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Journal Entry 1 by loafingcactus from Raleigh, North Carolina USA on Sunday, September 08, 2002
 I recommend this book highly because it is full of interesting photos and facts and also because it focuses on the travel. I think I've read a lot more about life in the west then the actual trip itself, but considering the amount of time and effort required, the trip was a phase in the lives of these people as much as living in some settled place would be.
On page 50 of the book is a photo of the elderly Mrs. Sarah Helmick sitting in front of a modern American flag. In 1845 (p. 49) she and her husband set West the morning after their wedding. Soon after, they lost all of their possessions. Nonetheless, they successfully reached Oregon. It just amazes me to see the photos of these little old ladies in comfortable circumstances and realize how recently they did this nearly-impossible thing.
It is a little bit difficult to connect with the stilted photos of the people when they were young. Someone will be described as attractive, but no one looks attractive in those photos. However, on page 149 there is a photo of four adult standing in front of a cabin an an infant in the doorway. The mother of the infant appears to be amazingly beautiful, perhaps one would compare her to Julia Roberts. Can you picture Julia Roberts living on the frontier?
The book tells that many of the women didn't want to make the trip, and the more reticent the woman, the more likely she was to take particular note of graves along the trail. One woman who was known to particularly opposed to the trip wrote a count of graves and dead animals passed on the road each and every day of the trip. Her impressive detail is noted on pages 112-113 of the book.
On pages 56-57 there is a really neat letter from a traveler's second husband. With 10% of the men dieing on the trail, many women had the opportunity to settle land themselves or freely choose a husband that would be most advantageous to them. The book states that Yankee husbands were considered best, and this letter is from one such Yankee husband.
The book focuses on the lives of women, apparently a task not very difficult because them women themselves focused on each other and tended to write of their own community, omitting references to the men. What I find interesting, as we look back on the gender roles of the time and think of men ("the patriarchy") as the enforcers of female roles, is the information about how women protected their female roles. On page 85 the text is:
"In their steadfast clinging to ribbons and bows, to starched white aprons and petticoats, the women suggest that the frontier, in a profound manner, threatened their sense of social role and sexual identity. The dress of the Indian woman was, after all, both chaste and practical. The fervor with which it was rejected suggests something of the anxiety of the emigrant woman lest the frontier upset the careful balances that had been worked out between husbands and wives in rural communities.
"Precisely because work roles were blurred on the frontier, and because women were often called upon to do chores recognized as men's work, dress became a primary mode of asserting the delineation of the sexes. Dress was emblematic of the intention of women to restore the domestic sphere as soon as possible thereby limiting women's work to the house. Starching white aprons on the frontier must have required extraordinary discipline, but those starched aprons betokened delimited work roles that frontier women would not lightly forgo."
The text ends (p. 158) with the statement, "Their legacy to history was the survival of the family on the westward journey." It is amazing to look at the pictures of complete dislocation as these family were traveling in their covered wagons, and then look at the established lives the children and children of the women have. There is mention in one of these stories about a women who lost her entire family except one child, and that child became the wife of a California state legislator.
The book ends with the text of several diaries. I in particular liked the diary of Lydia Allen Rudd, who started her journey with her husband in 1852. She has a wry humor that I appreciated. Describing a man who is traveling to California with nothing but a wheelbarrow (p. 189), she writes "I think that he will get tired wheeling his way through the world by the time he gets to California." Later she sees a wagon being pulled by five harnessed men (p. 190). She writes, "They must be some of the persevering kind I think Wanting to go to California more than I do." As is typical of her script, she uses a capital letter for a new sentence, but only uses a period at the end of a complete idea or paragraph.
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Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey (Studies in the Life of Women)
