Go West, Young Woman: A Few Words About the Emigrant Experience

In my Southern California college days, two friends and I spoke of going over to western Nevada--to the Great Basin region near the Humboldt Sink--and prowling around its salt stretches for old piano keys, grandfather clock parts, leather bags ... anything.  We were taking a class called The West in American Lit and our professor had just informed us that we could still pick up emigrant cast-offs.  Things tossed out to lighten loads on that particularly bad stretch before attempting the Sierras.  In fact, we later drove to Las Vegas for ditch day, but that's as far as we got.

With my own wanderlust, I admired these adventurers and even did my senior paper on Francis Parkman's The Oregon Trail.  Then, maybe a decade ago, I learned that family members had made the trip in 1845, ending up in Sonoma in time to participate in what's been called The Bear Flag Revolt--when the settlers declared California a republic, independent of Mexico.  So ... when I saw Lillian Schlissel's Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey at a recent library sale for $2, I bought it.

I found that with few exceptions, women only made the trip because their men-folk made it.  For men, it was a good time in their lives to go--whether to start over, escape debt, look for gold, or "simply" follow their adventuring spirit.  For many of the women, however, it was the worst time, for most were in the middle of their child-bearing, child-rearing years.  A good fifth of them started out or became pregnant on the trip.  Such personal matters, however, were not discussed.  Diaries did not refer to pregnancy.  Nor to child-birth other than to mention (almost in passing) that someone in the next wagon had a new sister or a new son.  Or that a woman and her new-born had just been buried--only then to discover that the woman had died in child-birth since the diarist had only ever referred to her as "being sick."  Nor did child-birth hold up the day's travel ... or at least not for long.  Stopping meant possible confrontation with Indians.  Or eating up food reserves.  Or running the risk of having the rest of the wagon train carry on without you, then making an unforeseen turn-off and never catching up again.  It took one woman something like three years before she learned where her children were.  (As I recall, she'd ended up in California and they in Oregon. She obviously hadn't even known if they were alive.)

In that one Nevada stretch (as I learned later), there were innumerable animal carcasses and graves in what were still the early years of migration.  Even from the beginning of the trip, illness was a constant threat.  Cholera was rampant as was dysentery.  Children fell out of wagons and were run over before anyone was the wiser.  River-crossing drownings were not uncommon.  And then a woman hoped that another woman would be around to help her give birth.

Then, too, finding a good burial site could be agonizing. The soil was often too hard to dig deep graves, so wolves habitually dug them up.  Or Indians did, wanting the deceased's clothing.  Some travelers buried their dead on the trail itself so that the wheel imprints would disguise the grave.  Of course, it would be impossible to find later if one ever wanted to return to collect the remains and bury them closer to home.  And markers were generally useless:  they simply could not withstand the weather. 

As for the Indians, the emigrants were constantly apprehensive, sometimes with reason, sometimes not.  Being better at hunting and fishing, the Indians often bartered their catch ... or helped ferry wagons across a river for buttons, socks, shirts, blankets.  Sometimes, on waking, travelers found that their blanket had been stolen in the middle of the night.  Or they found the cholera they'd by-passed a week or two earlier had just begun infecting the region they were now entering--passed along by the Indians who, in stealing the clothing of those who died of cholera, had now contracted the disease.

Since the women felt that the long trip eroded their social sensibilities, they did their best to keep up appearances.  Though old photos show them in men's boots when the rains and mud got too bad, they also show them in ribbons and bows, in starched white aprons, in petticoats.  And petticoats proved useful as well.  In the tree-less, bush-less prairie, a woman required the assistance of another woman with a good full skirt.  As the author says, "So simple a matter as bodily functions on a terrain that provided no shelter could make daily life an agony of embarrassment when there was no other woman to make of her extended skirt a curtain." (1)  

Here's a part of that great tree-less plain.  It's an early evening shot I took out my window when taking the train one summer.

As well as doing the domestic chores and caring for the children, women sometimes drove the ox teams.  Or they collected buffalo chips for fuel as they walked.  Or they searched for berries.  One "managed to roll some dough on a wagon seat and bake a pie over hot rocks in order to lift meals out of the tedium of beans and coffee." (2)

After reading ninety-some diaries, the author says, "One must suspect, finally, that many women judged the heroic adventure of their men as some kind of outrageous folly thrust upon them by obedience to patriarchal ritual." (3)  But she concludes that "when disaster struck, when a husband or father died, the women picked up their children and continued on.  There was no turning back." (4)

(1) p.98

(2) p.13

(3) p.15

(4) p.158