Another passage from Elizabeth Dixon Smith Geer’s journal caught my attention. Some of the women write about taking the opportunity to explore the strange landscapes they see along the trail. Elizabeth’s husband trekked up a mountain and noted the striations of the rocks and the fossils contained within them. He described them to his wife when he returned.
August 7 [1847]
made 15 miles encamped on Blacks fork a small river bordered with willows this large waste of country in my opinion has once been a see my husband found on top of a mountain sea shells petrified in the stone the creaces in the rocks show the different stages of the water.
Geer, Elizabeth Dixon Smith, 1808/9?-1855, Diary of Elizabeth Dixon Geer, August, 1847, in Covered Wagon Women: Diaries & Letters from the Western Trails, vol. 1: 1840-1849. Holmes, Kenneth L., editor and compiler. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1995, page 136.
What also struck me about this entry is that it shows that not just the poor and uneducated set out for the west. Clearly, Elizabeth and her husband possessed knowledge of natural history and an understanding that the world we know was once vastly different. (The basic rules of spelling and punctuation may be another matter, however!)
red paper boat 