U.S. Frontier Letters and Diaries

Four newly wed couples, along with one single man, were sent to Oregon in 1838 to reinforce the two-year-old mission established by Marcus Whitman and Henry Spalding. These reinforcements were to become legendary in the history of the Pacific Northwest for the incessant bickering and petty jealousies that eventually caused the deaths of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and forced the abandonment of the mission effort.

Uncertainty and conflict as well as willpower and endurance mark the story of the Oregon Mission and its charismatic, though contentious, missionaries. Simply getting to Oregon in the 1830s was a feat. Once they arrived, their efforts were doomed by their inability to agree on strategies for converting the Nez Perce and Spokane Indians.

This Bison Books edition contains the very personal diary of Sarah Smith, "the weeping one" as the Indians remembered her. When read in chronological sequence with the nearly one hundred letters written by her husband, Asa, a compelling picture of their journey to Oregon and subsequent life at the mission emerges. Other letters, documents, and biographical sketches enhance the volume.

Forty years after the legendary overland travels of Oregon pioneers in the 1840s, Lucy Clark Allen wrote, "the excitement continues". Economic hard times in Minnesota sent Allen and her husband to Montana in hopes of evading the droughts, grasshoppers, and failed crops that had plagued their farm. Allen and her compatriots, in this volume of Covered Wagon Women, experienced a journey much different than that of their predecessors. Many settlements now awaited those bound for the West, with amenities such as hotels and restaurants as well as grain suppliers to provide feed for the horses and mules that had replaced the slower oxen in pulling wagons. Routes were clearly marked -- some had been replaced entirely by railroad tracks. Nevertheless, many of the same dangers, fears, and aspirations confronted these dauntless women who traveled the overland trails.

Western history is all the richer thanks to LeRoy and Ann Hafen, who have assembled a fascinating array of diaries and memoirs of forty-niners who set out from Salt Lake City toward California's gold fields over the Old Spanish Trail. For many would-be gold miners, this dry, dangerous route was preferable to crossing the Sierra Nevada. The Donner party disaster was only three years prior and fresh in the minds of many.

In reality, the choice of the southern route did not ease travelers' efforts. The unremitting heat and lack of water killed more people and animals than did the snows of the mountains. Jacob Stover's narrative provides fine descriptions of these challenges, especially the difficulty in transporting supplies. Of added interest is the journal of Henry Bigler, a former member of the Mormon Battalion, who was the first person to record Marshall's discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill.

"For children, who didn't know they were living under hardship, life on a western military post was exciting. . . . This account records a child's view of the military's last hurrah in the West."-Denver Post. "Written in 1944-45, the book offers Mary Leefe Laurence's eyewitness account, from ages six to 26, of life at a series of frontier forts, including Fort Dodge and Fort Leavenworth. . . . Laurence offers rare glimpses of Western life and of a handful of historic figures, including Geronimo."-Publishers Weekly. "The only known book-length memoir of childhood in the post-Civil War army . . . This rare memoir deserves a wide audience."-Kansas History.The young daughter of an English-born U. S. infantry officer on the post-Civil War frontier, Mary Leefe Laurence had the childhood of an army nomad, accompanying the regiment from south Texas to the Canadian border. In faithfully recording her travels, she offers extensive and unique insight into life as a child and adolescent in the twilight of the Indian-fighting army.Thomas T. Smith is a Regular Army Major of Infantry on assignment to the United States Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He is the editor of A Dose of Frontier Soldiering: The Memoirs of Coporal E. A. Bode, Frontier Regular Infantry, 1877-1882.