The diaries and letters of women who braved the overland trails during the great nineteenth-century westward migration are treasured documents in the study of t

The stories seem simple?they left, they traveled, they settled?yet the restless westering impulse of Americans created one of the most enduring figures in our f

Offers the writings and recollections of thirteen Anglo women who traveled to the American West in the 1840s, taken from their letters and diaries, and reflecti

“We traveled this forenoon over the roughest and most desolate piece of ground that was ever made,” wrote Amelia Knight during her 1853 wagon train journey

The diaries and letters of women on the overland trails in the mid- to late nineteenth century are treasured documents. These eleven selections drawn from the m