The Great Medicine Road: Narratives of the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails, Part 1: 1840–1848 ed. by Michael L. Tate (review)

Michael L. Tate’s The Great Medicine Road: Narratives of the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails is a well-produced volume. Tate has done an excellent job of listing secondary material to assist the reader in learning more about the assembled primary sources. The accounts, organized chronologically by year of travel, contain a wide-ranging sampling of emigrant experiences. Readers will find a variety of firsthand descriptions of the Great Plains. Students and enthusiasts of the overland trail will also be particularly interested in the less widely available materials such as William Porter’s “Letter to His Family.”

However, the purpose of this volume is murky. In the “Editorial Procedures” Tate declares that, given the ready availability of scholarly syntheses on the trail, it is “our responsibility to allow the pioneer generation to speak directly to modern audiences” (17). However, by the end of the introduction Tate has stated that this volume is in fact a “blending” of secondary interpretation and primary voices (34). What he asserts to offer, essentially, is the best of both worlds. Notwithstanding this claim, after reading the entire volume it is clear that the book is much more the latter than the former. The Great Medicine Road therefore contributes to a rich collection of published primary accounts.

Unfortunately, it does not drive trail historiography forward. For the past thirty or forty years the vast majority of trail literature has been edited accounts like this one, not new interpretations of this migration. This statement is not meant to discount newer interpretive work, including Tate’s 2006 Indians and Emigrants and Will Bagley’s evolving Trails West series. These studies, among others, have advanced trail historiography, but they have not as of yet helped to advance the scholarly standing of the trail among western historians let alone historians writ large. We, meaning western historians and trail scholars, need many more innovative interpretations of trail history.

If we as western historians are to understand westward expansion, then we must critically engage with settlers and their stories. In past decades historians have made considerable strides toward acknowledging the multiplicity of peoples and places that drove the history of the West. However, in focusing on revealing new stories, we have too often overlooked the opportunity to produce new insight into the old. The trail is critical to understanding the specificities of settler colonialism in the United States. Tate’s own 2006 work demonstrates that in engaging with the trail we do not abandon a multicultural West for a white one but rather enhance our understanding of both.