Tamsen was opposed to leaving the main road to take the Hastings Cutoff. Sadly, she never made it to California. Instead of evacuating Truckee Lake with the second or third relief party, she chose to stay behind to tend to her dying husband. When she finally left the cabins at Truckee Lake and attempted to walk out on her own, she made it as far as the tents at Alder Creek. There she either died or was killed by Lewis Keseberg.
Not all the women who traveled westward did so enthusiastically or willingly. Anna Maria King was one of them, though once her family was settled in Oregon, she found life there agreeable.
And although I was much apposed to coming as anyone could be, if I were back there and know what I know now, I should be perfectly willing to come.
King, Anna Maria, 1822-1905, Letter to Mother, Brothers, and Sisters, 1 April 1846, in Covered Wagon Women: Diaries & Letters from the Western Trails, volume 1: 1840-1849, page 44. Holmes, Kenneth L., editor & compiler Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.
Virginia was 13 years old when she was stranded at Truckee Pass with the the Donner party. Hers was the only family who did not resort to cannibalism, but that didn’t make their ordeal any less horrific.
The passage below is from a letter she wrote to her cousin, after the surviving members of the Donner party were rescued.
O Mary I would cry and wish I had what you all wasted Eliza had to go to Mr Graves cabin & we staid at Mr Breen they had meat all the time & we had to kill littel cash the dog & eat him we ate his head and feet & hide & evry thing about him o my Dear Cousin you dont now what trubel is yet a many a time we had on the last thing a cooking and did not now wher the next would come from but there was awl ways some way provided
Reed, Virginia, 1833-1921, Letter to Her Cousin, 16 May 1847, in Covered Wagon Women: Diaries & Letters from the Western Trails, volume 1: 1840-1849, page 78. Holmes, Kenneth L., editor & compiler Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.
Ladyjournals, ahoy! But first I’m going to finish the Nancy Drew that’s been sitting on my bedside table.
Dewy’s 24 Hour Readathon starts tomorrow morning! You can find start times for your location here. I’m in the US Eastern time zone, so it’ll be 8am for me.
I’m still planning on reading from ladyjournals, at least for the early half of the day. If my brain starts to get squishy, I may switch to Nancy Drew or Trixie Belden.
If you’re in the U.S. and have access to CSPAN 3, I strongly recommend looking for a re-run of Pamela Smith Hill’s talk on Pioneer Girl.
I have the book, which is quite good. It contains the text of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s first, previously unpublished autobiography which she used as an outline for the Little House books, along with a ton of photos and scholarly research by Pamela Smith Hill about Laura and her writing.
ETA: You can watch the video online, here. I couldn’t find an embed code, alas, and I don’t know if it’s region locked to the U.S. only.
Because I needed more books, right? A few of them are kiddie books with illustrations for collage.
When my old blog got hacked a couple of years ago, I went back to Blogger. I was fed up with the lack of help from my web hosts’ alleged help department, and I was fed up with trying to stay on top of back end stuff I didn’t really feel competent to be in charge of. But Blogger is clunky as hell. The mobile app is especially exasperating, because it does not know how to handle HTML. The WordPress app does, though, so I decided to give WP another try, only this time NOT self-hosting.
It was the best blogging decision I have made. If there are draw-backs, I haven’t seen them yet. I expect I’ll eventually need to pay for space, because I’ve gradually been adding back the content lost when my old blog was eaten. I’m having to do it manually, though, copying text from the actual database, so it’s a slow process.
Which is all to say that I have finally excavated the Covered Wagon Women entries. Also the few entries I did on Laura Ingalls. I regretted losing those the most. My photos and artwork are all available on Flickr, so they’re accessible whether the blog is here or not. The writing, though, was not.
Also! Dewey’s 24 Hour Readathon is coming up. I wasn’t sure what I was going to read this time around, but the blog excavations have nudged me in the direction of more ladyjournals. I have a ton to choose from, and I’ll likely be sharing my favorite bits here.
From my break-time trawl through the stacks. There are several shelves of this periodical from the early 1800s. It looks like the bindings are almost, if not actually, as old as the books. Most are in decent condition, but a few spines are broken, allowing me to peek underneath their skirts, so to speak.
red paper boat 