Across the Plains: Sarah Royce’s Western Narrative (review)

In an updated edition of Sarah Royce’s 1849 migration narrative, Jennifer Dawes Adkison gives this oft-quoted source on the prototypical “western woman” a new framework by arguing that it be understood as part of the literature of frontier mythmaking. Reading the text purely as an account of white women’s Gold Rush experiences ignores important contexts of its creation: she wrote it thirty years after her journey and at the behest of her son, Josiah Royce, who was writing a history of California. Knowing her story would help fashion a “significant historical moment,” Royce set out to create herself as an “intentional mythmaker” (10, 12). She thus belongs in the company of other writers who drew upon powerful tropes to legitimate their authority even as they used that authority to take part in constructing “the West.”

Royce set out from Iowa with her husband and small daughter in the spring of 1849 and reached California by late fall. The narrative, partly based on her travel diary, describes encounters with Native Americans, death on the trail, her adjustment to outdoor life, and negotiations between emigrants in both large caravans and smaller groups. Once in California, Royce observes historic events, social and economic life in mining camps, and the effect of new settlement on families. Adkison has published Royce’s narrative in a form truer to its original format, removing paragraph divisions and chapter headings added later and restoring passages that were omitted from its original publication. (Aside from noting one such passage, however, the new edition doesn’t indicate which sections were deleted previously.)

The introductory essay analyzes these omissions and events, describing two ways that Royce constructed her own authority: by emphasizing her role as mediator between the reader and western spaces and by establishing her credibility as an “old-timer.” Adkison usefully reframes some stock themes of white women’s travel narratives—struggles to maintain a semblance of domesticity, the West as liminal space—in terms of Royce’s literary self-making (13). Yet Adkison leaves open the question of how putting Royce in the company of western genre writers might revise earlier interpretations of white women’s overland travel and settlement. If Royce’s concerns about protecting her home from intrusion and her intriguing revelations of marital transgressions among settlers were part of her attempts to fashion herself as an authority, these moments might say nearly as much about her engagement with the social and political contexts of the 1880s as they do about white women’s Gold Rush experiences.

Recovering Royce’s authority means undermining her textual authenticity, exposing the landscape, the journey, and white womanhood—along with its claims to spirituality and domesticity as the basis of authority—as consciously constructed. Our knowledge of white women’s western lives is complicated when we acknowledge the fuzzy line between daily experience and literary creation. This suggests that other familiar pioneer women’s narratives may be far more unsettled and far more intertwined with the projects of national identity-formation than earlier scholars have assumed.