“We traveled this forenoon over the roughest and most desolate piece of ground that was ever made,” wrote Amelia Knight during her 1853 wagon train journey to Oregon. Some of the parties who traveled with Knight were propelled by religious motives. Hannah King, an Englishwoman and Mormon convert, was headed for Salt Lake City. Her cultured, introspective diary touches on the feelings of sensitive people bound together in a stressful undertaking. Celinda Hines and Rachel Taylor were Methodists seeking their new Canaan in Oregon. Also Oregon-bound in 1853 were Sarah (Sally) Perkins, whose minimalist record cuts deep, and Eliza Butler Ground and Margaret Butler Smith, sisters who wrote revealing letters after arriving. Going to California in 1854 were Elizabeth Myrick, who wrote a no-nonsense diary, and the teenage Mary Burrell, whose wit and exuberance prevail.

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.

V. 1. 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.

New applique patterns in the Kansas City Star heritage.

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.

Offers the writings and recollections of ten women who traveled to the American West in 1853-1854, taken from their letters and diaries, and reflecting the political, social, and economic forces of the era.