In 1852 a record number of women helped keep the wagons rolling over the perilous western trails. The fourth volume of Covered Wagon Women is devoted to families headed for California that year. Diaries and letters of six pioneer women describe the rigors en route, trailside celebrations and tragedies, the scourge of cholera, and encounters with the Indians.

The women who traveled west in covered wagons during the 1840s speak through these letters and diaries. Here are the voices of Tamsen Donner and young Virginia Reed, members of the ill-fated Donner party; Patty Sessions, the Mormon midwife who delivered five babies on the trail between Omaha and Salt Lake City; Rachel Fisher, who buried both her husband and her little girl before reaching Oregon. Still others make themselves heard, starting out from different places and recording details along the way, from the mundane to the soul-shattering and spirit-lifting.

In 1852 a record number of women helped keep the wagons rolling over the perilous western trails. The fourth volume of Covered Wagon Women is devoted to families headed for California that year. Diaries and letters of six pioneer women describe the rigors en route, trailside celebrations and tragedies, the scourge of cholera, and encounters with the Indians.

Some of the women traveling west in the late 1850s were strong advocates of equal rights for their sex. On the trail, Julia Archibald Holmes and Hannah Keziah Clapp sensibly wore the “freedom costume” called bloomers. In 1858 Holmes joined the Pikes Peak gold rush and was the first woman of record to climb the famous mountain. Educator Hannah Clapp traveled to California with a revolver by her side, speaking her mind in a letter included in this volume, which is also enriched by the trail diaries of seven other women. Among them were Sarah Sutton, who died in 1854, just before reaching Oregon’s Willamette Valley; Sarah Maria Mousley, a Mormon woman traveling to Utah in 1857; and Martha Missouri Moore, who drove thousands of sheep from Missouri to California with her husband in 1860.

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 the American West. These eight firsthand accounts are among the best ever written. They were selected for the power with which they portray the hardship, adventure, and boundless love for friends and family that characterized the overland experience. Some were written with the skilled pens of educated women. Others bear the marks of crude cabin learning, with archaic and imaginative spelling and a simplicity of expression. All convey the profound effect the westward trek had on these women. For too long these diaries and letters were secreted away in attics and basements or collected dust on the shelves of manuscript collections across the country. Their publication gives us a fresh perspective on the pioneer experience.