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Reviews
Covered Wagon Women, vol. 10, Diaries and Letters from the Western Trails, 1879–1903
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Edited by Kenneth L. Holmes, with an introduction by Elliott West
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University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2000. Photographs, index. 288 pages. $13.00 paper
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Covered Wagon Women, vol. 11, Diaries and Letters from the Western Trails, 1869–1903
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Edited by Kenneth L. Holmes, with an introduction by Katherine G. Morrisey
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University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2000. Photographs, maps, bibliography, index. 205 pages. $13.00 paper.
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Reviewed by David M. Wrobel
University of Nevada Las Vegas
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These two fine volumes conclude the University of Nebraska Press's
reprinting of the late Kenneth L. Holmes's indispensable Covered
Wagon Women series, first published by the Arthur H. Clark Company
(1983–1993). The ready availability of these works once again
for classroom adoption and for a general readership is welcome indeed.
The series begins in 1845 with the earliest letters and diaries
of women journeying westward and uses 1890 as the cutoff date for
inclusion of accounts (although one later source, Anna Hansberry's
letter from 1903, closes the final volume). The eleven volumes in
the series together contain approximately one hundred travel accounts,
ranging in length from a few pages to as many as fifty. It is a
remarkable catalogue of a half-century of women's voices from the
trails detailing cultural encounters, social life, landscape, and
climate. Social historians, western historians, and scholars of
women, the family, gender, and race relations would all do well
to reconsider these works or to consider them for the first time.
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What of particular importance do these final two volumes offer? What is significant about westward journeying in the late 1870s and 1880s? Traveling was certainly easier in this period than it had been in previous decades, as evidenced by the experience of Mrs. Hampton and her family. The Hamptons left Edwards County, Kansas, in the fall of 1888 but after two months abandoned the trail at Fossil, in western Wyoming, as winter set in. They loaded their wagon and team onto a freight train and themselves onto a passenger train to their final destination — Portland, Oregon. Supplies and comfortable lodgings were readily available along the trails by this time. By the 1880s, emigrants were more likely to comment on Indian reservation life than on "Indian dangers" (which had been enormously exaggerated in earlier accounts). Travelers could literally follow the railroad tracks for much of their journey. Even if they chose not to or could not afford to take the train, most of these later emigrants were in sight of "civilization" much of the time. |
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Yet those parallel realities of covered wagon women journeying in sight of "Pullman pioneers" in their palatial railroad cars are, as Elliott West emphasizes in his introduction to volume 10, part of the wonder of this transitional period. These were not by any means the last migrants, not even the last European American migrants, to venture westward in search of promised lands. (It is worth remembering that more homesteads were taken up between 1900 and 1920 than between 1862 and 1900.) They were the last such western homeseekers to record their experiences in large numbers during the journey, however — the last to consciously view themselves, for better or worse, as part of the "frontier movement." Two years after the Hamptons boarded that train in Wyoming, the Census Bureau announced in its 1890 report that there was no longer a discernible frontier line and that the term frontier would no longer be used in the census. Two years after that, Harper and Brothers published Richard Harding Davis's popular travel narrative The West from a Car Window. Davis admitted that he had only three months to explore the whole West and that the network of railroads was vital to the endeavor. Just a few decades earlier a single wagon trip from the Central Plains to the Pacific would have taken roughly the same amount of time. Whether the frontier of white American settlement had actually closed by this time or not, many Americans perceived that a momentous change was occurring in the late nineteenth century. |
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The fourteen letters and diaries in these two volumes provide great insight into this fascinating transitional time. Each of these accounts, in keeping with the previous nine volumes, is expertly introduced by Holmes and accompanied by his helpful explanatory notes. These new editions also include excellent introductions by Elliott West (vol. 10) and Katherine Morrissey (vol. 11). Volume 11 contains a useful series bibliography of both primary sources and pertinent secondary works. |
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Among the many highlights of volume 10 is Mary Riddle's diary from the late 1870s. In 1878, Riddle described Wyoming as "wild and beautiful — nice to look at — but too wild to ever be of any use to mortals only for the wild beasts to roam over" (p. 32). (The state's present-day population of less than half a million makes the remark seem more prophetic than naïve.) Equally memorable is Riddle's commentary on her all-night vigil with two other women over the body of a child who had become sick and died along the trail: "no one can begin to tell the awful dreariness of setting up with a corps [sic] in a tent in a wild country" (p. 52). While the western trails certainly had become less demanding by the late 1870s, sickness and even death still marked some journeys. The end of the trail was not always marked by effusive pronouncements about promised lands, either. Mary Riddle's gloomy conclusion to her two-year diary was written in the heavily forested Clatsop County, Washington, on the bank of the Columbia River, where her family had taken up a homestead: "Now this is the end of over two years of wandering about trying to get into the best place but if this is the best I do pity the worst" (p. 57). |
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Mrs. Hampton's diary is a highlight of volume 11. Why did Mrs. Hampton (whose first name we do not even know), almost forty-nine years of age, leave south-central Kansas in mid-September (an unwise starting date for a covered wagon journey to the West Coast) with her children and a grandchild but without her husband? She noted that he had to stay behind and settle up some business, and he would later take the train and meet the family in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The Hamptons' reunion elicits the following rather uninspired diary entry from Mrs. Hampton: "Monday afternoon late we came to Cheyenne city where we found my husband, who had been waiting there for us since the previous Thursday" (p. 155). From there the family traveled to the western edge of Wyoming and took the train. Mrs. Hampton records the change in climate after a mere two days of train travel: "And what a change! Friday, snow and ice everywhere; Sunday, birds singing, flowers blooming, rain falling softly, the air balmy, it seems like a veritable Paradise" (p. 163). This is a seemingly happy ending to an unusual journey that raises many questions. |
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Perhaps, as Holmes suggests in his introduction to this diary, the Hamptons were lousy planners, lacked common sense, or treated the once-perilous undertaking with the kind of disdain that was becoming increasingly prevalent in the era of modern travel. From what we can gather, the Hamptons probably had the money to take the train the whole way. Perhaps Mrs. Hampton wanted her family to experience the westward journey and her husband was less enthusiastic about the enterprise. Perhaps the family (at Mrs. Hampton's direction) had decided from the very beginning to take the train when winter set in. One can only speculate about such matters, and Mrs. Hampton's diary certainly is a wonderful source for such speculation. Informative and provocative, Mrs. Hampton is just one of the many memorable women's voices in these two compelling works. |
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