.

Cronon, William, and George A. Miles. Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s
Western Past. W. W. Norton & Company, 1993.

Delay, Brian. War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War. New
Haven: Yale University Press, Published in association with the William P. Clements
Center for Southwest Studies Southern Methodist University, 2008.

Deloria, Philip. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

DeLucia, Christine. “The Memory Frontier: Uncommon Pursuits of Past and Place in
the Northeast After King Philip’s War.” Journal of American History 98, no. 4 (March 1,
2012): 975–997.

Deverell, William F. “To Loosen the Safety Valve: Eastern Workers and Western
Lands.” The Western Historical Quarterly 19, no. 3 (August 1988): 269–285.

De Voto, Bernard Augustine. The Year of Decision, 1846 (Boston: Little, Brown and Co.,
1984).

Dillon, Richard H, and Charles Shaw. Texas argonauts: Isaac H. Duval and the
California Gold Rush. San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1987.

Engels, Jeremy and Greg Goodale. “‘Our Battle Cry Will Be: Remember Jenny
McCrea!’: A Précis on the Rhetoric of Revenge.” American Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2009):
95–6.

Etter, Patricia. To California on the Southern Route, 1849 : a History and Annotated
Bibliography. Spokane Wash.: Arthur H. Clark, 1998.

Fabian. Ann."Amateur Authorship," in The Industrial Book, 1840-1880. Edited by Scott
E. Casper et al. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. 407-15.

———. Card Sharps, Dream Books, & Bucket Shops : Gambling in 19th-century
America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.

259

———. The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2010.

———. The Unvarnished Truth Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

Fahs, Alice. The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North & South, 1861-
1865. Civil War America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Faragher, John Mack. Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: The Significance of the
Frontier in American History and Other Essays. New York: Holt, 1994.

———. Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1986.

———. “The Custom of the Country: Cross-Cultural Marriage in the Far Western Fur
Trade.” In Western Women: Their Land, Their Lives. Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press, 1988.

———. “The Frontier Trail: Rethinking Turner and Reimagining the American West.”
The American Historical Review 98, no. 1 (February 1, 1993): 106–117.

———. Women and Men on the Overland Trail. Vol. 2nd. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2001.

Farmer, Jared. On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Farrell, James. Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830-1920. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1980.

Faust, Drew Gilpin. ed. The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum
South, 1830-1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.

Faust, Drew Gilpin. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.

Fehrenbacher, Don E. The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and
Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Finkelman, Paul. An Imperfect Union : Slavery, Federalism, and Comity. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1981.

260

Fletcher Patricia, Jack E. Fletcher, and Lee Whiteley. Cherokee Trail Diaries. Sequim
Wash.: Fletcher Family Foundation, 1999.

Floyd, Janet. Writing: The Pioneer Woman. University of Missouri Press, 2002.

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth and Eugene D. Genovese. The Mind of the Master Class:
History and Fatih in the Southern Slaveholder’s Worldview. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2005.

Fredrickson, George M. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-
American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

Freehling, William W.The Road to Disunion, 2 Vols. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2007.

Friend, Craig Thompson. Along the Maysville Road : the Early American Republic in the
trans-Appalachian West. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005.

Fritzsche, Peter. “Specters of History: On Nostalgia, Exile, and Modernity.” The
American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (December 1, 2001): 1587–1618.

———. Stranded in the present: modern time and the melancholy of history.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Frost, Donald McKay. Notes on General Ashley, the Overland Trail and South Pass.
Barre, Mass.: Barre gazette, 1960.

Fryd, Vivien Green. Art & Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol,
1815-1860. Ohio University Press, 2001.

Gannon, Barbara A. The won cause: black and white comradeship in the Grand Army of
the Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Gerber, David. Authors of Their Lives: the Personal Correspondence of British
Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century. New York: New York
University Press, 2006.

Ghent, William J. The Road to Oregon, a Chronicle of the Great Emigrant Trail.
London; New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1929.

Gjerde, Jon. “We’ll Meet on Canaan’s Land: Patterns of Migration,” in Minds of the
West. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

261

Glassberg, Daniel. “Making Places in California,” in Sense of History: the Place of the
Past in American Life. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. 165-
202.

Gordon, Sarah. The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in
Nineteenth-century America. Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Greenberg, Amy S. Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Grewal, Inderpal. Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.

Grinnell, George Bird. The Cheyenne Indians : Their History and Ways of Life, Vol. 2.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972.

Griswold, Robert L. Family and Divorce in California, 1850-1890: Victorian Illusions
and Everyday Realities. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982.

Grossman, James R. The Frontier in American Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1994.

Guyatt, Nicholas. Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607-1876. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Hafen, Le Roy Reuben, and Ann W Hafen. Handcarts to Zion : the story of a unique
western migration, 1856-1860, with contemporary journals, accounts, reports; and
rosters of members of the ten handcart companies. Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark Co.,
1960.

Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992.

Hall, Patricia. “"Restless in the Midst of Their Prosperity’: New Evidence on the Internal
Migration of Americans, 1850-2000.” The Journal of American History. 91, no. 3 (2004):
829.

Halttunen, Karen. Confidence Men and Painted Women : a Study of Middle-class Culture
in America, 1830-1870. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.

Hamalainen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

Hartog, Hendrik. Man and Wife in America: a History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2000.
262

Henkin, David. The Postal Age: the Emergence of Modern Communications in
Nineteenth-century America. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2006.

Herbert, Christopher. “‘Life’s Prizes Are by Labor Got’: Risk, Reward, and White
Manliness in the California Gold Rush.” Pacific Historical Review 80, no. 3 (2011): 339–
368.

Hills, Patricia. “Picturing Progress in the Era of Westward Expansion.” In The West as
America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920. Edited by William Truettner
et al. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991.

Holt, Michael F. The Fate of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the
Coming of the Civil War. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004.

Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: the Origins of American Racial Anglo-
saxonism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797.
London; New York: Methuen, 1986

Hyde, Anne F. An American Vision: Far Western Landscape and National Culture,
1820-1920. New York: New York University Press, 1990.

———. Empires, Nations, and Families: a History of the North American West,
1800-1860. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011.

Lamar, Howard. “From Bondage to Contract: Ethnic Labor in the American West, 1600-
1890.” In The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social
History of Rural America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985, 293–
326.

Inscoe, John. Mountain Masters, Slavery, and the Sectional Crisis in Western North
Carolina. 1st ed. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989.

Jeffrey, Julie Roy. Frontier Women: the trans-Mississippi West, 1840-1880. American
Century Series. New York: Hill and Wang, 1979.

Spear, Jennifer M. “‘They Need Wives’ Métissage and the Regulation of Sexuality in
French Louisiana, 1699-1730.” In Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North
American History, 35–59. New York: New York University Press, 1999.

John, Richard. Spreading the News: the American Postal System from Franklin to Morse.
Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.
263

Johnson, David Alan. Founding the Far West: California, Oregon, and Nevada, 1840-
1890. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
Johnson, Susan Lee. Roaring Camp: the Social World of the California Gold Rush. New
York: W.W. Norton, 2000.

Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul : Life Inside the Antebellum Slave market. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Kammen, Michael. Mystic Chords of Memory : the Transformation of Tradition in
American Culture. 1st ed. New York: Knopf, 1991.

Kaplan, Amy. “Manifest Domesticity.” American Literature; a Journal of Literary
History, Criticism and Bibliography. 70, no. 3 (1998): 581-0.

Keyes, Sarah. “‘Like a Roaring Lion’: The Overland Trail as a Sonic Conquest.” Journal
of American History 96, (June 2009): 19-43.

Klein, Kerwin Lee. Frontiers of historical imagination: narrating the European
conquest of native America, 1890-1990. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

———. “Reclaiming the ‘F’ Word, or Being and Becoming Postwestern.” Pacific
Historical Review 65, no. 2 (May 1, 1996): 179–215.

Kornblith, Gary J. “Rethinking the Coming of the Civil War: A Counterfactual Exercise.”
Journal of American History 90, no. 1 (June 2003): 76–105.

Kropp, Phoebe S. California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Kuehn, Julia, and Paul Smethurst. Travel Writing, Form, and Empire: The Poetics and
Politics of Mobility. New York: Routledge, 2009.

Laderman, Gary. The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799-1883.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

LaDow, Beth. The Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland.
New York: Routledge, 2001.

Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance
in the Age of Mass Culture. Columbia University Press, 2004.

Lapp, Rudolph M. Archy Lee: A California Fugitive Slave Case (San Francisco: Book
Club of California, 1969).
264

———. Blacks in Gold Rush California. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.

Lause, Mark A. Young America: land, labor, and the Republican community. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2005.

Lears, T. J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of
American Culture, 1880-1920. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Lepore, Jill. The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity.
New York: Vintage Books, 1998.

Lerner, Gerda. The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels Against Slavery. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1967.

Levine, Bruce. Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of Civil War. New York: Hill and
Wang, 1992.

Lewis, David Rich. “Argonauts and the Overland Trail Experience: Method and Theory.”
The Western Historical Quarterly 16, no. 3 (1985): 285–305.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American
West. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1987.

———. “Turnerians All: The Dream of a Helpful History in an Intelligible World.”
American Historical Review 100, no. 3 (1995): 697–716.

Lockley, Frederick. “The Case of Robin Holmes Vs. Nathaniel Ford.” The Quarterly of
the Oregon Historical Society 23, no. 2 (June 1922): 111–137.

Lystra, Karen. Searching the Heart : Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-
Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Lynch, Vera Martin. Free land for free men; a story of Clackamas County. Portland,
Or.: Printed by Artline Print., 1973.

Mahoney, Timothy R. Provincial lives: Middle-Class Experience in the Antebellum
Middle West. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Mapp, Paul W. The elusive West and the contest for empire, 1713-1763. Chapel Hill;
Williamsburg, Va.: University of North Carolina Press ; Published for the Omohundro
Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2011.

Marten, James Alan. Sing not War: the Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in
Gilded Age America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
265

Martz, Earl M. Dred Scott and the Politics of Slavery. Lawrence: University Press of
Kansas, 2007

Matsuda, Matt K. The memory of the modern (New York: Oxford University Press,
1996);

Matt, Susan J. Homesickness : an American history. New York: Oxford University Press,
2011.

Mattes, Merrill J. Platte River Road Narratives: a Descriptive Bibliography of Travel
over the Great Central Overland Route to Oregon, California, Utah, Colorado, Montana,
and Other Western States and Territories, 1812-1866. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1988.

McCrossen, Alexis. Holy day, Holiday: the American Sunday. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2000.

McGinty, Brian. The Oatman Massacre: a Tale of Desert Captivity and Survival.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005.

McGuinness, Aims. Path of Empire : Panama and the California Gold Rush. The United
States in the World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.

McLagan, Elizabeth. A Peculiar Paradise: a History
of Blacks in Oregon, 1788-1940. Portland Or.: Georgian Press, 1980.

Miller, Tamara Gaskell. “"My Whole Enjoyment & Almost My Existence Depends Upon
My Friends’: Family and Kinship in Early Ohio,” in The Center of a Great Empire: The
Ohio Country in the Early American Republic. Edited by Andrew R. L. Cayton and
Stuart D. Hobbs. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005.
Milner, Clyde A. “The Shared Memory of Montana Pioneers.” Montana: The Magazine
of Western History 37, no. 1 (1987): 2–13.

Moore, Shirley Ann Wilson. "Sweet Freedom's Plains: African Americans on the
Overland Trails, 1841-1869." Salt Lake City and Santa Fe: National Trails Intermountain
Region, January 31, 2012.
Morgan, Dale Lowell, Richard L Saunders, and Gregory E Smoak. Shoshonean peoples
and the overland trails : frontiers of the Utah Superintendency of Indian Affairs, 1849
1869. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2007.

Morrison, Michael A. Slavery and the American West : the Eclipse of Manifest Destiny
and the Coming of the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

266

Munkres, Robert L. “The Plains Indian Threat on the Oregon Trail Before 1860.” Annals
of Wyoming 40 (1968): 193–221.

Myres, Sandra L. Westering Women and the Frontier Experience, 1800-1915.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982.

Neely, Mark E. The Boundaries of American Political Culture in the Civil War Era
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire.” Representations,
no. 26 (1989): 7–24.

Novick, Peter. That Noble Dream: the “Objectivity Question” and the American
Historical Profession. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Nugent, Walter T. K. Into the West: The Story of its People. New York: A. A. Knopf,
1999.

O’Brien, Jean. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Ostler, Jeffrey. The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded
Knee. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Painter, Nell Irvin. Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction. New
York: Knopf, 1977.

Pascoe, Peggy. Relations of Rescue: the Search for Female Moral Authority in the
American West, 1874-1939. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Pearsall, Sarah. Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Peck, Gunther. Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North
American West, 1880-1930. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Peltier, Jerome. Black Harris. Fairfield, Wash.: Ye Galleon Press, 1986.

Perdue, Theda, and Michael D Green. The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears.
New York: Viking, 2007.

Petrik, Paula. No Step Backwar : Women and Family on the Rocky Mountain Mining
Frontier, Helena, Montana, 1865-1900. Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 1987.
267

Pomeroy, Earl. In Search of the Golden West: the Tourist in Western America (Lincoln,
Neb.,: University of Nebraska Press, 1990).

Potter, David M. Introduction to Trail to California: the Overland Journal of Vincent
Geiger and Wakeman Bryarly. Edited by David M. Potter. (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1945).

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York:
Routledge, 1992.

Reid, John Phillip. Law for the Elephant: Property and Social Behavior on the Overland
Trail. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1980.

———. Policing the Elephant : Crime, Punishment, and Social Behavior on the
Overland Trail. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1997.

Richard, K. Keith. “Unwelcome Settlers: Black and Mulatto Oregon Pioneers.” Oregon
Historical Quarterly 84, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 29–55.

Riley, Glenda. Building and Breaking Families in the American West. 1st ed.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.

———. Confronting race: women and Indians on the frontier,
1815-1915. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004.

———. “The Specter of a Savage: Rumors and Alarmism on the Overland
Trail.” The Western Historical Quarterly 15, no. 4 (October 1, 1984): 427–444.

Roberts, Brian. American Alchemy: the California Gold Rush and Middle-class Culture.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Rohrbough, Malcolm J. Days of Gold: the California Gold Rush and the American
Nation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Rosaldo, Renato. “Imperialist Nostalgia.” Representations, no. 26 (1989): 107–122.

Rosenberg, Charles. The Cholera Years the United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.

Ross, Nancy Wilson. Westward the Women. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1944.

Rothman, Adam. Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep
South. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005.
268

Rothman, Hal K. Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West.
Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1998.

Ryan, Mary P. Cradle of the Middle Class: the Family in Oneida County, New York,
1790-1865. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Sachs, Aaron. The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots
of American Environmentalism. New York: Viking, 2006.

Sandage, Scott A. Born Losers: a History of Failure in America. Cambridge, Ma:
Harvard University Press, 2005.

Sandweiss, Martha. Print the Legend: Photography and the American West. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2002.

Saum, Lewis. The Popular Mood of pre-Civil War America. Westport Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1980.

Savage, W. Blacks in the West. Westport Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976.

Saxton, Alexander. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass
Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Verso, 1990.

Schantz, Mark. Awaiting the Heavenly Country : the Civil War and America’s Culture of
Death. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.

Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space
in the 19th Century. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 1986.

Schlissel, Lillian. Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey. New York: Schocken
Books, 1992.

Seefeldt, Douglas, Jeffrey L. Hantman, and Peter S. Onuf. Across the Continent:
Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and the Making of America. Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 2005.
Shaffer, Marguerite S. “‘See America First’: Re-Envisioning Nation and Region through
Western Tourism.” The Pacific Historical Review 65, no. 4 (1996): 559–581.

Sloane, David. The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Vol. 6th.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976.

269

Smith, Mark M. Listening to Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2001.

Smith, Sherry L. “Reconciliation and restitution in the American West.” Western
Historical Quarterly 41, no. 1 (2010): 5–21.

———. “Single Women Homesteaders: The Perplexing Case of Elinore Pruitt Stewart.”
The Western Historical Quarterly 22, no. 2 (1991): 163–183.

Smith, Stacey L. “Remaking Slavery in a Free State: Masters and Slaves in Gold Rush
California.” Pacific Historical Review 80, no. 1 (February 1, 2011): 28–63.

Smits, David. “‘Squaw Men,’ ‘Half-Breeds,’ and Amalgamators: Late Nineteenth-
Century Anglo-American Attitudes Toward Indian-White Race-Mixing.” American
Indian Culture and Research Journal 15, no. 3 (1991): 29–61.

Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing,
and Imperial Administration. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

Stallworthy, Jon. The Oxford book of war poetry. New York: Oxford University Press,
1984).
Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860. New York:
Knopf, 1986.

Stegner, Wallace. The gathering of Zion: the story of the Mormon Trail. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1992.

Stephanson, Anders. Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right.
New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.

Stewart, George Rippey. The California Trail, an Epic with Many Heroes. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1962.

Stoler, Ann Laura. “Tense and tender ties : the politics of comparison in (post)
colonial studies.” Itinerario 27, no. 3/4 (2003): 263–284.

Stoll, Steven. Larding the lean Earth: soil and society in nineteenth-century America.
New York: Hill and Wang, 2002.

Sturken, Marita. Tangled memories the Vietnam War, the AIDS epidemic, and the politics
of remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

270

Sundquist, Eric J. "The Literature of Expansion and Race." Volume 2, Prose Writing,
1820–1865, The Cambridge History of American Literature 1995,
10.1017/CHOL9780521301060.
Tate, Michael. Indians and Emigrants: Encounters on the Overland Trails. Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 2006.

Taylor, Amy Murrell. The Divided Family in Civil War America (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2005).
Taylor, Quintard. “Slaves and Free Men: Blacks in the Oregon Country, 1840-1860.”
Oregon Historical Quarterly 83, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 153–170.

Thurman, Sue Bailey. Pioneers of Negro Origin in California. San Francisco: Acme,
1949.

Tisdale. Shelby J. "Railroads, Tourism, and Native Americans in the Greater Southwest."
Journal of the Southwest 38, no 4 (December, 1996): 433-62.

Truettner, William H, and Nancy K Anderson, eds., The West as America: reinterpreting
images of the frontier, 1820-1920. Washington: Published for the National Museum of
American Art by the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991.

Ulrich, Laurel. The age of homespun : objects and stories in the creation of an American
myth. New York: Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 2001.

Unruh, John David. The Plains Across: the Overland Emigrants and the trans
Mississippi West, 1840-60. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979.

Utley, Robert Marshall. The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846-1890. Histories
of the American Frontier. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984.

Valencius, Conevery Bolton. The Health of the Country: How American Settlers
Understood Themselves and Their Land. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

Vestal, Stanley. Jim Bridger, Mountain Man; a Biography. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1970.

Washington, Margaret. “African American History and the Frontier Thesis,” Journal of
the Early Republic. 13, no. 2 (1993): 238.

Ward, Jean . Pacific Northwest Women, 1815-1925 Lives, Memories, and Writings.
Corvallis Ore.: Oregon State University Press, 1997.

271

West, Elliott. “Family Life on the Trail West | History Today.” History Today, 1992.

———. Growing up with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989.

———. “Reconstructing Race.” The Western historical quarterly. 34, no. 1 (2003): 7–26.

———. The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado.
Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998.

———. The Way to the West. Calvin P. Horn Lectures in Western History and Culture.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.

Wheeler, Gordon. Black California: The History of African Americans in the Golden
State. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1993.

White, Richard. “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: a History of the American
West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.

——. Railroaded: the transcontinentals and the making of modern America. New York:
W.W. Norton & Co., 2011.

———. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes
Region, 1650-1815. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

———. The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change
Among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1983.

———. “The Winning of the West: The Expansion of the Western Sioux in the
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” The Journal of American History 65, no. 2 (1978):
319–43.

———. “Trashing the Trails.” In Trails: Toward a New Western History. Lawrence,
Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 1991.

White, Shane White and Graham. The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American
History Through Songs, Sermons, and Speech. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005.

James Williams, Fugitive Slave in the Gold Rush: Life and Adventures of James
Williams, ed. Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Blacks in the American West (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2002).

Wrobel, David M. “Beyond the Frontier-Region Dichotomy.” Pacific Historical Review
272

65, no. 3 (1996): 401–429.

Wrobel, David M. “Global West, American Frontier.” Pacific Historical Review 78, no.
1 (2009): 1–26.

———. Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West.
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002.

VI. Unpublished Material

Bagley, Will. "Virulent Prejudice Against His Race: Blacks on the Trail." Unpublished
manuscript in author's possession.

Beutler, Keith Tony. “The memory revolution in America and memory of the American
Revolution, 1790-1840.” PhD. Dissertation, 2005.

Block, Michael. “New England Merchants, the China Trade, and the Origins of
California.” PhD. Dissertation, University of Southern California, 2011.

Feldman, James W. “Pioneer memory: retrospective views of the early Overland Trail.”
Bachelor of Arts Thesis, Amherst College, 1993.

Frink, Brenda Denise. “Pioneers and Patriots: Race, Gender, and Historical Memory in
California, 1875-1915.” PhD. Dissertation, Stanford University, 2010.

Hammill, Kenneth. "Dorothy Dell (Dutton) Hammill, 1910-1986, Daughter of Oregon
Pioneers Her Life, Ancestry, Descendants."

Huebner, Karin Louise. “Remembrance and reform : a multi-generational saga of a
Euro American-Indian family, 1739-1924.”PhD. Dissertation, University of Southern
California, 2009.

Laugesen, Amanda Pia Krarup. “Making Western Pasts: Historical Societies of Kansas,
Wisconsin, and Oregon, 1870-1920.” PhD. Dissertation, Australian National University,
2000.

Miyamoto, Melody M. “No Home for Domesticity? Gender and Society on the Overland
Trails.” PhD. Dissertation, Arizona State University, 2006.

Smith, Stacey Leigh. “California bound : unfree labor, race, and the Reconstruction of the
Far West, 1848-1870.” PhD. Dissertation, 2008.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Urbane bouquets: a floricultural history of California, 1848 to 1915

PDF

Borderland visualities: technologies of sight and the production of the nineteenth-century U.S.-Mexico borderlands

PDF

Self-representation, cultural formation, and Mexican-American modernism

PDF

Let us fake out a frontier: dissent and the settler colonial imaginary in U.S. literature after 1945

PDF

Roguish femininity: gender and imperialism in the nineteenth‐century United States

PDF

Blue‐collar, white‐collar: Raymond Carver's and John Cheever's versions of the American (anti) pastoral (a critical study); and, Beyond the lights and other stories (a short story collection)

PDF

A cultivating enterprise: wine, race, and conquest in California, 1769-1920

PDF

Freezing civilities: ice and the building of the American West, 1850−1950

PDF

The Pacific Slope superstorms and the Big Winter of 1861−1862

PDF

The print practice of martyrology in British North America, 1688-1787

PDF

Remembrance and reform: a multi-generational saga of a Euro-American-Indian family, 1739-1924

PDF

"This strange and distant land:" isolation, problem groups, and the incorporation of California, 1846-1882

PDF

America's heirs presumptive: boys' boarding schools in New England, 1877-1938

PDF

The curious life of the corpse in nineteenth-century English literature and culture

PDF

Romancing the bomb: Gothic terror and terrorism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature

PDF

Believing in novels: Evangelical narratives and nineteenth‐century British culture

PDF

A new American way of food in eighteenth-century Southeastern Pennsylvania: the recipe book of Bettee Saffin and Ann Ellis

PDF

Domestic topographies: gender and the house in the nineteenth-century British novel

PDF

Oilmen and cactus rustlers: metropolis, empire, and revolution in the Los Angeles Mexico borderlands, 1890-1940

PDF

Authority and the failed justification of evil in Cormac McCarthy's Blood meridian, or The evening redness in the West

Asset Metadata

Creator Keyes, Sarah (author)

Core Title Beyond the plains: migration to the Pacific and the reconfiguration of America, 1820s-1900s

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program History

Publication Date 07/17/2014

Defense Date 05/24/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag culture,Native Americans,nineteenth century,North America,OAI-PMH Harvest,U.S. west

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Deverell, William F. (committee chair), Fox, Richard W. (committee member), Handley, William R. (committee member), Mancall, Peter C. (committee member)

Creator Email keyes.sarah@gmail.com,skeyes@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-60865

Unique identifier UC11288052

Identifier usctheses-c3-60865 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-KeyesSarah-961.pdf

Dmrecord 60865

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Keyes, Sarah

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA