"We traveled this forenoon over the roughest and most desolate piece of ground that was ever made", wrote Amelia Knight during her 1853 wagon train journey to Oregon. The letters and diaries of women like Amelia open a window on not only the hardships, privation, and danger the travelers endured, but also on their diverse backgrounds and religious beliefs--and the awesome landscape that challenged them with every step.
Some of the women traveling west in the late 1850s were strong advocates of equal rights for their sex. On the trail, Julia Archibald Holmes and Hannah Keziah Clapp sensibly wore the "freedom costume" called bloomers. In 1858 Holmes joined the Pikes Peak gold rush and was the first woman of record to climb the famous mountain. Educator Hannah Clapp traveled to California with a revolver by her side, speaking her mind in a letter included in this volume, which is also enriched by the trail diaries of seven other women. Among them were Sarah Sutton, who died in 1854, just before reaching Oregon's Willamette Valley; Sarah Maria Mousley, a Mormon woman traveling to Utah in 1857; and Martha Missouri Moore, who drove thousands of sheep from Missouri to California with her husband in 1860. Introducing this Bison Books edition is Shirley A. Leckie, a history professor at the University of Central Florida and the author of Elizabeth Bacon Custer and the Making of a Myth.