SOURCE: "Women's Diaries on the Western Frontier," in American Studies, Vol. XVIII, No. 1, Spring, 1977, pp. 87-100.

In the following essay, Schlissel discusses the usefulness of diaries in the study of the impact of Western migration on nineteenth-century women.

This book began with a fascination for the diaries of the overland women, with the detail of their lives and the dramatic dimensions of their everyday existence. These were ordinary women who were caught up in a momentous event of history. Between 1840 and 1870, a quarter of a million Americans crossed the continental United States, some twenty-four hundred miles of it, in one of the great migrations of modern times. They went West to claim free land in the Oregon and California Territories, and they went West to strike it rich by mining gold and silver. Men and women knew they were engaged in nothing less than extending American possession of...