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REVIEWS
GHOSTS OF THE PIONEERS: A FAMILY SEARCH FOR THE INDEPENDENT OREGON COLONY OF 1844
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by Twain Braden
illustrations by Jim Sollers
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| The Lyons Press, Guilford, Connecticut, 2007. Illustrations, photographs, maps. 304 pages. $24.95 cloth. |
| This is a difficult book to categorize or to characterize. As the title suggests, it aspires to discern the ghosts of three families who traveled the Oregon Trail in 1844. Braden undertakes this expedition on two levels: conventional historical research coupled with an extended road trip along the Oregon Trail with a patient wife and four energetic children. Though Braden presents some useful historical material and observations, his book is more interesting and valuable as a meditation on modern masculinity than as a piece of historical scholarship. |
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This is not a conventional history. Braden switches back and forth between the families of the wagon train and his own. Moreover, he provides no notes or even a list of sources. It is therefore difficult for readers to discern exactly what sort of research he conducted or the reliability of his historical reconstructions. Like most enthusiasts of a particular event, he overemphasizes its uniqueness. "Nothing like this period has existed since for American families," he asserts. "We bucked up against the Pacific and realized that was it. All the land was gone" (p. x). Yet, a great deal of land in the nation's interior remained to be homesteaded long after the Willamette Valley filled. Plenty of families moved west before and after the 1840s. |
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That said, Braden offers some interesting accounts of the Sager, Shaw, and Morrison families, and he makes excellent use of the observations of John Minto, a prolific and engaging writer who accompanied the Morrisons. Braden often points out how differently men and women experienced the Oregon Trail and provides an interesting account of how the Sager children — who survived the deaths of their parents on the trail and then the killings at the Whitman Mission — "guarded the family story" (p. 279). |
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But it is Braden's depictions of the contemporary West that ring most true. He admits that his earnest quest for the ghosts of the overlanders is quixotic if not ridiculous. The search for Naomi Sager's gravesite brings the family to "a thirty-mile stretch of trail that no longer exists, long ago tilled under for commercial hell holes, highways, soybean and potato farms, and, more recently, acres of ugly tract housing with faux Olde English names" (p. 231). He is also honest enough to realize that it is a bit of a stretch to equate Missouri's version of pizza or a KOA campground with the discomforts and disease of the Oregon Trail. |
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Braden's reflections on why he is so drawn to these pioneers are thoughtful and provocative. He admires these "badasses" who could hunt and farm even as they cared for their families; they were practical men who "were profoundly satisfied with their lives" (p. 108). Braden clearly fears becoming a modern middle-class man who works at a Dilbertesque desk job before going home to manipulate the TV remote and observe the maturation of dull, obese children. He writes movingly of his shortcomings as a husband and his anxieties as a father, even as he hopes that the ghosts of the Oregon Trail will somehow deliver him from his fears. |
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Approaching the past to escape the modern condition, rather than trying to understand history on its own terms, inevitably leads to at least a little nostalgia and romanticizing, shortcomings that Ghosts of the Pioneers is not immune from. But this well written and engaging book often eschews simple answers to the dilemmas of the past and, especially, the present. |
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| David Peterson del Mar
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| Portland, Oregon |
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