Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927

11. On the Trail, On the Road

11 On the Trail, On the Road Most women’s western books were about the place, not getting to it. Even some books named for the trail are only incidentally about it. Those books that are true journey books fall into three categories. First are army and overland accounts, many written long after the events they narrate, shaped by a sense of western history, by fallible memory, by needs and desires to spin the story in the writer’s or her family’s favor. Second are railroad travel books, examples of a short-lived genre that came into existence a decade or so after the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. These followed the itineraries of the popular excursion companies and thus repeated many particulars, all the more because many literary travelers were moralistic New Englanders worried about western behaviors. In the twentieth century women began to go West by automobile , and wrote to celebrate auto travel as much as to describe the West. Railroad and auto books shaped the “West” as an imaginative reappearance of earlier days, referring what they saw on the ground to ideas about the West they had begun with. Writing quite specifically to bring the dead back to life, Lydia Spencer Lane’s 1893 I Married a Soldier (reissued in 1987 with an introduction by Darlis Miller) says: “To-day there is no ‘frontier;’ the wilderness blossoms as the rose; our old deadly enemy, the Indian, is educated, clothed, and almost in his right mind; railroads run hither and yon, and the great trains of army wagons and ambulances are things of the past, whatever civilization may follow. The hardy, adventurous element in those early pioneer days will ever possess an interest of its own, and I venture to hope that the record of my own experiences will contribute somewhat to the history of those heroic times” (13). In earlier chapters I have talked about some books set mainly in one place that also had extensive travel sections. Elizabeth Cornelia Woodcock Ferris’s ἀ e Mormons at Home (1856), for example, contributed to Utah writing but ultimately positions Salt Lake City along the way to Sacramento and the gold rush. Women who went overland to the Pacific Northwest or to the California gold fields sometimes had sections about the journey there, almost always recalling it as a nightmarish interlude. The earliest of what might be thought of as wholly road-oriented books are three dime novels from the 1860s, frank fantasies directed, surprisingly for those who think of the dime novel as a masculine genre, toward women readers. Ann Sophia Stephens’s Esther: A Story of the Oregon Trail (1862) has Mormons, Sioux, a beautiful Indian maiden, and a Byronic plainsman recovering from an unhappy love affair masquerading as an Indian. The protagonist is traveling the Oregon trail with her uncle. The stories make the road into a place for men to have adventures and women to find romance. Stephens says that the prairie life of “constant changes and excitement . . . is a school, the like of which there is not elsewhere on earth, for training men to be self-reliant, brave to recklessness , scornful of privation, uncaring for hardship, and steady and unquailing in the hour of strife” (65). (One may remember that books set entirely on the prairie seldom saw life there as exciting.) And Stephens does mean “men.” The novel endorses Manifest Destiny, and waxes nostalgic over the vanishing Indian : “The star that leads civilization westward shines sadly upon the graves of a people almost extinct—a people that have been hunted ruthlessly from their greenwood haunts till every year has seen their graves multiplying thicker and thicker in the wilderness. Then the Anglo-Saxon comes to plow it up and plant corn above the dead warriors, stopping now and then to pick up a stone arrowhead from his furrow, and examine it curiously, as if he did not know what soil his sacrilegious plow was upturning. . . . Yon star that leads westward has no halting place for him till it sets on the calm Pacific, writing on its blue waters the history of a people that have perished” (9). Metta Victoria Victor’s two western dime novels are ἀ e Gold Hunters (1863) and ἀ e Two Hunters; or, ἀ e Cañon Camp, A Romance of the Santa Fe Trail (1865). ἀ e Gold Hunters takes place on the trail to Pike’s Peak. Amid storms, fires, Indians, captures, rescues, and daring feats, a father meets...