Traveling West: 19th Century Women On The Overland Route by Martha Mitten Allen (review)

Reviews 369 many women into prostitution, it was often assumed that “working women” were little more than whores. Emily fought this image and struggled gallantly to preserve her sense of gentility and decency. She begins each diary entry with a Biblical quote or paraphrase from which she draws strength to endure each day. Rather than deny her suffering and misery in her writing, as was common during this period, Emily speaks truthfully of her illnesses, her fears, and her desires for a “home” which has become a symbol for a better, easier and “shared” existence. She continues her tasks in prayer, in the hope that God will help her to rise above these hard times. The diary covers the period of one year almost to the day. The reader is told that within a couple of years following the last diary entry Emily remarries and then appears to vanish from all records and censuses in the area. One wonders if readers of this volume will be able to fill in the gaps that the scholar was not able to close. Perhaps descendants of these people will surface and supply additional information. PENELOPE REEDY The Redneck Review, Fairfield, Idaho Traveling West: 19th Century Women On The Overland Route. Martha Mitten Allen. (El Paso, Texas: Texas Western Press, 1987. 86 pages, $5.00 paper, $10.00 cloth.) To the plethora of recent books about women in the West can be added this extended essay dealing with attitudes expressed in travel narratives by women. Author Allen confesses that this material has already been examined in describing women’s overland experiences, their sex roles, and their family structures, but most scholars have concentrated upon the concrete daily life of women—“cooking, washing, caring for children, counting graves, and picking up buffalo chips.” Her particular focus is on women’s reactions to the country itself, to the people who inhabit it, and to the idea of the West expressed in their published and unpublished accounts. The essay is thoroughly documented. A quarter of its pages are endnotes, which explains the somewhat monotonous inventorying of opinions and feel­ ings of the travelers. Allen makes little attempt either to personalize or indi­ vidualize the comments or to evaluate their quality herself, especially in the sections dealing with plains, mountains and people. The book reads, therefore, a little like a catalogue. Furthermore, the ideas expressed appear quite pre­ dictable—although she does establish differences between those who wrote before 1860 and those who traveled after that date. Most women found the plains bleak, barren and unappealing, the mountains awe-inspiring and beau­ tiful, the Indians more disgusting than frightening, and the Mormon practice of polygamy loathsome and degrading to women. 370 Western American Literature The last section of the book—“the magnetic, mystical West”—is the most interesting and suggests an area that the reader wishes were investigated more thoroughly. Many of the travelers found only what they expected because of the preconceived notions and images they brought with them. But others were profoundly changed by what they saw and experienced. Unfortunately, the real impact of the West upon the minds and imagination of the women who traveled in it in the nineteenth century is only superficially examined in this slight work. RUTH ALEXANDER South Dakota State University The Blizzard Voices. By Ted Kooser. (Studio One, Fourth Floor / 212 Second Street / 55401 Minneapolis: The Bieler Press, 1986. 55 pages, $125. Limited edition hardcover, $8.95 paper.) At the end of March, I drove with my daughter from northern Utah to the Puget Sound. Spring settled uneasily over the Great Basin, but the weather was good until we reached the Blue Mountains of Oregon, where we ran into snow flurries as we made the circuitous descent into Pendleton. A thirty-knot wind was blowing in the Columbia River Valley, a strong head wind that embedded a three foot tumbleweed in the Plymouth’sgrille. Climbing into the mountains out of Yakima, we lost it, but as we descended into Ellensburg, the wind redoubled, blowing cold and wet out of the southwest. We stopped to top up the gas tank; the night attendant told us that cars were turning back at...