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: 277
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.

Best of Covered Wagon Women

Best of Covered Wagon Women
Author: Kenneth L. Holmes
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2014-10-20
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0806183020

The diaries and letters of women on the overland trails in the mid- to late nineteenth century are treasured documents. These eleven selections drawn from the multivolume Covered Wagon Women series present the best first-person trail accounts penned by women in their teens who traveled west between 1846 and 1898. Ranging in age from eleven to nineteen, unmarried and without children of their own, these diarists had experiences different from those of older women who carried heavier responsibilities with them on the trail. These letters and diaries reflect both the unique perspective of youthful optimism and the experiences common among all female emigrants. The young women write of friendship and family, trail hardships, and explorations such as visits to Indian gravesites. Some like Sallie Hester even write of enjoying the company of men, and many speculate about marriage prospects. Domestic roles did not define the girls’ trail experience; only the four oldest in this collection recorded helping with chores. As they journey through Indian lands, these writers show that even their youth did not prevent them from holding notions of white racial superiority. Two of the selections are newly published, having appeared only in limited-distribution collector’s editions of the original series. For all readers captivated by the first Best of Covered Wagon Women collection, this new volume’s focus on youthful travelers adds a fresh perspective to life on the trail.

Covered Wagon Women, Volume 5

Covered Wagon Women, Volume 5
Author: Kenneth L. Holmes
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2020-08-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1496225589

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 the wagons to keep warm, tasting buffalo meat, trying to climb Independence Rock. She meets her future husband, Benjamin Duniway, at the end of the Oregon Trail and, in the years to come, finds fame as a writer and a leader of the suffrage movement in the Northwest. Her grandson, David Duniway, edited her trail diary for Covered Wagon Women. This volume includes the equally vivid diaries of other women who rode the wagons in 1852. Polly Coon of Wisconsin recalls trading with the Indians. Martha Read, starting from Illinois, is particularly alert to the suffering of the animals, noting hundreds of dead cows and horses along the way. Cecilia Adams and Parthenia Blank, twin sisters from Illinois, jointly chronicle their once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Diary of Sallie Hester

Diary of Sallie Hester
Author: Sallie Hester
Publisher: Capstone
Total Pages: 33
Release: 2014
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 1476541930

"Presents excerpts from the diary of Sallie Hester, a teenager who traveled West on the Oregon Trail in a wagon train in the mid-1800s"--

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

The Oregon Trail

The Oregon Trail
Author: Rinker Buck
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2015-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1451659164

A new American journey.

America's Women

America's Women
Author: Gail Collins
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 602
Release: 2009-10-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0061739227

Rich in detail, filled with fascinating characters, and panoramic in its sweep, this magnificent, comprehensive work tells for the first time the complete story of the American woman from the Pilgrims to the 21st-century In this sweeping cultural history, Gail Collins explores the transformations, victories, and tragedies of women in America over the past 300 years. As she traces the role of females from their arrival on the Mayflower through the 19th century to the feminist movement of the 1970s and today, she demonstrates a boomerang pattern of participation and retreat. In some periods, women were expected to work in the fields and behind the barricades—to colonize the nation, pioneer the West, and run the defense industries of World War II. In the decades between, economic forces and cultural attitudes shunted them back into the home, confining them to the role of moral beacon and domestic goddess. Told chronologically through the compelling true stories of individuals whose lives, linked together, provide a complete picture of the American woman’s experience, Untitled is a landmark work and major contribution for us all.

Women's Voices from the Oregon Trail

Women's Voices from the Oregon Trail
Author: Susan G. Butruille
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1994
Genre: Frontier and pioneer life
ISBN: 9780963483980

Tracing the trail and tracking down and writing about places of interest about women: landmarks, statues, signposts, markers, gravestones.