Covered Wagon Women, Volume 2

Covered Wagon Women, Volume 2
Author: Kenneth L. Holmes
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2020-08-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1496225562

The women who traveled west in covered wagons during the 1840s speak through these letters and diaries. Here are the voices of Tamsen Donner and young Virginia Reed, members of the ill-fated Donner party; Patty Sessions, the Mormon midwife who delivered five babies on the trail between Omaha and Salt Lake City; Rachel Fisher, who buried both her husband and her little girl before reaching Oregon. Still others make themselves heard, starting out from different places and recording details along the way, from the mundane to the soul-shattering and spirit-lifting.

Covered Wagon Women: 1852, The California Trail

Covered Wagon Women: 1852, The California Trail
Author: Kenneth L. Holmes
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 1995-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780803272910

In 1852 a record number of women helped keep the wagons rolling over the perilous western trails. The fourth volume of Covered Wagon Women is devoted to families headed for California that year. Diaries and letters of six pioneer women describe the rigors en route, trailside celebrations and tragedies, the scourge of cholera, and encounters with the Indians.

Covered Wagon Women, Volume 1

Covered Wagon Women, Volume 1
Author: Kenneth L. Holmes
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2020-08-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1496225546

The women who traveled west in covered wagons during the 1840s speak through these letters and diaries. Here are the voices of Tamsen Donner and young Virginia Reed, members of the ill-fated Donner party; Patty Sessions, the Mormon midwife who delivered five babies on the trail between Omaha and Salt Lake City; Rachel Fisher, who buried both her husband and her little girl before reaching Oregon. Still others make themselves heard, starting out from different places and recording details along the way, from the mundane to the soul-shattering and spirit-lifting.

Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey

Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey
Author: Lillian Schlissel
Publisher: Schocken
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2011-08-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307803171

An expanded edition of one of the most original and provocative works of American history of the last decade, which documents the pioneering experiences and grit of American frontier women.

True Sisters

True Sisters
Author: Sandra Dallas
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2012-04-24
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250005027

Four women seeking the promise of salvation and prosperity in a new land.

Daily Life in a Covered Wagon

Daily Life in a Covered Wagon
Author: Paul Erickson
Publisher: Turtleback Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1997-07
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780613028387

Describes what it was like traveling on the Oregon Trail, including what travelers ate, wore, and saw along the route

New Women in the Old West

New Women in the Old West
Author: Winifred Gallagher
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2021-07-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0735223254

A riveting history of the American West told for the first time through the pioneering women who used the challenges of migration and settlement as opportunities to advocate for their rights, and transformed the country in the process Between 1840 and 1910, hundreds of thousands of men and women traveled deep into the underdeveloped American West, lured by the prospect of adventure and opportunity, and galvanized by the spirit of Manifest Destiny. Alongside this rapid expansion of the United States, a second, overlapping social shift was taking place: survival in a settler society busy building itself from scratch required two equally hardworking partners, compelling women to compromise eastern sensibilities and take on some of the same responsibilities as their husbands. At a time when women had very few legal or economic--much less political--rights, these women soon proved they were just as essential as men to westward expansion. Their efforts to attain equality by acting as men's equals paid off, and well before the Nineteenth Amendment, they became the first American women to vote. During the mid-nineteenth century, the fight for women's suffrage was radical indeed. But as the traditional domestic model of womanhood shifted to one that included public service, the women of the West were becoming not only coproviders for their families but also town mothers who established schools, churches, and philanthropies. At a time of few economic opportunities elsewhere, they claimed their own homesteads and graduated from new, free coeducational colleges that provided career alternatives to marriage. In 1869, the men of the Wyoming Territory gave women the right to vote--partly to persuade more of them to move west--but with this victory in hand, western suffragists fought relentlessly until the rest of the region followed suit. By 1914 most western women could vote--a right still denied to women in every eastern state. In New Women in the Old West, Winifred Gallagher brings to life the riveting history of the little-known women--the White, Black, and Asian settlers, and the Native Americans and Hispanics they displaced--who played monumental roles in one of America's most transformative periods. Like western history in general, the record of women's crucial place at the intersection of settlement and suffrage has long been overlooked. Drawing on an extraordinary collection of research, Gallagher weaves together the striking legacy of the persistent individuals who not only created homes on weather-wracked prairies and built communities in muddy mining camps, but also played a vital, unrecognized role in the women's rights movement and forever redefined the "American woman."

New Sources of Indian History, 1850–1891

New Sources of Indian History, 1850–1891
Author: Stanley Vestal
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2015-07-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0806153741

More than a century has passed since that winter morning in 1890 when the Indian police killed Sitting Bull and destroyed the power of his great Sioux Nation. Yet only recently were the facts about Sitting Bull and the Sioux being sifted from the fables that have grown up in the interim. In New Sources of Indian History, Stanley Vestal traced scores of historical threads, obtained firsthand, which helped reveal the fabric of Sioux life, warfare, and relations with the whites from 1850 to 1891. This miscellany brings together the many phases of existence the Sioux knew when buffalo still roamed the shores of the Missouri, cultural aspects they lost when Indian agencies and military posts replaced the council fire. More than a series of episodes hung on the thread of time, this book portrays a many-colored pattern of American Indian personalities—from Sitting Bull, the leader of a mighty warrior society, to Black Bull, the Indian trickster, who would have sold Sioux lands to whites by the pound. For readers of Vestal’s Sitting Bull (1932) this volume presents proof of the facts set forth in that remarkable biography.

Pioneer Women

Pioneer Women
Author: Joanna Stratton
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2013-05-28
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1476753598

From a rediscovered collection of autobiographical accounts written by hundreds of Kansas pioneer women in the early twentieth century, Joanna Stratton has created a collection hailed by Newsweek as “uncommonly interesting” and “a remarkable distillation of primary sources.” Never before has there been such a detailed record of women’s courage, such a living portrait of the women who civilized the American frontier. Here are their stories: wilderness mothers, schoolmarms, Indian squaws, immigrants, homesteaders, and circuit riders. Their personal recollections of prairie fires, locust plagues, cowboy shootouts, Indian raids, and blizzards on the plains vividly reveal the drama, danger and excitement of the pioneer experience. These were women of relentless determination, whose tenacity helped them to conquer loneliness and privation. Their work was the work of survival, it demanded as much from them as from their men—and at last that partnership has been recognized. “These voices are haunting” (The New York Times Book Review), and they reveal the special heroism and industriousness of pioneer women as never before.

The California Trail

The California Trail
Author: George R. Stewart
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 1983-01-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780803291430

In 1841 and 1842 small groups of emigrants tried to discover a route to California passable by wagons. Without reliable maps or guides, they pushed ahead, retreated, detoured, split up, and regrouped, reaching their destination only at great cost of property and life. But they had found a trail, or cleared one, and by their mistakes had shown others how to take wagon trains across half a continent. By 1844 a great migration was in progress. Each successive party learned from those who went before where to cross rivers and mountains, when to rest, when to forge ahead, and how to find food and water. Increased experience was translated into better wagon designs, improved understanding of climate and terrain, and better-supplied and -organized caravans. George R. Stewart's California Trail describes the trail's year-by-year changes as weather conditions, new exploration, and the changing character of emigrants affected it. Successes and disasters (like the Donner party's fate) are presented in nearly personal detail. More than a history of the trail, this book tells how to travel it, what it felt like, what was feared and hoped for.