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Just after the depression of 1837, many Americans were attracted to move westward, where the prospect of free land was encouraging them to settle in the states of Oregon and California. Between 1840 and 1870, many writings were describing the struggle of conquering western frontier. Journeys of people moving to new land were often described as mystic adventure. Lillian Schlissel paid close attention to the lives of women during this period of migration. She has determined that If ever there was a time when men and women turned their psychic energies toward opposite visions, the overland journey was that time.
In Womens Diaries of the Westward Journey Schlissel explores her findings of the lives of women during the period of migration. The author is quoting at length from her sources and including a selection of diaries and reminiscences at the end. Although unmarried adolescents were often exuberant about their experience, for the married women, particularly those with young children, the trip was fraught with danger and fear. Children could fall under wagon wheels or be left behind in the confusion of traveling with as many as one hundred other wagons. There were buffalo stampedes, Indian attacks, snakebites, dysentery, starvation, and cholera many women note individual graves, sometimes one per mile.
In addition, one of every five women was pregnant when the journey began or became so in the course of a trip that guidebooks said would take three to four months, but often took six to eight. Through Lillian Schlissel's fascinating and extremely readable account, we gain a fuller understanding of the journey few of these women wanted to take. In her book, Lillian Schlissel first analyses the information she has researched from the many journals and letters of the women who made the crossing that have been preserved from this period. Several extracts from the diaries of very different women are reproduced so that readers may read for themselves the thoughts and activities of those who committed their feelings to paper.
In many ways America has always been a frontier, from the first pilgrims who settled her untamed shores to the last forty-niner to pack his possessions and head out west. The fact that Americans have created this shining juggernaut of a nation up from a foundation of virgin wilds and expanses shows that she is truly a land of opportunity, and one which was unarguably taken advantage of. The people who lived the frontier were a very special breed, optimistic, steadfast survivors who yearned for something better and ultimately were rewarded for their nisus. The reward for the individual was significant, however; the benefit to the United States herself may be immeasurable. A new type of democracy unlike those seen before was born in America. It is the frontier that set the constitutional government in America apart from previous forms of democracy which only enjoyed success in smaller states.
As the East coast of America was the frontier for Europe, Americans needed somewhere that they could consider their frontier. The West became that frontier, and to Americans it was their place to take hold of and develop communities based on American values and beliefs. The West was a place to get farther away from the influence of Europe on the East coast. The West is the best case of Americanization. "The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought.
It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in a birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for women. A major effect of the frontier and the settlements in the West was the development and growing appreciation of a democracy, to which women had made a great contribution. Not everyone was likely to move west.
Only the people that felt they were capable or strong enough to survive possibly out in the West were the ones to leave the Atlantic coast. This type of selection promoted individualism greatly. Individuals or small groups of people mostly did overtaking the West. Instead of dealing with the complex society of the Atlantic coast, the people in the west had a more primitive society that was based on the family. These people did not always have to worry about the person who was higher up in the chain of command. They were only concerned with their family or the few other members in their community.
Women in Womens Diaries of the Westward Journey were restless. Besides, nervous energy is also something that most of the settlers possessed. How could they not have when they were constantly moving farther and farther west, into new and mysterious territory? The West provided a place to express individual beliefs and ideas, where women could express their desire to have equal rights with men. It was a society where the restraints of Europe had little or no effect.
In order to women of this country to have equal freedoms and rights with men, freedom of the West was necessary. More than a quarter of a million Americans crossed the continental United States between 1840 and 1870 in one of the greatest migrations of modern times. Frontiersmen have become part of the legend, but pioneering was in fact, a family matter, and the western experiences of American women are central to an accurate picture of what life was like on the frontier. Chronicles of women show an aspect of the westward saga, which was seldom seen before Schlissel and never in such depth. Womens Diaries of the Westward Journey is the story of daily struggle.
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