Quick Facts

Preemption

What a farm family wanted most was a government policy that would permit a farmer to “squat” on a piece of land. that is, to build a house and clear the trees, and then after the region had been surveyed, to purchase his land at the minimum auction price without being outbid by the speculator. In 1842 the first “Preemption Bill” was passed. It protected the farmer who had made improvements. It also whetted his appetite for free land. If a farmer improved new land. “homesteaded,” was he not performing a national service and benefiting the national economy by bringing the wilderness under cultivation?

Women's Struggle on the Trail

“If we are to trust and respect their revelations in their diaries and recollections, the greatest struggle of women on the trail was the struggle to endure the hardship and suffering without becoming bitter and resentful, without becoming the carping wife, without burdening their marital relationship with the bad feelings that burned inside them. If we are to judge them not by our standards but their own, we will not resurrect and applaud every little act of womanly resistance and mean feminine spirit but examine and attempt to understand the powers of endurance that permitted them to act out the role of good wife through the whole hated experience. The women’s materials give us a penetrating look at the feminine psychology of social dependency.”

Slavery in Oregon and California

Oregon was less hospitable to blacks than many of them had hoped. The territorial legislature passed laws prohibiting admission to black settlers, even though exceptions were made on individual petition. When Oregon was admitted to the union in 1857, a Free Negro Admission Article was proposed for the state’s constitution. but it was defeated, and the small number of blacks who had made their way to Oregon lived uneasily until the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.

California, on the other hand, outlawed slavery within its boundaries in 1850 because miners feared the appearance of slave labor. The mines soon became places where an exotic mixture of races and nationalities shouldered one another in the feverish search for wealth. Mary Ballou wrote home that she lived in a mining camp caUed “Negro Bar,” where “French and Duch and Scoth and Jews and Italions and Sweeds and Chineese and Indians” were all panning for gold. Even before the discovery of gold. California had been settled by men and women of Mexican, lndian, and African descent. Eighteen percent of the population, according to a Spanish census of 1790, were of other than Anglo-American origin. By 1849, San Francisco blacks had formed a “mutual Benefit and Relief Society” of their own. By 1854, that city had three black churches, and within the next decade there were three black newspapers and as many black churches.

Women's Trail Diaries

“Another important distinction to be made in Overland Trail narrative – almost as significant as that between diary and memoir – is that between narratives written by men and those written by women. When we do read detailed and sensitive descriptions of Western topography, they are likely to have been written by women. Not that females had, particularly, more leisure time than men in which to write their fuller accounts of the trail. Rather, they were, in general, better educated and more inclined as well as better able to depict their experiences in writing. Such also were the observations of Sandra Myers (University of Texas, Arlington) who was at the Huntington Library during the summer of 1979, researching and writing a book on women on the Overland Trail.

Linguist Ann Stewart, examining trail narratives for a forthcoming book on the Western contribution of speech to American English, found the men’s narratives much more interesting than the women’s. The men’s idiosyncratic spelling and folksy syntax give far better clues to the spoken speech of the time; words were spelled the way they sounded to the writer, giving the skilled phonologist a good idea of how the writer spoke. But the women are usually of little help this way; they respect conventions of grammar and spelling. “

Women's Need for Privacy on the Trail

In some measure, women were distressed at losing the daily exchanges, the comfonable conversation. and the sharing of chores with female kin and frtends. But the need of women for other women on the Overland ‘frail was also more critical. So simple a matter as bodily functions on a terrain that provided no shelter could make daily life an agony of embarrassment when there was no other woman to make of her extended skirt a curtain. Excretion and evacuation could become unspeakable problems without another woman or women to make a curtain of modesty. Resistance to the appearance of bloomers on the frontier becomes more understandable when one conslders that the reduced skins had implications beyond fashion. Long and full skirts on the lrail were soon begrimed and muddy, but they were worn because of their properties as curtains. Two women together, long skirts extended, lent privacy to a third; and even one woman could provide a measure of propriety to a sister on the ‘frail. But a woman alone, where could she hide from the eyes of the men? There was periodic menstruation-and the lack of water. There was periodic dysentery–and the lack of water. There was occasional childbirth-and the lack of water. And all of these functions were comphcated by the absence of shelter and by a lack of privacy. Only In contemplating the utter emptiness of some of the terrain the emigrants crossed can one comprehend the panic felt by women at the prospect of being alone among men. There were days when the horizon was not broken by a tree or hill. There were just miles of flat land. Somehow it seemed as if every vicissitude of the road might be borne as long as a woman could preserve the pale of modesty and privacy. When these were stripped away, those aspects of life that came under the heaviest taboos of society-the bodily functions of excretion and childbirth-were exposed to the eyes of men. The need women felt to travel beside at least one other woman was hardly neurotic; it was a reflection of the very real and and essential services. The daily services women performed for each other.

Spur to Emigration on the 1840s

In 1831, a Massachusetts schoolteacher incorporated the “American Society for Encouraging the Settlement of the Oregon Territory.” His ambition was to “repeat with appropriate variations the history of the Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay.” But the real spur to emigration into Oregon was the prolonged depression that swept the country in 1837· By the year’s end, banks across the nation had closed, and by 1839 wages fell 30 to so percent. Twenty thousand unemployed laborers demonstrated in Philadelphia, and in New York two hundred thousand people were wondering how they would survive the winter. Horace Greeley told the unemployed to “go West,” but the Midwest was as hard-hit as New York. In the Mississippi valley, prices fell lower and lower. Wheat was ten cents a bushel, and corn could be given away. Steamboats on the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers were burning grain for fuel. As farmers surveyed the debacle, they could find fewer and fewer reasons not to escape to better lands.)

And there was another factor. In a fashion that men and women of the twentieth century will never fully understand, farmers of the Mississippi valley and the Plains states had begun to feel “crowded.·~ One farmer said that the reason he had to emigrate from western Illinois was that “people were settling right under his nose,” although his nearest neighbor was twelve miles away. He moved to Missouri, but that did not satisfy, and soon he abandoned a half-finished clearing and packed his family and household goods onto a wagon and made his way to Oregon where there was only the Pacific Ocean beside him.’

Women's Influence on the Decision to Emigrate

Faragher writes of his sample of women’s diaries: “Not one wife initiated the idea [of migrating]; It was always the husband. Less than a quarter of the women writers recorded agreeing with their restless husbands; most of them accepted it as a husband-made decision to which they could only acquiesce. But nearly a third wrote of their objections and how they moved only reluctantly” (Women and Men on the Overland Trail, p. 163). On the other hand, Julie Roy Jeffrey found not only that women participated effectively in the decision-making process, but that “evidence corroborates female power to affect decision making. . . . Whatever ideology had to say about the necessity of female submission, women felt free to disrupt male emigration project and … had bargaining powers.” (See Frontier Women, pp. 30-31.) The debate on the participation of women in the decision to go West is an important one Insofar as it presents a major testing of the relationship between husband and wife in America at mid-century .

Women's Recording of Gravesites

There is a kind of murderous precision in the women’s recounting of mishap. Surely, the accounts must be viewed as a reflection of the continuing anxieties they felt. But the more one reads these diaries, the more one comes to feel the passionate indictment, the bitter appraisal by the women of the men’s determination to make the journey. However bravely the women started, however they mustered their strength to meet the demands of each day, however they rallied to appreciate the splendors  of the scenery, the women were intimately affected by the journey’s dreadful toll. Their responses depended upon whether their own lives were placed within the processes of childbearing and childrearing, or whether  they were still in their girlhood years. Buoyant spirits are almost always in the diaries of unmarried girls and young wives. Accounts shade and darken in the pages of women whose energies were spent nursing and caring for infants and small children.

Hell on Women and Horses

“It was in the West, in consequence, that women had the greatest status.”‘ Both Smith and Bird have borrowed their views from Arthur Calhoun, with whose opinions, in matters of American family history, one has always to contend.

The frontier helped to liberalize the American family . . .Women stood by their husbands’ side and fought for life and little ones against human and other foes. Ladies whose husbands lost everything threw aside ease and luxury and fared boldly into the far West where they endured without complaint toils, danger, sickness and loneliness. Reciprocity in the marriage relation was the logical consequence where woman bore a man’s share in the struggle for existence.

This was hardly the assessment of contemporaries. Emigrant women, in their own evaluation, came much closer to the of the frontier aphorism; “This country is all right for mendogs, but it’s hell on women and horses.” Perhaps not everyone joined in that consensus, but male and female opinion on the question of the status of women conjoined in curious but revealing manner.”

Emigrant Characteristics

Most of the emigrants shared certain characteristics as a group: they were men and women who had already made one or more moves before in a restless search for better lands. They were children of parents who themselves had moved to new lands. If ever a people could be said to have been “prepared” for the adventure of the Overland Trail, it would have to be these men and women. They possessed the assortment of skills needed to make the journey and start again. They had owned land before, had cleared land before, and were prepared to clear and own land again. And they were young. Most of the population that moved across half the continent were between sixteen and thirty-five years of age.

Lightening the Wagons

“As the emigrants moved up the grade approaching the Rockies, it became obvious that the overloaded wagons had to be lightened, and gradually they discarded materials not essential for survival. Domestic goods, of course, were most easily excluded from the essential category, much to the dismay of the women. “We came across a heavy old fashioned cook stove which some emigrant had hauled all those weary miles mountain and desert, only to discard it at last,” wrote Lavinia Porter. “No doubt some poor forlorn woman was now compelled to do her cooking by the primitive camp fire, perhaps much against her will.” True recalled that by the time hisparty reached the Great Basin all his mother’s camping conveniences had been discarded, greatly adding to her labors and filling her days with anxiety. This anxiety was not only the effect of added work. Books, furniture, knickknacks, chine, daguerreotypes, guitars—the very articles that most helped establish a domestic feel about the camps were the first things be discarded. Lightening the wagons, however necessary, was interpreted by women as a process operating against their interests. In one party a woman “exclaimed over an escritoire of rare workmanship” she had found along the trail “and pitied the poor woman who had to part with it.

“The loss of a sense of home—the inability to ‘keep house’ on the trail—was perhaps the hardest loss to bear, the thing that drove women closest to desperation.”