Abigail Jane Scott was seventeen when she left Illinois with her family in the spring of 1852. Her record of the journey west is full of expressive detail: breakfasting in a snowstorm, walking behind
“We traveled this forenoon over the roughest and most desolate piece of ground that was ever made,” wrote Amelia Knight during her 1853 wagon train journey to Oregon. Some of the parties who traveled
Some of the women traveling west in the late 1850s were strong advocates of equal rights for their sex. On the trail, Julia Archibald Holmes and Hannah Keziah Clapp sensibly wore the “freedom costume”
The overland trails in the 1860s witnessed the creation of stage stations to facilitate overland travel. These stations, placed every twenty or thirty miles, ensured that travelers would be able to ob
In their simplicity is their poignancy. On August 7, 1865, Mary Louisa Black noted in her journal that they were “nooning on a nice stream in a valey in the mountains.” A day later she ob
Forty years after the legendary overland travels of Oregon pioneers in the 1840s, Lucy Clark Allen wrote, “the excitement continues.” Economic hard times in Minnesota sent Allen and her h
The stories seem simple—they left, they traveled, they settled—yet the restless westering impulse of Americans created one of the most enduring figures in our frontier pantheon: the hardy pioneer pers
