Western American Literature

In The Great Medicine Road: Narratives of the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails, Part 3, historian Michael Tate offers nine firsthand accounts of travel on the northern overland trails during the mid-nineteenth century. Organized chronologically by year, the narratives provide a wide range of experiences, from a young man traveling to the gold fields to a young woman's traveling with her sick husband to the salubrious California climate to the [End Page 269] recollections of a twelve-year-old boy who floated down the Snake River to Oregon.

This book is the third volume of a projected four-part series; the first two volumes deal with emigration during the 1840s. During the earlier period, trail travelers contended with inadequately marked trails, few supply stations, and poor guidebooks. By the early 1850s, however, the routes were well traveled, there were more alternative routes and more places to reprovision or to replace stock, and better guidebooks were available. There were also new difficulties due to the large increase in the volume of traffic on the trails. Cholera posed a great danger for emigrants, and all the accounts in the book describe its devastating effects. Al Hawk, only a teenager at the time of his 1852 overland journey, remembered that it left hundreds of victims in unmarked graves in the Plains. Because so many wagon trains were on the trail, grass, wood, and water became increasingly difficult to find. The emigrants give detailed accounts of the tremendous dangers involved in crossing streams—including loss of lives and stock due to drowning—and the difficulties of traversing deep sand and mud, contending with steep hills, and rounding up stray stock. By the time they reached Idaho, Nevada, and eastern Oregon, most emigrants were exhausted and often out of supplies. As they traversed the western deserts, they all commented on the abandoned wagons, human graves, and dead stock left lying along the trail.

The 1850s saw increases in conflicts with Native Americans, in large part because of the destruction of the Indians' resources—game, grazing land, water—as the emigrants traversed Indian land. Conflict also arose from cultural misunderstanding and racism. In addition, violence often erupted between emigrants, and the accidental discharge of firearms caused considerable loss of life.

In his introduction Tate gives an excellent overview of the trail experience in the early 1850s. Setting the trail in the larger context of the development of the West, he makes it clear that an accurate portrayal of the Overland experience cannot be painted without the inclusion of women, children, the Mormon faithful, and the US Army, which surveyed new routes west, made improvements to the routes, and attempted to protect trail travelers. In this volume, Tate [End Page 270] includes the 1854 report of Captain Rufus Ingalls, who accompanied the Steptoe Expedition from Fort Leavenworth in Kansas through the Utah Territory to the Pacific Coast. Ingalls details the expedition's interactions with Brigham Young and his followers and describes the violent deterioration of Mormon–federal relations.

In a section on "Editorial Procedures" Tate explains that he selected accounts that would be representative of the migrations to Oregon, California, and Salt Lake City and that followed the central Great Plains routes along the Platte and Sweetwater Rivers through the South Pass. He also chose narratives, including diaries and reminiscences, both diverse and rich in details. As editor he attempts to let the pioneers speak for themselves, presenting the texts with as little intrusion as possible. That said, his editorial notes and lengthy biographies contain information that only meticulous research can uncover, allowing readers to learn more about the lives of the emigrants before and after their journeys. Tate's documentation of sources is exceedingly thorough. Maps enable armchair travelers to follow the routes described in the narratives.

A valuable compilation of primary source material documenting the experiences of westering emigrants, The...