I don’t recall where I bought Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey except to say that I’m sure it was on a trip out West. I am frequently inspired to buy books like this when I travel, but unfortunately they don’t always get cracked open.
Well, for some reason, I recently took this off my bookshelf, where it had been neglected for years, and started reading—and was immediately engrossed. Despite the book’s academic tone, its stories of women crossing the continent between 1840 and 1870 are vivid and gripping.
Women–most of whom would rather have stayed back East with friends and family–usually crossed the continent at the insistence of their husbands or fathers. They often had children in tow. Pregnancy and childbirth on the trail were so commonplace that they were barely mentioned in the diaries of women and often not mentioned at all in accounts left by men.
“How these women dealt with the risks of childbirth, how they felt about the prospect of being delivered by the side of the road, in a tent or in a wagon, is untold,” writes author Lillian Schlissel. “The women must have watched the horizon anxiously in the last days of pregnancy, trying to learn if the weather would be calm or threatening, if the wagons were near or far from water, if another woman was at hand, if the road was smooth or rocky.”
The women carefully counted and noted graves they saw along the road (Schlissel found this heartbreakingly common among the accounts), cooked in primitive conditions, had to unpack and pack the wagon at each stop, slept outdoors in rain and mud. Children fell out of wagons, were run over, fell ill and died. Dust storms, mosquitoes, hail storms, sun, snow, dysentery, cholera …
One account of a river crossing, from a fragment of letter written between 1856 and ’57, haunts me.
“…a woman was standing on the bank, she said to mother, do you see that man with the red warmer on well that is my husband and while she spoke the boat struck and went down and she had to stand within call of him and see him drownd. O my heart was sore for that woman and three miles from the river we saw another women with 8 children stand beside the grave of her husband and her oldest son so sick that she could not travel …”
The women formed a sisterhood, caring for each other in childbirth, tending the sick together, helping each other maintain modesty when nature called on barren terrain by holding out long skirts to form a screen, and providing the kind of companionship for each other that only women can. Sad and lonely were the women who traveled with no others for support.
I won’t soon forget the stories I read in this book. It’s a whole different view of America’s Westward expansion.
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