Covered Wagon Women: Diaries and Letters from the Western Trails, 1840-1849 (Covered Wagon Women)

Rating:
Summary: Esteemed
Review: Authentic, bold and openhearted accounts from 1840's emigrant women. Historians and the general reader should be so fortunate that these noble women took the time out of their busy, hectic days to write letters and diaries of their westward travels. Secondly, we should also be grateful that these narratives have survived for us future readers to somewhat comprehend their stamina, perserverence and gutsy character.
Heartfelt accounts of river fordings, lack of food and/or water for livestock and people, Indian misconducts, wagon breakdowns, disease and death of loved ones, vivid landscape and countryside descriptions and the numerous day to day occurences for survival. To mention a few of the dozen writings:
Betsey Bayley and Anna Marie King's accounts of the perilous 1845 Stephen Meek Cutoff.
Tabitha Brown's 1846 account of emigration along the Applegate Cutoff.
Letters from Tamsen Donner and thirteen year old Virginia Reed's trip with the horrific Donner Party of 1846.
Patty Sessions who drove her own wagon to Salt Lake in 1847 and delivered several babies along the way (midwifed nearly 4,000 deliveries in her lifetime).
Rachel Fisher's travels in 1847 who lost her husband and a child during the emigration.
Elizabeth Dixon Smith's party of 1847 that lost several emigrants during their journey.
Editing by Dr. Holmes is second to none.

Rating:
Summary: Esteemed
Review: Authentic, bold and openhearted accounts from 1840's emigrant women. Historians and the general reader should be so fortunate that these noble women took the time out of their busy, hectic days to write letters and diaries of their westward travels. Secondly, we should also be grateful that these narratives have survived for us future readers to somewhat comprehend their stamina, perserverence and gutsy character.
Heartfelt accounts of river fordings, lack of food and/or water for livestock and people, Indian misconducts, wagon breakdowns, disease and death of loved ones, vivid landscape and countryside descriptions and the numerous day to day occurences for survival. To mention a few of the dozen writings:
Betsey Bayley and Anna Marie King's accounts of the perilous 1845 Stephen Meek Cutoff.
Tabitha Brown's 1846 account of emigration along the Applegate Cutoff.
Letters from Tamsen Donner and thirteen year old Virginia Reed's trip with the horrific Donner Party of 1846.
Patty Sessions who drove her own wagon to Salt Lake in 1847 and delivered several babies along the way (midwifed nearly 4,000 deliveries in her lifetime).
Rachel Fisher's travels in 1847 who lost her husband and a child during the emigration.
Elizabeth Dixon Smith's party of 1847 that lost several emigrants during their journey.
Editing by Dr. Holmes is second to none.

Rating:
Summary: Marvelous Compilation of Frontier Womens' Experiences
Review: I got this book yesterday in the mail and it is already read. This book takes letters, diaries and other correspondence of women who shaped the frontier and gives the reader an insight into the hardships that their families faced making the long western crossing to the hope of a better future in Oregon and California.
The author has tapped many sources in libraries all across the west to get this information together. He makes a point in the introduction that this is information compiled nowhere else. He deals with lesser known narratives except he does include a journal from Virginia Reed a child travelling with the Donner Party and Tabitha Brown one of the top 10 figures in shaping Oregon history.
Very informative and educational! Can't wait to start the next book in the series.

Rating:
Summary: Like Going Back in Time
Review: I have read all 11 books in this series over and over, and I would recomend them all. It is like looking over the shoulder of the rugged pioneer women as they took time, almost every day, to document what would probably be the most important event in their lives. Tired,wet, and sometimes hungry, they brought stability to the west. I have also traveled and seen many sights that still remain as evidence of the Oregon Trail. We can't travel back in time, but this is the next best thing!

Rating:
Summary: Great Stories of the Overland Trails
Review: The study of women's history has blossomed during the past several decades, and the result has been the production of several outstanding works on the subject. "Covered Wagon Women" is an important contribution to this growing field of investigation. It is a useful work that makes available to historian and buff alike several fascinating letters and diaries written by women involved in the westward movement of the 1840s. The editor, Kenneth L. Holmes and the publisher have undertaken an ambitious project, and, this work, and others in this series, represent a benchmark in this field's historiography.

The material presented in this first volume has been arranged by the editor into twelve chapters with entries by fourteen women. These accounts are representative rather than exhaustive. However, there are important documents discussing the experiences of several intelligent and articulate women on the Oregon, California, Santa Fe, and Mormon trails. The editor chose his documents well. They are all primary resources, written at the time of the incidents described or immediately thereafter. More important, Holmes did not reprint commonly used diaries. I was pleasantly surprised that Susan Magoffin's diary of her trip to Santa Fe in 1846 was not included in the collection. It is an outstanding diary but readily available elsewhere. Instead, Holmes scoured the nation's archives and libraries, and solicited copies of documents from individuals, to assemble what should be considered an exemplary collection of manuscripts.

Holmes's editorial work is also outstanding. He allows the individual writers to tell their own story without correcting grammar, punctuation, and syntax. He adds, moreover, useful annotations providing additional background information about key personalities and events without overediting, certainly no easy task judging from the number of edited works that suffer from this defect.

The editor gives considerable attention to Mormon women during the westward trek to Utah. Holmes includes as a major piece within the collection a diary of Patty Bartlett Sessions, dated June 21, 1847, through September 26, 1847. The original, located in the Historical Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has been well used by scholars investigating the Mormon trek to Utah, the role of women in the Church and in western history, and the development of medical treatment, but its publication for a wider audience is most welcome.

While "Covered Wagon Women" is a fine book of lasting historical value, it could have been made better with additional work. For instance, the editor chose to omit both a bibliography and an index, opting for the issuance of a cumulative bibliography and index in the tenth volume of the series. This decision will, of course, make the volume less usable by researchers in the interim. Additionally, Holmes is inconsistent in his editorial work. He is at his best in his treatment of the diary of Patty Sessions. First, it has an excellent introduction that draws heavily upon the research of such leaders in the study of Mormon women on the frontier as Leonard J. Arrington and Maureen Ursenbach Beecher. Second, it includes a useful dramatis personae, briefly describing characters mentioned in the diary. Finally, Holmes attaches a solid bibliography pointing the direction for further study. In contrast, Holmes's editing of other diaries and letters possesses nothing approaching the depth of scholarship he demonstrates in his work on Sessions. Most other entries contain only a cursory introduction, and none has either a description of characters or bibliography. It would have been commendable had Holmes been able to bring to the other accounts in this volume the fine editorial work he displays in his work on the Sessions diary.

In spite of these shortcomings, Kenneth Holmes has compiled a well-balanced, enjoyable book that should be of interest to all readers concerned with the study of women, the frontier movement, the overland trail, and Mormonism. This type of documentary history, although until recent years considered somewhat esoteric, should be encouraged, for it can open entirely new avenues of investigation when handled by skilled historians.