Covered Wagon Women, Volume 1: Diaries and Letters from the Western Trails, 1840-1849 [Paperback]

Kenneth L. Holmes (Editor), Anne M. Butler (Introduction)

Book Description

Series: Covered Wagon Women | Publication Date: September 1, 1995

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“The diaries and letters . . . throb with excitement, pain, and mind-boggling determination.”—Kliatt

(Kliatt )

“An outstanding collection of primary sources written by women moving west.”—Wagon Tracks

(Wagon Tracks )

“Kenneth L. Holmes made the very wise editorial decision not to update, revise, or parenthetically correct the quirky and often fascinating prose of these nineteenth-century women. . . . The writing is rich with the sounds of common speech and jargon . . . and it should be a gold mine for students of everyday life.”—John Mack Faragher, Western Historical Quarterly

(John Mack Faragher Western Historical Quarterly )

“Covered Wagon Women is to be valued. . . . First, it brings together in a single edition a major collection of the diaries of overland women. . . . Second, this is probably the most perfectly documented edition a researcher will find.”—Lillian Schlissel, Pacific Historical Review

(Lillian Schlissel Pacific Historical Review )

About the Author

Kenneth L. Holmes was a professor of history at Western Oregon State College. He edited and compiled Covered Wagon Women, drawing on archives and private sources.

 

Anne M. Butler, a professor of history at Utah State University–Logan, is the author of Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery: Prostitutes in the American West.

Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: Bison Books; 1st Bison Book Printing 1995 edition (September 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803272774
• ISBN-13: 978-0803272774
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #121,632 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

76 of 78 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A true look into the mind of the women pioneers. Exceptional, September 21, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Covered Wagon Women, Volume 1: Diaries and Letters from the Western Trails, 1840-1849 (Paperback)

The writer left the letters and diaries as the women wrote them which I feel makes this book exceptional. So much is written about the men who helped pioneer in the west, this book gives the womens side. It is facinating to look into the everyday life of these woman and imagine how they were able to overcome such trials. You wonder how they were able to leave husbands and children, who had died, to have to bury them out alone in the wilderness. This book gives the reader a look into these brave women and the hardships they endured. It is like a trip back in time. This is the first time I have read a book of this type and this one made me anxious to read the rest, which I have allready started.

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Marvelous Compilation of Frontier Womens' Experiences, March 23, 2002

By 

Kelley Perrigin - See all my reviews

This review is from: Covered Wagon Women, Volume 1: Diaries and Letters from the Western Trails, 1840-1849 (Paperback)

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.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Stories of the Overland Trails, April 14, 2004

By 

Roger D. Launius "Historian" (Washington, D.C., United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Covered Wagon Women, Volume 1: Diaries and Letters from the Western Trails, 1840-1849 (Paperback)

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.