Covered Wagon Women, Volume 5: Diaries and Letters from the Western Trails, 1852: The Oregon Trail

by Kenneth L. Holmes

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803272944
• ISBN13: 9780803272941
• Release Date: June 1997
• Publisher: Bison Books
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Stirring sunbonnet narratives

Once again, these diaries and letters of the "Covered Wagon Women" series detail the extraordinary stamina of early day pioneers traveling the Oregon Trail.The year 1852 not only had the heaviest trail traffic westward, but it was also rife with hundreds of human cholera deaths. As Parthenia Blank solemnly relates, "it makes it seem very gloomy to us to see so many of the emigrants buried on the plains". At the end of her journey, Martha Read had counted 750 graves, "but I suppose that a small part, for there were so many campt off from the road and buried their dead". Life on the trail also took its toll on livestock. Martha Read further notes the tally of "600 dead cattle and 50 horses" from "hollow horn"(anthrax), alkali water, poisonous plants, "want of good care", little food, lack of foot care, etc.Even in the early stages while crossing the Iowa River, Polly Coon is quoted as saying, "What a brittle thread has life and how uncertain that another moment is ours" after witnessing three men drowning during the river fording.Seventeen year old Abigail Jane Scott's lengthy diary is complete not only of daily routines, observations of the countryside and the many hardships associated with trail life, but also the vivid and harrowing descriptions of the deaths of her mother and brother during the journey. She further says, "If it wasn't for hope, the heart would fail".Editing by Dr. Kenneth Holmes and David Duniway brilliant. Introduction by Dr. Ruth Moynihan excellent.