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REVIEWS
SEVEN MONTHS TO OREGON: 1853 DIARIES, LETTERS AND REMINISCENT ACCOUNTS
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by Harold J. Peters
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The Patrice Press, Tooele, Utah, 2008. Photographs, maps, tables, indexes, bibliography. 443 pages. $39.95 cloth. $24.95 paper.
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BEST OF COVERED WAGON WOMEN
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by Kenneth L. Holmes
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| University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2008. Maps, index. 304 pages. $19.95 paper. |
| The plot, if you will, of any given account of pioneers traveling the Oregon Trail is always the same. Brave souls load up their wagons in the east and travel west. The suspense comes in wondering what, in particular, will befall a certain group. In Seven Months to Oregon, the editor, Harold Peters, seems determined to deny the reader any such sense of page-turning eagerness by announcing on page four of the introduction: "Tragically, in by far the most emotional event of the journey, Obadiah drowned while attempting to cross the Snake River." It soon becomes clear that readability is not the goal here. Instead, Peters seems to have aimed for the most thorough documentation possible of everything written before, during, and after a particular crossing of the plains by a group of Methodist ministers and their families in 1853. The bulk of the material is provided by three different writers — Celinda Hines, Gustavus Hines, and Harvey Hines — with added material from others wherever available. |
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Unfortunately, since the Hines trip was not historically noteworthy and, admittedly, came off with very few hitches, the effect of having three different people describe the same non-incidents is a little like making the reader hike fifteen miles of the trail, then backtrack and do it again two more times before proceeding to achieve some actual forward progress. Whenever some slight variances in viewpoint might add interest to the narrative, the editor frequently intrudes and exacerbates the repetitive effect by quoting directly what will be said in the very next paragraph. On page 143, for example, he writes: "Harvey in fact reports, 'This was the hardest single night of our journey ...' Celinda though, says only, 'In the night it rained and hailed.'?" And sure enough, in the very next paragraph, we get Celinda's account: "In the night it rained and hailed." This gets old fast. |
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Another problem is that, although one of the accounts is a daily diary kept by Celinda Hines (and previously collected in Covered Wagon Women), much of the material was written later as reminiscences or — heaven help us — sermons. In reading a wide range of Oregon Trail accounts, one comes to understand that what an individual wrote or said in a speech for public consumption later often says far more about the person's own character than about the trip itself. Perhaps that is why this volume seems to work better as a character study than as an Oregon Trail chronicle. Seven Months to Oregon is actually a Hines family history and Peters, a Hines descendant, has given his fellow descendants a true family treasure in putting together this volume. It should also appeal to scholars wishing to make a study of Christian ministers during Westward Expansion as well as those with an interest in trail conditions specific to the year 1853. Others, however, will find it slow going, as even trail buffs who never tire of reading details of the historic expedition might wonder why they are being asked to plow through someone's discourse on the slavery situation in Jamaica or the bad fiction written by one of the ministers — a novel about a brave minister heading into the wilderness. |
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To simply enjoy accounts of the journey, readers will do better to turn to what has apparently become the gold standard of trail diary collections, Kenneth L. Holmes's Covered Wagon Women. The series of eleven volumes has proven popular since it was published, one volume at a time, by the Arthur H. Clark Company. Now, after reprinting the entire series in paperback, the University of Oklahoma Press has come out with a new volume, The Best of Covered Wagon Women, showcasing a selection of eight trail diaries written from 1848 to 1864. |
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The women who wrote trail diaries surely did not imagine their words would remain entirely private. How else can we explain the universal delicacy in never mentioning their own pregnancies? Still, they were not writing with the expectation of being published or of having their words read from a pulpit. In the aforementioned book, Seven Months to Oregon, when Harvey Hines claims, in later years, that their band arrived "without ever so much as a cross word," a reader familiar with the diaries collected by Kenneth Holmes will have trouble believing it. Almost every diary in the collection hints at the strains of the trip on relationships, and it was apparently a rare group that did not have its share of conflict. While the diaries collected by Holmes have always varied in interest and readability — some diarists were simply better writers than others or had more inherently interesting experiences — they all have in common an honesty and immediacy that make them compelling enough to read again and again. Holmes supplies just enough background to give each diarist the proper context and then, with a bare minimum of footnotes, judiciously steps back and lets these women give us their eyewitness accounts in their own words. It is a formula that has resonated with readers since the first volume appeared and that will surely continue to work for new generations of "rut nuts" — those who never tire of loading up those wagons and setting off once more for the West. |
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| Linda Crew
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| Corvallis, Oregon |
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