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.

The wagon trains to California greatly decreased in 1851 as reports of deadly cholera on the trail the year before and strikeouts in gold prospecting became known. Those who did go west about 2,160 men and 1,440 women tended toward Oregon's rich Willamette Valley because of a new federal land law that awarded a husband and wife a full section.

Volume 3 of Covered Wagon Women contains the diaries and letters of six Oregon-bound women, as well as the journal of an English Mormon woman who described her experience all the way from Liverpool to Salt Lake City. The words of these pioneer...

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.

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...

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 with Knight were propelled by religious motives. Hannah King, an Englishwoman and Mormon convert, was headed for Salt Lake City. Her cultured, introspective diary touches on the feelings of sensitive people bound together in a stressful undertaking. Celinda Hines and Rachel Taylor were Methodists seeking their new Canaan in Oregon.Also Oregon-bound in 1853 were Sarah (Sally) Perkins, whose...

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 called bloomers. In 1858 Holmes joined the Pikes Peak gold rush and was the first woman of record to climb the famousmountain.Educator Hannah Clapp traveled to California with a revolver by her side, speaking her mind in a letter included in this volume, which is also enriched by the trail diaries of seven other women. Among them were Sarah Sutton, who died in 1854, just before reaching Oregon s...

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 obtain grain for their livestock and food for themselves. They also sped up the process of mail delivery to remote Western outposts. Tragically, the easing of overland travel coincided with renewed conflicts with the Cheyenne and other Plains Indians. The massacre of Black Kettle s people at Sand Creek instigated two years of bloody reprisals and counterreprisals."Amid this turmoil and change,...

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 observed that one of the men in the overland expedition had buried an infant here yesterday still born. One can only imagine her emotional turmoil she had buried her own daughter three months earlier, just as she and her husband set out for Oregon.While each diarist and letter-writer had her personal joys and sorrows, collectively these invaluable accounts demonstrate the passion and courage of these...

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 husband to Montana in hopes of evading the droughts, grasshoppers, and failed crops that had plagued their farm. Allen and her compatriots, in this volume of Covered Wagon Women, experience a much different journey than their predecessors. Many settlements now await those bound for the West, with amenities such as hotels and restaurants, as well as grain suppliers to provide feed for the horses and mules...

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: thehardy pioneer persevering against all odds. Undeterred by storms, ruthless bandits, towering mountains, and raging epidemics, the women in these volumes suggest why the pioneer represented the highest ideals and aspirations of a young nation. In this concluding volume of the Covered Wagon Women series, we see the final animal-powered overland migrations that were even then yielding to railroad travel and, in a few...