American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail 9781512824520

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American Burial Ground

AMER ICA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Series editors: Brian DeLay, Steven Hahn, Amy Dru Stanley America in the Nineteenth Century proposes a rigorous rethinking of this most formative period in U.S. history. Books in the series will be wide-­ranging and eclectic, with an interest in politics at all levels, culture and capitalism, race and slavery, law, gender, and the environment, and regional and transnational history. The series aims to expand the scope of nineteenth-­century historiography by bringing classic questions into dialogue with innovative perspectives, approaches, and methodologies.

American Burial Ground A New History of the Overland Trail

Sarah Keyes

Universit y of Pennsylvania Press Phil adelphia

Copyright © 2023 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104–4112 www​.upenn​.edu​/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Hardcover ISBN: 978-­1-­5128-­2451-­3 eBook ISBN: 978-­1-­5128-­2452-­0 A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress

For my family

CONTENTS

Introduction. The Trail of the Dead

1

Chapter 1. Trails of Graves

20

Chapter 2. Cholera’s Ravages

52

Chapter 3. The Disordered Dead

80

Chapter 4. Peoples of Suffering

112

Chapter 5. Remembering the Dead

143

Chapter 6. Legacies of the Overland Trail

174

Notes 203 Index 251 Acknowledgments 259

Introduction The Trail of the Dead

“If I live.”1 This common phrase appeared everywhere in nineteenth-­century America. It passed the lips of nearly every person in the United States, and it closed many of the letters that served as the most important mediums of mid-­nineteenth-­century communications. The deaths of relatives, friends, and neighbors were inquired into and reported on in nearly every letter written and read. Sickness and death defined nineteenth-­century life in ways unfathomable to most twenty-­first-­century Americans. Waves of illness crested and troughed in parallel with the cyclical lives of people working in a predominantly agricultural economy. Epidemics and pandemics punctuated these annual patterns, marking a year or years as a time of death. Mortality rates peaked in particular seasons and years. But everyone knew that death could come at any time. Amid this storm of death and loss it might seem unremarkable that Anna Kemp’s father, Riley, died when she was just nine years old. That Anna’s mother held her husband’s head in her lap while their daughters tried to hold his body still during his final sickness was also a not uncommon occurrence. When Riley died in early September 1852, he departed from a world where families—not trained professionals working in hospitals, morgues, and funeral homes—cared for the sick and the dead. On the Oregon Trail, where Riley died, families and the larger emigrant community did their best to tend to the dying and the dead while traveling. After Riley drew his last breath, members of the Kemps’ company found a level spot to the left of the road “surrounded by tall fir and pine trees.” There they dug his grave. His family, possibly including nine-­year-­old Anna, tended to his remains, dressing Riley’s lifeless body “in a fine suit of black broadcloth.” With no coffin on hand, the Kemps laid Riley on extra boards taken from their wagon bed and

2

Introduction

covered him with boughs cut from the nearby fir trees. Toward the end of her life, Anna, then Mrs. John T. Gowdy, remembered how handsome her father looked the day she helped bury him on the Trail.2 In dying when and where he did, Riley transformed his death and burial into something extraordinary. If Riley had lived three weeks more or six months less his death and burial would have fit neatly into the common experience of death in nineteenth-­century America. Instead, Riley joined a select group of emigrants who helped remake the Overland Trail into an American burial ground. The goal of this book is to show how deaths and graves like Riley’s helped claim the West for the United States. After Riley died, he was buried in land already layered with the overlapping sovereignties of the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Nez Perce peoples. But in laying Riley’s remains in Native land Riley’s family and white Americans at large planted a seed of white possession. That Riley’s grave and those of other emigrants grew into marks of U.S. possession across a transcontinental nation was far from inevitable when Riley died in 1852. But, eventually, graves of emigrants remade the Overland Trail into an American burial ground and, thus, U.S. space. As much as migration itself, emigrant burials were a symbolic and physical tool of territorial appropriation. Death, and concerns about death, was central to both the experience and legacy of the Overland Trail, the mid-­nineteenth-­century migration of more than 250,000 emigrants across the continent to Oregon and California. Riley was part of that migration, and the road alongside which he is buried is one of many traversed by emigrants as they crossed the continent in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Another pathway was the California Trail, a road that turned southwest away from the one the Kemps took northwest toward Oregon. These multiple migratory pathways across the continent merged into the singular “Overland Trail” because they were linked in people’s minds, then and now, to the same monumental transcontinental migration. While popular mythology typically depicts this migration as a caravan of covered wagons transporting men, women, and children across the sunny Plains, the Trail was a treacherous, often deadly trek that left a string of burials like Riley’s.3 People of all ages died along the way. Cholera, which dominated the Trail experience during the early 1850s, killed the most emigrants. But overlanders also died of starvation, of dehydration, of dysentery, of other illnesses, and from exposure to the elements. Though a darker portrait of westward migration than we are used to, remembering, and uncovering the cultural significance of the dead—especially in laying claim to land that was inhabited by Indigenous peoples—is the goal of this book.

NE Z PE RCE

Great Salt Lake

SOUTHERN PAIUTE

South Pass

KI OWA

L AKOTA

AR APAH O

Scotts Bluff

CHEYENNE

Fort Laramie

Independence Rock

Mi s

tt e

ver

Ri v e

Ri

PAWNEE

Pl a

S A I N P L

S IN

A

r

St. Louis

Southern Trails

Mormon Trail

California Trail

Oregon Trail

Fort Smith

Osage Mission

Shawnee Mission

Independence

W YAN D OT

Kanesville

Figure 1. The Overland Trail, 1838–69. This map shows many of the routes emigrants took in the nineteenth ­century. Map by Erin Greb Cartography

Mountain Meadows

BASIN AT

S H OSH O NE

WALLOWA VALLEY

MOJAVE DESERT

E GR

WA SHOE

D

200 mi

C AYUSE

N O RTHERN PAIUTE

A

PACIFIC OCEAN

V NE

0

Donner Lake

A

Sutter's Fort

Whitman Mission

UM ATILL A

Colum bia R

iv er

Y CK RO Riv e r

SIERR

M A NT U O

ppi

R

AT i

sissi

G E ur Mis

so

4

Introduction

There is perhaps no more shameful or significant process of nineteenth-­ century history than that of the violent incorporation of Native homelands into the U.S. dominion. Historians of Native America and, to a lesser extent, historians of the U.S. West have centered their attention on understanding the brutal, corrupt process through which a self-­styled democratic republic wrested control of territory from Indigenous peoples and Mexico to triple its size in little more than five decades.4 Land is what made the United States possible. Ownership of it opened doors for white men eager for equality while the fruits of it sustained slavery far longer in the United States than in most other republics. U.S. historians used to center the tension between freedom and slavery at the heart of U.S. history while letting dispossession fall to the side or drop out altogether. But many now rightly recognize that there would have been no expansion of white freedom and no explosive growth of slavery without dispossession.5 The ground we walk today is a historic thread that runs from the origins of our nation through the nineteenth-­century transmutation of the United States into a transcontinental nation to our twenty-­ first-­century present. The burial of Riley Kemp’s corpse in Native land, and the burials of thousands of other emigrants in the lands of the Lakota, Shoshone, Northern Paiute and Southern Paiute, and other Native polities through whose lands the Trail cut, is an understudied part of this thread. The act of inserting emigrant corpses such as Riley’s into sovereign Indigenous soil had far-­reaching consequences for U.S. history generally and the history of the Trail specifically. Whereas Trail history has primarily been told from the perspective of white emigrants, this book aspires to shift perspective from non-­Native to Native. The history of death and the Trail, I argue, is as much one of Indigenous defenses of their homelands as it is one of settlers’ aggressive aspirations. Emigrant aspirations naturally centered on making it to the Pacific, not dying along the way. Subsequent historians replicated this emphasis on those who reached Oregon and California, diverging occasionally from the main narrative to describe the deadly disaster of the Donner Party, during which an emigrant company became snowbound in the Sierra Nevada and the handful of travelers who made it out alive likely survived by eating their dead companions.6 But, in fact, the Trail was littered with the dead, and accounts of the presence of wagon wheels turned into grave markers, of a decaying emigrant corpse propped in a wagon box waiting to be found, should force us to acknowledge how pervasive death and corpses were across the Trail, and not just high in the Sierra. Early promotional accounts of the Trail depicted

The Trail of the Dead

5

the journey as a trying but doable challenge. Experience proved different. Westward migration became an unexpected disaster, with one Trail historian estimating that 6,600 emigrants died along the way.7 While mortality rates are impossible to determine with precision, it is possible to measure the magnitude of the role death played in the experience and the memory of the Trail. For nineteenth-­century white Americans the prospect of burying emigrants in unfamiliar territory amplified the terrors of death.8 The daughters, sons, brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers who interred their loved ones on the Trail dreamed of arriving in Oregon and California with their relatives by their sides. At this they failed. But they ultimately succeeded in something else. Dead emigrants eventually became an answer to another problem emigrants hadn’t fully grappled with at the start of their journey: how to definitively claim the West for the United States. Ultimately, U.S. claims to the West would be built on a narrative of destruction and disaster that defies the triumphalism typically associated with the Trail. The reconstruction of the iconic pioneer conveyance of the covered wagon from vehicles for the living into accessories for the dead exemplifies the deadly destruction of the Trail.9 Separated and then nailed back together, wagon sideboards, boxes, and floorboards became coffins that encased emigrant bodies in preparation for burial in treeless territory.10 Canvas covers became improvised burial shrouds wrapped tightly around corpses; bridle reins, looped underneath, allowed burial parties to lower their friends and relatives into dark vaults; and wagon boards became markers planted in the soil at the heads of new graves.11 Even wagon wheels were repurposed for emigrant tombs. Wheels became fencing material for soon-­to-­be abandoned emigrant graves or makeshift headstones—the name of the deceased and date of death inscribed on iron rims with domestic coal chisels.12 Like the Kemps, many overland emigrants who crossed the continent in the middle decades of the nineteenth century found that wagon materials intended to make their new lives in the West possible instead helped make Trail burials palatable.13 Emigrants successfully remediated some specific burials, but they could not correct the disorder of the dead on the Trail. Nineteenth-­century white Americans prized burial in the ground as the way to care for their dead, but exhaustion, hunger, and a lack of resources sometimes meant that emigrant corpses remained above the surface. One woman came upon a notice “posted by the roadside” describing how a company had “buried” a man they discovered stabbed on the road “by laying him upon the ground and covering him with earth.” After crossing the Humboldt desert in Northern Paiute Territory

6

Introduction

in 1849, William Parker Tell found a card describing how an unnamed emigrant went back to help two men dying of thirst only to discover one had perished in the interim and then to watch the other expire before his eyes. The well-­meaning emigrant “scraped a hole in the sand & buried one” but was too weak to bury the other. “So he laid him in a wagon box & turned it up so he could be seen from the road.”14 This grisly image of an emigrant corpse laid in an uncovered wagon box facing east captures an overlooked consequence of westward migration: that by the time the Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, the Overland Trail had already become a cultural landscape of death as ghastly and gruesome as the yet unimagined killing fields of the Civil War. Historians have identified the lethal destruction of the Civil War as producing a momentous cultural and political reconfiguration in the United States. It should not surprise us that death on the Overland Trail did the same, only decades earlier. In focusing on the cultural meanings of death during this foundational event of our nation’s history, I challenge the mythology of the Overland Trail as the symbol of American westward progress. Shifting attention from rumbling, westward-­bound covered wagons to wagons converted into coffins, and from living emigrants, often symbolized by gun-­toting men and sunbonneted women, to scattered scraps of calico, tufts of human hair, whitened bones poking through tan desert sands, and other debris of the dead, I argue that the thousands of failed emigrants who died along the way were, in one important respect, as successful as those who reached Oregon and California. If the emigrants who reached the Pacific became celebrated for what they helped build there, those who died along the way became traces of an expanding nation’s presence across the continent and, ultimately, seeds of later white settlements. Over time, the Overland Trail remade what white Americans called the far West into a place of emigrant struggle and sacrifice on behalf of their country. Emigrants who survived the journey emphasized the risk and reality of death to celebrate their successful crossing and to legitimize their claim to land and resources. Those who perished along the way also became emblems of all that white Americans had given up to realize their nation’s destiny. The emigrant fallen cast a shadow of white presence over the entire West: emigrants and other white Americans argued that their dead, strewn across the Plains, mountains, and deserts, were the seeds of a new settler order. Writing from California in October 1852, former emigrant and journalist Louise Smith Clappe dubbed the Trail a “boundless city of the dead.”15 In describing

The Trail of the Dead

7

the Trail as a vast burial ground, Clappe’s prescient phrasing reflected how the corpses of fallen emigrants could support American expansion. “Boundless” was the same term proponents of expansion were using to characterize the territorial growth achieved by living emigrants.16 Situated in territory first nominally and then physically controlled by the United States, dead emigrants became precursors to living western settlements. The remaking of the Trail into an American burial ground, in other words, gave white Americans the cultural purchase to claim the far West as American space. The initial disorder of the dead did not lend itself to claiming the West as U.S. space. But in dying along the Trail emigrants left traces of U.S. presence. As decades passed, and Trail migration ended, these dead constituted the migration’s most enduring legacy. Tended by later settlers and Trail memory-­workers, emigrant graves grew into markers of historic U.S. sacrifice, markers that played a central role in remaking the Trail and the West into U.S. space.

Death and Western History In some ways, my reinterpretation of the Trail reflects the efforts of New Western historians to reshape the field. Thirty years ago, New Western historian Elliott West credited his cohort of scholars with telling a “longer, grimmer, but more interesting” story. For West and his cohort, attention to the ways in which the past continues to affect the present along with a focus on “cultural dislocation, environmental calamity, economic exploitation,” and individual failures made for better histories. “Old” Western historians (as they became, by default, with the rise of the “New”), in contrast, had focused nearly exclusively on what West called the “glorious results” of American individualism, democracy, and civilization.17 There was suffering and tragedy in these older narratives, to be sure, but their arcs bent toward white triumph. Beginning in the nineteenth century, histories of the Overland Trail neatly followed this celebratory blueprint. By the mid-­twentieth century, migration across the Overland Trail had become the celebratory archetype of westward expansion. The Trail was, as historian Jay Monaghan described it in 1947, “the symbol of pioneer America.”18 Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, social tumult within and without the academy inspired a group of historians to reexamine the celebratory assumption underlying existing narratives of the Trail. Principal among these scholars was John Unruh, a Mennonite from South Dakota who tragically died of

8

Introduction

complications from brain cancer before his first book, The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-­Mississippi West, 1840–60, appeared in 1979. Plains Across was wildly successful, winning seven awards and earning a place on the list of finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in 1980.19 Unruh’s greatest contribution to knocking the Trail off its celebratory pedestal was his argument that, in contrast to Hollywood stereotypes, “Indians” killed few emigrants and emigrants likely killed more “Indians” than “Indians” killed them.20 Rather than peaceful pioneers struggling through trials of “violent savages” and “wilderness,” Unruh’s study asked readers to see pioneers as the source of violence. Equally revolutionary was John Mack Faragher’s Women and Men on the Overland Trail, which appeared the same year as Plains Across. Women and Men was at the vanguard of a wave of studies that incorporated white women into the traditionally masculine field of the U.S. West.21 Faragher would become a pivotal figure in the cohort of New Western historians that included Elliott West. In Women and Men he argued that, in contrast to depictions of the West as a land of opportunity and equality, female emigrants continued to work, suffer, and struggle within the same white patriarchal norms that structured society along the Eastern Seaboard. Beginning with Unruh and Faragher, revisionist Trail historians of the 1970s and 1980s cast a pall over the image of the Trail as a string of westward-­bound wagons bathed in the glow of the setting sun. But these historians also drew attention to a golden opportunity: the chance to use new analytic tools and methodologies to reinterpret iconic pillars of western history.22 More than forty years later, however, few historians of the U.S. West have put new wine in old bottles. Almost immediately after Plains Across and Women and Men appeared, New Western historians charted an intellectual course away from familiar topics such as the Overland Trail.23 Designed to jolt western history out of ruts as well-­worn as those mid-­nineteenth-­century emigrants’ 2,500-­pound wagons cut across the continent, their course successfully redirected and reinvigorated the field, turning to new subjects such as immigration and immigration policy, environmental destruction, and the late twentieth-­century urban West.24 And yet, the saga of the Overland Trail continues to be traced in K–16 classrooms, in voluminous scholarship produced by Trail enthusiasts and the National Park Service, and in guided tours and exhibit materials at a variety of local and state historic sites. Thanks to these historians we now have a better understanding of the variety of peoples, including African and Native

The Trail of the Dead

9

Americans, who participated in this migration. The important role that the Trail continues to play in public history and the nation’s memory demands that more be done.25 With this book I offer the first reinterpretation of the Overland Trail in over forty years. Above all else, I see this migration as a story of death: risking death on the way to the Pacific; trying to help relatives, friends, and company members die and be buried decently in unfamiliar territory; and then, remembering those who died on the way. Specialists who study the culture of death and dying likely won’t find this claim surprising, but the consequences of placing death at the center of the overland experience are as sweeping as previous scholars’ claim that the Trail was “the symbol of pioneer America.” In tracing the intimate relationship between the meanings of death and the Overland Trail from the antebellum era through the early twenty-­first century, my book contributes not only to the history of the Overland Trail, western history, and the history of memory and culture but also and importantly to the history of Native America. In my view, Indigenous people set the literal and metaphorical stages on which emigrants and white Americans at large made the case for the Trail’s significance.26 Indeed, the first migrants on stretches of the Overland Trail were not whites bound for Oregon and California but instead Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, Potawatomi, Shawnee, and other Native people bound for Indian Territory. It was these American Indian “emigrants” (a label used by white agents, military men, and the press in the nineteenth century), not white emigrants, who first forged the link between the dead and U.S. westward expansion that became the central significance of the Overland Trail. In the nineteenth century both Native peoples forced west and non-­ Native overlanders (another term used to describe white emigrants) who voluntarily migrated were referred to as “emigrants.” In this study I use “emigrant” exclusively to refer to the latter. Doing so helps distinguish between white travelers who migrated west under their own volition and Indigenous ­peoples forcibly deported west by the United States. Throughout the book I strive to use individual names to identify Native actors. When that is impossible, I identify them by tribal or national group. Although I am aware of their limitations, I also use the broad terms “Indigenous,” “Native,” “Native American, or “American Indian” to identify Native actors. When quoting my white subjects, I sometimes use the racist terms they used to label Native Americans. In general, I render the names of Native individuals, bands, and tribes with the name the descent community uses today.27

10

Introduction

Claiming Place It can be beguiling to think that choices such as which terms to use are “details” that do little to alter the broader narrative. But every narrative is the result of a series of such seemingly small choices. Choosing terms, beginning and ending points, and source materials have real consequences for our understanding of the past and, as I will also show in this study, for our understanding of place. Making “sense of place,” to borrow a phrase from anthropologist Keith Basso, is an intricate process through which humans convert the spaces we occupy into places rife with meaning.28 Once made, places act back on people, helping to shape and direct individual experience and the evolution of society. Maps are an excellent example of this phenomenon. Taken at face value, maps, whether they are the Google Maps we light up on our phones, the bound Rand McNally books of the twentieth century, or the long, narrow longitudinal representations of the Trail that emigrants unfolded from pocket-­sized leather-­bound journals, seem to represent simply what exists. But maps are in fact visual and textual constructions that depict the spaces we are in or the spaces we want to get to as particular places. In what became the United States, Native people as well as non-­Native European and U.S. settlers used cartography to demonstrate geographic knowledge, establish landmarks, and delineate borders to articulate extant and aspirational claims to space.29 This process of placemaking is central to U.S. history. The driving forces of much of this history have been, on the one hand, the violent effort to replace the original, Indigenous population of North America with new settlers and, on the other, the resistance to that dispossession on the part of American Indians. Historians have recognized that the central struggle in settler-­colonial entities like the United States is the struggle to claim territory.30 The introduction of new plants and animals and the creation of built environments are all part of these territorial contests. So too are maps, oral and written narratives, physical markers and signs, and photography or other visual representations.31 The dead, I argue, are also a central part. Speaking in the mid-­twentieth century in a different time and place, Serbian nationalist Vuk Drašković bluntly described the relationship between the dead and his people’s territorial claims: “Serbia is wherever there are Serbian graves.”32 It would take some time for white Americans to correlate Trail graves with U.S. territory. For emigrant graves to become part of the United States they had to be maintained. Historian Gary Laderman has argued that the settler dead occupied a special place “in the Protestant imagination” because

The Trail of the Dead

11

properly burying the dead “on the frontier” was essential to demonstrating “the success of American expansion.”33 In other words, according to Laderman, for nineteenth-­century American Protestants only properly maintained graves in settled communities counted as evidence of American territorial control. Evidence from other studies suggest Laderman was right. Literary scholar Hester Blum has analyzed how the burial of Lieutenant Charles Wilkes’s nephew Wilkes Henry during the Pacific Exploring Expedition that Wilkes commanded from 1838 to 1842 created a fictive territorial node in the American geographic imagination. But Wilkes Henry’s grave on Malolo in the Fiji Islands did not remake the island into an American place.34 A similar gap between American graves and American territory occurred for graves along the Trail. Buried in “unsettled country” outside the bounds of U.S. control, the dislocated dead of the Overland Trail at first challenged U.S. westward expansion by failing to reach their intended destinations on the Pacific. Only later, after the United States took control of the continent, did they come to undergird it.

The Overland Trail in History and Memory This reinterpretation of the meaning of the emigrant dead proceeded as haltingly as the cross-­continental migration of which the dead were a part. Almost from the beginning of the nation’s history, the overland journey was the stuff of American legend: a clarion manifestation of the nation’s destiny to expand from sea to sea and the culminating chapter in the young country’s history of westward expansion. It was also almost immediately a failure. After fur trader William Ashley led the first wagon train over South Pass through the Rocky Mountains in the spring of 1826, American newspapers took up the call for white Americans to make their way westward over a grade that they asserted was “two degrees less than the steepest ascent on the Cumberland road” (over which white Americans had passed to settle the Trans-­Appalachian frontier).35 But no flood of emigrants took to the Trail following this discovery. The first major wagon train traveled west in 1836, when Protestant missionaries made their way through South Pass and into British-­controlled Oregon. It would take another five years for the first official emigrant party, the Bidwell-­Bartelson Party, to reach the Pacific.36 By the time migration began to proceed in earnest, the upwards of 250,000 white Americans who left Missouri and Iowa, as well as Illinois,

12

Introduction

Ohio, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and other states, had clear ideas about what their journeys would be like.37 In 1854, seventeen-­year-­old Martha Ann Freeman began her overland trek to California having already “imagined a great deal about the trip.”38 In key ways the Trail was already an established narrative, an event to which many participants and observers thought they knew the end before the migration had even begun. The daughter of a Missouri doctor, Freeman hailed from an emerging professional class, but many emigrants were farmers, optimistic that the fertile soils of Oregon would mean a better life than the meager existence they had eked out in Illinois or Iowa following the economic downturn of 1837. Others were propertyless young men hopeful that shedding their city attire for checked shirts and exchanging their jobs as clerks and shopkeepers for that of California miners would make them economically independent.39 The Overland Trail attracted emigrants from around the world. Joseph Middleton’s gold rush company included “7 Irish men, 5 Americans, [and] 1 Englishman.” Three years later a Kanesville newspaper reported that that Iowa border town was “literally crowded with emigrants from all parts of the Globe.” The international diversity of the California Gold Rush—that was also part of the Overland Trail—has received more attention than that of the Trail itself, but overlanders also included citizens from around the world.40 Emigrant diversity was not only national but also economic, religious, racial, and regional. Other newspaper reports described “Indians, Dutch, Spanish, Mexican, French, Yankees, Kentuckians—jostling each other” in the streets of St. Joseph, Missouri, and depicted emigrant companies poised to start their journeys as made up of the “old and young, rich and poor, christian and infidel, black and white, bond and free.”41 While over the years visual shorthand of the Trail has reduced it to white Americans and white-­topped wagons, the emigration was much more diverse. For three decades, each spring emigrants from around the nation and the world disembarked from the puffing steamboats plying the waters of the Missouri River or drove in from farming communities. In Iowa and Missouri border towns, bursting at the seams with these seasonal arrivals, emigrants boarded in hotels or camped on private property while they formed companies, procured foodstuffs and livestock, and waited for the grass to grow. Once it had reached an acceptable height for livestock feed, or when they could no longer stand the crowds of emigrants and hucksters packing the streets and camps, they shouldered backpacks, hitched canvas-­topped wooden wagons to lowing oxen, swung astride their best horses, and set their sights on the

The Trail of the Dead

13

Pacific. Maps of the time depicted the Trail as a thin line running straight across the continent, but emigrants followed a variety of meandering paths as they trudged, pushed, and pulled themselves and their wagons west. Even as the sheer diversity of emigrants and routes stretched the boundaries of the Trail to its limits, death fused it together. The great distance and geographical challenges of crossing the continent stoked emigrants’ fears that they or their loved ones might die and be buried on the Trail far from home and family.42 While all emigrants shared a desire to avoid being buried on the Trail, the specific culture of death of white Protestants born or raised in the United States shaped the relationship between death and the Trail. White Protestant emigrants who comprised the majority of overlanders were reared in a culture that prepared them for death by focusing on tranquil domestic deathbed scenes, mourning, and memorializing the corpse and, by extension, the grave that held it. All these steps were supposed to happen in or close to home.43 Writing from the Trail in 1849, emigrant Charles Parke gave voice to this cultural standard when he hoped to God that he would die at “Home . . . the place, of all places to die.” Dying in the liminal space of the Trail, emigrants risked, in the words of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, leaving “their unburied bones [to] bleach on the desert,” where they would be “flapped by the raven, and gnawed by the wolf.” The prospect of this horrific burial terrified both emigrants and their families. As Margaret Chambers put it at the end of the century, the possibility of leaving “a loved one so far away was perfectly agonizing.”44 While many white Americans would, as Chambers did, escape the agony of leaving a loved one on the Trail, they could not escape the threat or the trauma of death. Consumption (what we now call tuberculosis), yellow fever, malaria, dysentery, and cholera: these were just some of the maladies that felled fathers, destroyed mothers, slew siblings, and stole loved ones. High antebellum mortality rates were experienced as a cold infant cradled in a new mother’s arms, a young widow shouldering the burden of a family and a failing farm, or a son called hastily back from the city to kneel at his dying mother’s bedside. The prevalence of disease in this pre-­antibiotic age meant that people born in the 1820s and 1830s, the decades of birth of many overlanders, had some of the lowest life expectancies of the entire century. Americans could not hope to escape death, but they could—and did—choreograph their response to it.45 They gathered to listen to their loved one’s dying moral instructions and dutifully narrated the scene for distant friends and relatives.46 With the soul gone, the body became the focus of memorialization. White Americans laid

14

Introduction

their loved ones out, wrapped them in shrouds, buried them close to home, and waited for the day they would be reunited in heaven.47 As they had cared for their dead, anticipative survivors cared for their connection with their deceased loved ones. Until the day they would meet again, they fingered locks of hair, gazed on miniature portraits, and awoke from the night’s slumbers with visions of the dead still fresh. Of all the available tools of connection between the living and the dead, graves became the most important memorials to deceased loved ones.48 Emigrants departing for Oregon and California said goodbye to the dead as they said goodbye to the living, and they left with much confidence that their loved ones’ graves would be properly maintained.49 No such confidence buoyed emigrants’ spirits as they turned away from new graves destined to be forever stranded somewhere between their old home and their new one.

The Culture of Death in the Nineteenth Century Even though historians have recognized the trauma that accompanied the unprecedented experiences of dying far from home during overland migrations or in the California gold fields, the Civil War remains the pivot on which explanations of nineteenth-­century death practices turn.50 The war was the moment when the sheer numbers of dead accelerated the modernization of embalming and funeral practices and the event that destroyed white Americans’ certainty of burying their loved ones close to home. So too did the vast numbers of dead soldiers demand the intervention of the federal government, thereby making the fallen a government responsibility and thus expanding the power of the nation-­state.51 Indeed, though there have been notable dissenting voices, few historians working in the United States have disputed the primacy, even the sui generis character, of the Civil War and death.52 Pulling the study of death westward helps to right this skewed perception. Decades before the exposed, disinterred, and unmarked bodies of soldiers in gray and blue captivated the nation, the Overland Trail upended American conventions and expectations of dying and death. For emigrant subscribers to the Protestant model of the good death, male traveling companions failed to provide the longed-­for attendance of female family members, while a jolting wagon made a bizarre deathbed. To compound these strange circumstances, dusty roadside graves were terrifyingly removed from the peaceful, pastoral cemeteries of the United States. When Civil War–era Americans read of

The Trail of the Dead

15

strangers nursing dying soldiers, looked at photographs of dead soldiers abandoned on the battlefield or buried in “lone graves,” or viewed lithographs of soldiers laid out to die while vultures hovered overhead, they saw the same symbols they had seen with wilderness deaths on the Overland Trail.53 But death on the Overland Trail was much more than a prologue to death and the Civil War. In important ways, dead emigrants accomplished the work of territorial reunification that Civil War soldiers failed to do. By becoming markers of American claims to the West, emigrant graves formed a beaded chain linking the settled United States to the Pacific Coast. In Indigenous hands these same grave sites also became evidence of American hypocrisy and racism and thus tools to combat those same territorial claims. To borrow historian Patricia Nelson Limerick’s famous phrase, if the Civil War dead represent the enduring legacy of slavery in the United States, the emigrant dead represent the enduring legacy of conquest. Looking beyond the geographical, chronological, and source borders that prior historians of the Trail have set brings the central importance of death on the Trail into focus. Pairing emigrants’ personal narratives with other forms of American culture adds a new dimension to our understanding of the national American audience of this iconic historical touchstone. Depictions of the Trail found in fiction, visual culture, tourist guidebooks, poetry, monuments, and film attest to the broad and enduring reach of this migration both as experience and as personal, familial, and national narrative. While looking for Native voices on the Overland Trail where other historians have looked, including government reports written by U.S. Indian agents and military officers, the travel narratives and memoirs of European and American fur traders and missionaries, and overlanders’ narratives, I also use ethnohistorical and anthropological literature as well as white documentation of Indigenous discussions of death and graves in anti-­removal campaigns across the nineteenth century. Overland travel accounts form the bulk of source material in this study. Housed in archives large and small across the United States, these narratives can be found as stand-­alone documents, part of larger personal and familial collections, or embedded in pension claims filed with the federal government. Other accounts have evaded the reach of such institutions, sitting in attics alongside other family mementos or displayed prominently on bookshelves next to other prized possessions.54 Most of these documents begin and end with the start and completion of emigrants’ journeys, while others conclude abruptly, their incompleteness a textual and physical manifestation

16

Introduction

of a life cut short. Taken collectively these accounts are a “mosaic in words” (as Trail historian Dale L. Morgan evocatively called them) of the personal experiences of the hundreds of thousands of emigrants who pinned their hopes and set their sights on reaching the Pacific.55 Armed with the materials and tools of literacy, emigrants poured out their experiences in newspaper accounts, published books, diaries, and journals, as well as in that most significant nineteenth-­century form of personal communication: the letter. Many emigrants wrote because their families demanded it, stopping only when forced by painful wasp stings or by their inability to keep up with their wagon trains.56 Henry Patrick Harding’s mother tried to goad him into writing his own overland narrative by telling him how her community “had a feast in reading a dozen pages from your  .  .  . travelling companion.”57 Harding’s mother never received the narrative she wanted but many other mothers did, walking down to the local post office to collect missives mailed from the Plains. When emigrants finished writing they mailed their letters at forts, deposited them in makeshift post office boxes, or paid people (including Native Americans) bound for the east to carry them to the United States. Information that flowed eastward gave shape to individual and national experience of the Trail and formed a basis for later travelers. Within families and communities, letters from the Plains passed from hand to hand and from house to house. Emigrants frequently instructed their recipients, as East S. Owen instructed his sister, on how to dispense their missives: “After you have perused this letter,—pass it to father & mother if they are living & as a matter of course after they have read it they will pass it round to the brothers and sisters.”58 Newspapers became another vehicle to disseminate accounts of these journeys. After receiving a letter from the Plains, some white Americans, either on their own volition or at the urging of their loved ones, handed the missive over to newspaper editors for publication.59 Eager for readable accounts of the Trail, some newspaper editors hired professional writers to make the journey come alive for homebound audiences eager for news from the Plains. But amateur emigrant writings remained the most important sources of information on the Trail experience. Whether they were letters, diaries, or journals, these writings functioned simultaneously as both personal account and resources for immediate community or, in some cases, materials that could be marketed as published, commercial guidebooks.60 Emigrants, who envisioned their writings as contributions to familial and national history, worked to make sure their narratives were preserved.

The Trail of the Dead

17

When Charles Edward Pancoast returned home from California, he first read his overland account to his family, then made copies for his adopted sons before finally putting it away for safekeeping.61 Decades after they reached Oregon and California, emigrants smoothed and refined the awkward passages of their accounts, frequently calling on children and grandchildren to help them edit, transcribe, and publish their overland memoirs. The Trail experience was of course lived, but it was also sifted and rewritten by time and memory (as it is still). While other historians of westward expansion posit themselves as excavating the rift between the imagined and the actual process of colonialism, I begin from the premise that the stories people tell themselves about their past, present, and future carry as much weight as (and sometimes more than) events on the ground. Personal narratives, historian Ann Fabian has argued, “offer a popular version of the American past” and a means for historians to understand national myths.62 Lived and represented experiences of emigrants intertwined to narrate a national mythology of a migration that emigrants saw as an event of national significance before they ever stepped west of Missouri.

The Arc of Death and the Overland Trail This story of the Overland Trail starts with U.S. removal of Native peoples in the 1820s. It was during the anti-­removal campaigns that the language of death and graves moved to the center of cultural discussions of Indigenous and American claims to the landscape. Indigenous peoples articulated an agony of leaving graves of their ancestors behind that kindled empathy in white Americans who, like Margaret Chambers, feared similar separations. “The graves of our ancestors” became a rallying cry against removal and for enduring sacred and emotional attachment to Indigenous homelands. While anti-­removal activists marshaled the Native dead to defend territory, removal’s proponents mobilized them to claim it. Glossing over the horrific realities of white civilians and soldiers leveling guns, alcohol, disease, and deprivation at Native people, white Americans spun a romanticized narrative of “Indian” bones destined to become fertilizer for white civilization. They also marked and memorialized “Indian” grave sites, appropriating them to the purpose of white American possession. Many of these tombs are often erroneously described or labeled as the tomb of the “last” of their race. The mythology of the “vanishing Indian” was the cornerstone of a long-­lasting

18

Introduction

and far-­reaching ideological campaign to dispossess Native people. Historians of death have yet to link death and removal and death on the Trail together, but they were two sides of the same coin, forged in the multicultural and multinational milieu of nineteenth-­century America. This was the context in which white Americans stepped out onto the Trail. While the Donner disaster created a memorable and ominous touchstone for Americans at large, it was the cholera epidemics of 1849–55 that more fundamentally remade the relationship between death and the Overland Trail. By bringing cholera onto the Plains overlanders brought an urban disease to the supposedly healthy West. The ensuing epidemics both advanced and altered an existing perception of emigrants as under continual siege. Now, instead of wilderness threats and imaginary hostile “Indians,” emigrants shuddered and quaked at their fellow travelers—ever cautious that they might contract the disease from the members of another wagon train. The epidemiological chaos of cholera on the Plains converted the Trail from simply a road into the world’s longest cemetery. Overlanders’ descriptions of exhumed and scattered human remains laid the groundwork for the later idea that emigrant remains permeated the western landscape. At the same time, overlanders’ burials contributed to a new, collective emigrant identity that defied existing divisions of locality and, in some cases, region. The challenges of burying and mourning the dead on the Trail helped create an idea of a national community in a liminal place. The families of dead emigrants would take the first steps to domesticate the Trail through their efforts to maintain the physical sites and memory of their loved ones. Beginning in the 1840s, surviving relatives incorporated emigrant graves into familial memory and geography. In doing so, they became the first to attempt to familiarize these faraway places. Military conflict, justified in part as necessary to protect emigrants and to keep the Trail open during the Civil War, would prove pivotal to advancing Native dispossession. In response to these militarized anti-­removal campaigns in the West of the 1860s and the 1870s, Indigenous leaders worked to turn graves of their dead from signs of vanishing to proofs of persistence. In the process, they challenged white Americans’ depiction of the West as a landscape of the settler dead and laid the groundwork for efforts to regain their land that continue to this day. In this same period white Americans also labored to cement a national commemorative legacy of the emigrant dead. In the decades after the Trail closed, railroad companies and white settlers stepped in to mark and celebrate

The Trail of the Dead

19

the emigrant dead as helping to give birth to U.S. territorial dominion. Their successes, however, were only partial and Native activists would continue to challenge their view of the history of the Trail and the West over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries. This trajectory closes the book. There was nothing inevitable, no manifest destiny, about the contingent way in which the emigrant dead moved to the center of the overland experience. By dying before they reached Oregon and California, these dead emigrants at first failed to propel U.S. expansion to the Pacific. And yet, in their death, they created a need to establish and protect graves in territory that, while the United States claimed much of it, the government had neither the means nor the will to physically control. Focusing on these settlers who died in motion highlights the contingencies, failures, and contradictions of an era that many textbooks still simply refer to as the era of westward expansion. Overlanders were on the way to places they intended to settle (at least for a time): they had no desire to remain along the Trail but remain some 6,600 did. This is the story of how these emigrant dead unintentionally made the West American.

CHAPTER 1

Trails of Graves

In a “Circular Addressed to benevolent Ladies of the U. States” published on Christmas Day, 1829, white reformer Catherine Beecher decried her nation’s proposal to deport sixty thousand Cherokee citizens. Drawing on the Cherokee strategy of opposing removal by describing their connection to the “graves of their fathers,” Beecher lamented that, if driven west, the Cherokee would lose even “the last sad hope of reposing from their oppressions in the sepulchres of their fathers, and beneath their native soil.” In appealing to white women to “sway the empire of affection” so the Cherokee people could fulfill their wish to be buried in their native soil, Beecher couched their right to remain as an emotional desire to lie with their dead kin. Beecher’s circular also made the case that removal would destroy the Cherokee nation. In her words, the forced march would “expose them [Cherokee] to the hunger, nakedness, sickness, and distress of a long and fatiguing journey through unfrequented wilds” and lead to “their destruction.”1 Though little remarked on by historians, Beecher’s famous circular placed graves and death at the center of Native and non-­Native territorial struggles. Indeed, Beecher framed her call to action around the Cherokee people’s desire to be buried with the sepulchers of their fathers and the belief that removal would kill them. In so doing, Beecher’s circular took a page from the playbook of Indigenous anti-­ removal activists who had long described their inseverable connections to the graves of their fathers and predicted that the journey west would kill them. Shamefully, both removal and the mortal losses predicted by Indigenous peoples and their allies came to pass. Five months after Beecher’s circular was published, the U.S. Congress narrowly passed the Indian Removal Act on May 28, 1830. The slim margin of victory demonstrated that U.S. citizens were divided on the issue, but it did nothing to lessen the blow of a law that set the stage for the forcible deportation of nations from their territories.

Trails of Graves

21

Over the next decade, on foot, in wagons, and on steamboats pointed west, Native peoples perished. After dying, their countrymen, white military soldiers, or hired civilian contractors buried their remains in unfamiliar western soil or deposited their bodies in the waters of the Wabash and Arkansas Rivers, where they became eternally displaced from their homelands. In an 1842 letter to Cherokee Principal Chief John Ross, Ross’s niece, Eliza Jane, bewailed the state of these displaced dead, “strewn . . . along the roads and banks of rivers in strange lands . . . amongst strangers, without one friend to watch over their bones.” In Eliza’s words, what is now widely known as the Trail of Tears was actually a trail of graves.2 In reflecting on the lasting consequences of her nation’s deportation, Eliza used phrasing like that which emigrants and the public would come to use to characterize the Overland Trail. Eliza, of course, had no way of predicting what would happen on the Trail. Like Beecher’s circular, Eliza’s letter advanced a long-­standing relationship between Indigenous defense of their homelands and nations and the graves of their people. In opposing removal based on the graves of their fathers, warning the United States that forcing them west would kill them, and in experiencing and resisting the tragedy of dying on their forced marches west, Indigenous peoples tightened the cultural links between the dead and territorial ownership and between dying and placemaking. In so doing, Native anti-­deportation activists unknowingly, but critically, set the metaphorical stage on which emigrants and white Americans would make the case for the Overland Trail’s significance. At first glance, the Removal Era and the Overland Trail might seem to have little in common beyond their iconic stature in U.S. history. But historians have begun to see them as inextricably linked events, with the journeys of forced dispossession enabling the ones of possession.3 As historian Elliott West put it some twenty years ago, Removal and the Trail were “twin migrations.”4 Training the spotlight on death provides another way to connect these two historic touchstones. What became the central plot of the Overland Trail and its role in national expansion—risking death on the way, dying in unsettled country, and being buried far from home and family—had already been established as the central plot of the Removal Era. But these similar plots were turned to distinct ends. Indigenous peoples lived, narrated, and memorialized their experiences of death in opposition to rather than in concert with U.S. settler colonialism. Examining Native opposition to deportation broadly reveals that almost all anti-­removal activists used their “ancestors’ graves” or “the graves of

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Figure 2. Select Indigenous Removal Routes, 1815–48. Beginning in the 1810s, U.S. deportations created westward trails of Indigenous graves that originated in the north and south and converged on the eastern edges of the Overland Trail. Map by Erin Greb Cartography.

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Trails of Graves

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our fathers” to articulate and defend enduring claims to their homelands.5 Here, it is important to acknowledge that Indigenous deportation experiences diverged based on local conditions; the experiences of Chickasaws or Choctaws, for example, differed substantially from that of the Cherokees. Within each Native nation, experience also varied widely depending on factors such as personal identity and the particularities of forced marches. With these caveats in mind, I adopt a broad approach to show how the widely shared experiences of genocide and of financial corruption and dispossession directed Removal writ large. Like the historian Claudio Saunt I also see removal as deportation: a forced policy to expel entire nations from U.S. space. But this chapter uses removal when describing historical actors’ perspectives and when considering Indigenous deportations of the early nineteenth century in historical memory.6 While recognizing that the history of Cherokee removal has long overshadowed that of other Indigenous peoples, I ultimately home in on the Cherokee anti-­removal campaign to illustrate how that nationally prominent movement pushed death to the center of Native and non-­Native Americans’ struggles for territorial control. In grappling with death as a critical cultural dimension of the struggle during Removal, this chapter illuminates a previously overlooked aspect of one of the most searing episodes of U.S. history. Death played a central role in anti-­removal campaigns and in Indigenous experiences during their forced marches west. Native peoples lived the horrors of leaving their ancestors’ graves behind and watching loved ones perish on deportation marches. But they also narrated them to inspire white action on their behalf. In this regard, Indigenous activists’ efforts were so successful that graves became a central metric of territorial belonging to which even President Andrew Jackson had to respond. At the same time, I also suggest that historians should consider how anti-­removal activism shaped the cultural contours of U.S. expansion. The settler-­colonial narrative of death and placemaking was, in some respects, a response to one of the most enduring Indigenous anticolonial campaigns against the expanding United States.

Defending Graves to Defend Their Land Indigenous defense of their graves to defend their land began long before the United States became a nation. In 1620, the sachem of Passonagessit protested the English plunder of his people’s graves. In a speech to the English

24

Chapter 1

at Plymouth, the sachem declared that his mother’s ghost had come to him and instructed him to fight “against this thievish people, who have newly intruded in our land.” With this message, the Indigenous leader used his mother’s ghost to personify Native resistance to English encroachment. The response of the English is lost to history, but fifty years later a Puritan minister published the sachem’s protest to, in the words of one historian, “demonize Indians and justify war against them.” Some one hundred years after that publication, the famous nineteenth-­century author Washington Irving deployed the speech to romanticize Native death and white American ascendance in North America.7 This history of the sachem’s words and their multiple appropriations provide a representative example of a centuries-­ long struggle between Indigenous people and settlers over Native graves and territorial claims. According to Indigenous people, their graves and their dead embodied their long-­standing presence in and claim to the landscape. From the Anglo perspective, Indigenous graves were signs that “Indians” were doomed to die and vanish to make way for Europeans. This myth of the “vanishing Indian” shifted responsibility for Native deaths from settlers to the workings of providence. During the era of English empire in North America, this fantasy evolved in concert with rising Indigenous mortality caused by European diseases spread by English settlers and increasing imperial interest in taking more Native lands.8 Opportunism rather than providence (as the legend’s supporters claimed) breathed life into the dark myth of inevitable Indigenous disappearance. After the American Revolution, the “vanishing Indian” bolstered the territorial ambitions of the fledgling U.S. republic. By 1814, large numbers of white Americans had embraced the fallacy.9 Proponents of the theory commonly used natural metaphors such as melting snow or falling leaves to cloak the pernicious myth in a guise of peaceful inevitability. Senator John Elliott of Georgia deployed this tactic in an 1825 speech before the Senate in which he likened the Cherokee nation to “a promontory of sand, exposed to the ceaseless encroachment of the ocean . . . gradually wasting away before the current of white population.”10 In speaking of sands and currents rather than of territory and dispossession, Elliott cast removal as timeless and inevitable rather than historic and avoidable. A contemporaneous groundswell of white literary production celebrating and mourning dying “Indians” also leveraged the “vanishing Indian” fallacy to rebrand violent colonial theft as passive settler inheritance. Between 1824 and 1834, white Americans published more than forty novels (including James

Trails of Graves

25

Fenimore Cooper’s famous The Leatherstocking Tales series) showcasing the romantic melancholy of the demise of the “noble savage” and the plight of “vanishing Americans.”11 Weeping “Indians” mourning the passing of “their race” appeared so frequently in the pages of novels, plays, and poetry that it would be difficult to imagine early nineteenth-­century American literature without them. Fictional Indians wept alone, with each other, and, sometimes, in front of white settlers. Children, many of whom would come of age during the decades of migration across the Overland Trail, also imbibed the “vanishing Indian” myth from their schoolbooks. “Indians,” one 1836 schoolbook lamented, are “a soon-­to-­be-­extinct species of animal.”12 Reading these lines by candlelight in farmhouses or by the light of day in one-­room schoolhouses, young children absorbed the lesson that their nation’s past, present, and future growth rested on a law of nature not the actions of their government or their society. In 1835, with an outsider’s critical eye, French traveler Alexis de Tocqueville summed up this mythology. Every day, he wrote, white Americans repeat to themselves: “The Indian race is destined for final destruction which one cannot prevent and which it is not desirable to delay. Heaven has not made them to become civilized; it is necessary that they die. . . . In time I will have their lands and will be innocent of their death.”13 De Tocqueville’s observation captured the secular prayer of a nation willing itself onto a path of innocent, preordained expansion. For centuries, the myth of the “vanishing Indian” helped Anglo settlers justify dispossession. To this distortive discourse of falling leaves, wasting sands, and death sentences decreed by God himself, Native people offered a frank assessment: the “vanishing Indian” was a settler-­colonial fallacy that cloaked white violence and injustice in a guise of peaceful inevitability to accelerate removal. In speeches, treatises, circulars, and other widely disseminated materials, anti-­removal activists argued that it was not innocence whites should feel but culpability. Indigenous people were not doomed to die and disappear, but it was possible that whites might make them. Disease and warfare could exterminate them, and genocide was a possibility.14 Anti-­removal activists also turned words into action. The year after de Tocqueville returned to France, the Mashpee Wampanoag launched a revolt against the commonwealth of Massachusetts. Claiming their right to self-­ governance, the Mashpee organized councils and implemented procedures to prevent “outsiders” from entering their village or using its resources. In Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts Pequot

26

Chapter 1

writer William Apess rebutted the fantasy of the “vanishing Indian” with a myth of the “vanishing whites.” Describing himself standing outside a Massachusetts meetinghouse, the Methodist minister then remarked how the “pale faces” of the white congregants streaming in to listen to his service displayed a “hue of death.” In Apess’s formulation, this pale hue made living whites seem more dead to the Pequot man than the Indigenous Mashpee buried in the neighboring graveyard. That graveyard teemed with life. A murmuring brook ran through it, and it was “overgrown with pines.”15 In Apess’s depiction, the Mashpee graveyard is not a sign of Native disappearance but rather one of Mashpee persistence. The message of Apess and that of the seventeenth-­ century sachem whose mother’s ghost urged him to defend his people’s lands was clear: Indigenous death did not clear the way for non-­Native settlement. Instead, Native graves and their dead represented persistence and resistance. For nineteenth-­century Native activists such as Apess, the education in the English language and in Christianity offered by missionary settlers became tools in the Indigenous struggle to combat, deflect, and thwart colonialism. Like Apess, many of the Native leaders who used graves to defend their lands had been educated in white schools and embraced Christianity in some form. Beginning in the 1810s, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) missionaries fanned out to Indigenous communities across North America. In some cases, they entered at the specific request of Native peoples who recognized the political edge that learning English and the ways of white politics and culture could give their next generation of leaders. For instance, David Folsom, who became a Choctaw chief in the 1820s, funded the ABCFM to build two schools in Choctaw territory.16 While Protestants dominated missionary establishments in the South, Catholics ministered to Indigenous peoples in the North. The Ottawa, for instance, used their long-­ standing relationship with Catholic missionaries to prepare a new generation of bicultural political leaders including Kanapima (“one who is talked of ”), who was known to whites as Augustin Hamlin Jr. After being educated at a Catholic seminary in Cincinnati, Hamlin returned to the Ottawa nation to serve as political conduit between Ottawa leaders and U.S. representatives. Pro-­removal activists argued that bicultural Native people such as Hamlin were not “Indian” at all and thus could not legitimately oppose removal.17 In 1825, an anonymous writer in the pro-­removal newspaper the Georgia Journal published a variant of this critique when he dismissed the Creek message of wanting to remain on their land so they could be buried with the graves of their fathers as “sentimental trash” put in their mouths by white northerners.18

Trails of Graves

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White allies certainly amplified and, in some cases, likely helped craft Indigenous peoples’ anti-­removal messaging. But such participation did not make Native anti-­removal campaigns any less Indigenous. In using sentimental feeling and phrasing around death and graves that resembled that of white northerners’ discussion of their own graves, Indigenous anti-­removal leaders created relatable, emotionally affecting campaigns. Moreover, such language was also relatable to Native people, regardless of their collaboration with white Protestants. Indeed, in the end, long-­standing Indigenous spiritual attachment to their homelands and, specifically, to the graves of their fathers may have been the most important factor in the central role that the graves played in their defense of their lands.19 While the anonymously authored dismissal published in the Georgia Journal was unfounded, this writer’s critique reveals the rhetorical power of Indigenous defense of their land. Time and again, Native activists forced their opponents to reckon with arguments centered on their fathers’ graves. The Indigenous language of their fathers’ graves was so powerful because it created three interrelated arguments that articulated American Indian claims to their current lands and their unyielding commitment to remaining in situ. In response to white encroachment, Native peoples declared the following: where our fathers’ graves are is where our land is, we love our fathers’ graves and will not leave them, and we wish to remain and be buried where our fathers are buried.20 In making these three statements, Native Americans used their graves to define Native space, articulate their unwavering attachment to that space, and define burial in that land as the end goal of their permanent residency. In conversations with whites, political tracts, and other messaging, individual Indigenous activists elaborated on these basic arguments to sketch the ways that graves emotionally and spiritually sustained their communities. For example, Levi Colbert, who was of Chickasaw and European descent, protested U.S. deportation proposals on the basis that the Chickasaw ­people’s fathers’ graves are the roots of their nation. If removed from these roots, his nation would shrivel and die. In 1835, Ottawa Augustin Hamlin Jr. told U.S. negotiators that his people would never give up their land. In Hamlin’s own words these lands are “where the bones of our forefathers lay thick in the earth; the land which has drank, and which has been bought with the price of, their native blood, and which has been there after transmitted to us.” As Hamlin described it, the Ottawa people’s land was a sacred inheritance descended to them because of the mortal sacrifices of their ancestors. It was

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Chapter 1

not something to sell or trade. Hamlin’s language also brought the defense of Native lands into line with white descriptions of the bloody sacrifices of the American Revolution. In white American memory, those sacrifices had sanctified American independence and territorial belonging. This similarity would have rendered Hamlin’s appeal legible and, perhaps, more compelling to white audiences. But Hamlin was not quite done. He continued, describing the bond between the Ottawa and their dead as a living one: “the mortal remains of our deceased parents, relations, and friends, cry out to us as it were, For our compassion, our sympathies and our love.”21 In describing this emotional bond between the dead and the living, Hamlin joined Colbert, Folsom, Apess, and the seventeenth-­century sachem in describing the dead as forming living ties to their land. Such ties were worth defending to the death. In his use of the graves of his fathers, Sauk leader Black Hawk took a slightly different tack, describing the emotional comfort and sustenance his people’s graves gave to the living. In times of stress and sorrow, Sauk men, women, and children visited the graves of their fathers to share their anxieties with the dead. As Black Hawk put it, “‘There is no [other] place like that where the bones of our fore­ fathers lie, to go when in grief ’ . . . there . . . ‘the Great Spirit will take pity on us.’” When white miners invaded the lead-­rich Sauk Territory in 1827, Sauk leaders reiterated their people’s unwavering commitment to their ancestors’ graves and their homeland: “the land at Saukenuk contained the bones of their ancestors, and for that reason alone they ‘would defend it as long as they lived.’”22 Even though Black Hawk ultimately lost his battle to remain in Saukenuk, his words and his defense of his people’s graves lived on. In 1833 Black Hawk would publish a biography detailing his resistance and his hope that his p ­ eople would one day return to the land of the graves of their fathers.

The Cherokee Anti-­Removal Campaign Although Black Hawk and Cherokee Principal Chief John Ross possessed vastly different backgrounds—the latter was an English-­speaking bicultural child of relative privilege who spearheaded the Cherokees’ legal strategy, and the former was a warrior of the previous generation who knew little about U.S. politics—the two men both deftly invoked ancestors’ graves in their territorial claims.23 Like Black Hawk, Ross used his people’s attachment to the graves of their fathers to anchor his decades-­long campaign against removal.

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The “graves of our fathers” became a central pillar of the Cherokee people’s sophisticated campaign that blanketed the United States with anti-­removal messages. The Cherokee Phoenix and Indians’ Advocate was one of the most important organs of this anti-­removal campaign. Founded in 1828 by Cherokee Elias Boudinot, the paper was originally simply titled the Cherokee Phoenix.24 Boudinot chose this title to convey the hopeful message of Cherokee rebirth. He added and Indians’ Advocate after known removal proponent Andrew Jackson won the presidency. For the next decade, the Phoenix remained a primary mouthpiece of resistance to Jacksonian Indian policy. In this mission, the paper proved so effective that one pro-­removal white Georgian complained that the Phoenix was the only reason why the Cherokee case had been made “so prominent.” The assistance of white allies, especially missionaries, helped Cherokee activists reach wider audiences. Religious periodicals (that had, by far, the largest circulation at the time) frequently reprinted editorials from the Phoenix. The Cherokee were not alone in their sophisticated use of media to promote their cause. Choctaw lawyer James McDonald described the Choctaw people’s anti-­removal movement as “paper warfare.”25 The dead stood at the strategic center of this paper warfare. During the decades-­ long contest between Native peoples and pro-­ removal factions, graves moved to the center of conversations about territorial claims.26 Of course, the roots of Indigenous peoples’ uses of graves lay in their communities’ specific cosmology and history. For instance, Cherokee cosmology centers their land and their people in the middle of their traditional homeland. Each direction from this center holds a different meaning. The East represents success and victory; the West, the direction forced removal would take them, represents death.27 It is no surprise, then, that the Cherokee people spent decades fighting off U.S. attempts to remove their nation. By the time the discovery of gold in Georgia in 1827 cast fuel on the fire of the removal movement, the Cherokee nation had already weathered nearly forty years of U.S. designs on their homelands. In 1791, the Cherokee had negotiated and signed a treaty with Secretary of War Henry Knox that protected their rights to their land. In exchange for adopting white agriculture, religion, and education the Cherokee nation maintained their right to five million fertile acres. The treaty was a decisive win for the Cherokee, who, because of the declining deerskin trade, were looking for other economic opportunities. The Cherokee people held up their side of the bargain, but resource-­hungry white Americans kept coming back for more land.

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On December 2, 1807, U.S. representative Return J. Meigs pressured Cherokee people living around Chickamauga Creek to give up their land. But, six months later, Meigs’s efforts to relocate the Cherokee people had failed to bear fruit. As he explained to Secretary of War Henry Dearborn, “to induce them to migrate, they must have strong excitements to leave the place of their nativity and the graves of their fathers.” Ultimately, Meigs had to compromise, accepting the departure of 800 men, women, and children as opposed to the 2,000 he had predicted would depart.28 For the 1,200 Cherokee who remained, cosmology and history united them with land at Chickamauga Creek, a unity sanctioned by their treaty agreements with the United States. These legal agreements, sanctioned by U.S. constitutional law, provided the foundation for the Cherokee nation’s defense of their lands. Appropriated and reinterpreted by Cherokee activists, the U.S. cultural mythology of the “vanishing Indian” became a foundation for Cherokee defense of their lands. In an April 9, 1824, letter to the editors of the National Intelligencer, John Ross, then President of the Cherokee National Council, inverted white stereotypes of Native-­U.S. relations. Ross began by accusing pro-­removal Georgians of raising “the fell war whoop . . . against us to dispossess us of our lands.” Ross then declared that if white Georgians continued acting like the “Indian savage” by bringing military force to bear against his people, the Cherokee nation “will gratify the delegation of Georgia in their present earnestness to see us removed or destroyed by adding additional fertility to our land by a deposit of our bodies and our bones.” Like his first sentence, Ross’s second sentence inverted white messaging by turning a featured conceit of “vanishing Indian” mythology, that the bones of the Indigenous dead would fertilize the soil for white farmers, into a threat of armed resistance. By publishing this letter in the Intelligencer, Washington’s leading political newspaper, Ross took the Cherokee’s anti-­removal campaign to the heart of white political power.29 In this strategic messaging, Ross and the Cherokee were so successful that they compelled top leaders of Andrew Jackson’s administration and the president himself to directly respond to their defense of the graves of their fathers. In 1828, John Ross became the Principal Chief of the Cherokee nation and Andrew Jackson the equivalent in the United States. A man whose moment of fame during the Battle of New Orleans became a platform from which to launch a political career, Jackson was riddled with old bullet wounds (and at least one bullet) and plagued by chronic digestive issues. Debilitating physical ailments aside, Jackson became the face of an unflinching and increasingly

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hard-­line belief in racial difference between whites and Natives and a militant deportation agenda.30 In pursuit of this agenda Jackson was joined by Superintendent of Indian Affairs Thomas Loraine McKenney, a resident of Maryland who helped craft and promote the Jackson administration’s removal policy. Jackson and McKenney could largely count on support in the South and the West, the same regions that had propelled Jackson to the presidency. But opposition to removal was more deeply entrenched in the Northeast. In August 1829, in his capacity as Superintendent of Indian Affairs, McKenney took the administration’s removal messaging to New York. In a speech at a New York City church and to an audience that likely included readers and perhaps publishers of the Cherokee people’s arguments against removal, he attempted to refute anti-­removal messaging. McKenney responded to Cherokee and other Indigenous peoples’ declarations that they wished to remain beside the graves of their fathers. In a rhetorical address to Native peoples of the South, the superintendent of their affairs urged them to depart or to die. The “bones of your fathers,” he cautioned them, “cannot benefit you, stay where they are as long as you may.”31 McKenney’s refutation of Indigenous anti-­removal messaging oozed racial paternalism, but his decision to respond to Native peoples’ defense of the graves of their fathers illustrates that the message compelled the attention of federal officials at the highest levels. Less than six months later, the president himself would respond to Indigenous defenses of the graves of their fathers. In his first annual message to Congress in December 1829, Andrew Jackson laid out his commitment to removal. Yet, perhaps in a concession to members of the House and Senate who opposed this policy, Jackson acknowledged that removal would require separating Indigenous people from the graves of their ancestors. Because of this, Jackson declared, “This [Indigenous] emigration should be voluntary, for it would be as cruel as [it would be] unjust to compel the aborigines to abandon the graves of their fathers and seek a home in a distant land.”32 Instead of forcing Indigenous peoples west, Jackson was saying, the United States should convince them it would be an error to remain. Jackson’s speech did not concede the main issue. He still declared that removal should happen. But his carefully crafted address did demonstrate how Cherokee activists’ messaging surrounding their emotional connection to their graves had pervaded national removal discourse. Just a year later, Jackson and his speechwriting team had composed a different strategy to defuse Cherokee messaging on the graves of their fathers. Whereas before Jackson had described compulsory distancing of the Cherokee

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people from the graves of their fathers as cruel and unjust, in his 1830 annual message to Congress he now described that separation as something they would share with white Americans. As Jackson put it, “Doubtless it will be painful to leave the graves of their fathers; but what do they do more than our ancestors did or than our children are now doing? . . . To better their condition in an unknown land our forefathers left all that was dear in earthly objects.”33 With these words, Jackson attempted to equate removal with voluntary white migration, declaring that they shared the same degree of painful separation and the same joy of opportunity to be found at the end. It was this joy of opportunity, Jackson argued, that mattered most: “Does humanity weep at these (white American) painful separations from everything animate and inanimate, with which the young heart has become entwined?” He rhetorically asked his audience. For Jackson the answer was clear, “Far from it.” In Jackson’s argument, pain and joy attended removal (which he described as voluntary) and white migrations. But, for both, the defining emotional register was the latter. In the Jacksonian pro-­removal argument, for both “Indians” and white emigrants the joy of opportunity outweighed the pain of separation. Jackson thus acknowledged the emotional suffering of Native migrants, but he was sure to declare that a “settled, civilized christian [sic]” surely suffered more from leaving “the graves of his fathers” than did the “wandering savage.”34 Jackson’s message concluded by thrusting a rhetorical dagger into the Cherokees’ carefully crafted language of death: suggesting that their pain and thus their attachment to their land was not as great as that of their white American counterparts. Less than six months later, on May 28, 1830, the Indian Removal Act narrowly passed both houses. Jackson signed the bill into law that same day. The narrow victory signaled the country’s stark division on the removal issue. Jackson’s hasty signature is, perhaps, evidence of his deep personal and political commitment to removal. Removal’s opponents certainly saw Jackson as the figurehead of the campaign. While most white opponents of removal were clustered in the Northeast, some also resided in the South. In one telling response from those who had opposed the bill, the Natchez, an anti-­Jacksonian newspaper, published a series of satirical letters signed by a “Patriot.” The letters skewered the administration and, as is typical of satirists, landed on the most common language to make their point. In the words of the “Patriot,” the Jacksonian removal policy boiled down to “Who cares about the bones of Indians!”35 With this exclamation, the Patriot’s letters

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demonstrated just how prevalent Indigenous graves and their dead had become to removal debates. Defeat did nothing to dilute Cherokee activists’ messaging about the graves of their fathers. Although they failed to stop the Indian Removal Act, Cherokee activists kept fighting for their homeland. While Ross took his people’s case to the Supreme Court (with mixed results), he also continued to hammer home the Cherokee commitment to remaining with the graves of their fathers, and this commitment continued to receive national attention. In 1832, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison used the well-­known Cherokee attachment to their graves to argue against relocating emancipated African Americans to Liberia. In Thoughts on African Colonization, Garrison compared African Americans’ steadfast opposition to colonization to the Cherokee people’s opposition to removal: “they [African Americans] are as unanimously opposed to a removal to Africa, as the Cherokees [are opposed to removing] from the council-­fires and graves of their fathers.”36 In other words, Garrison was saying, African Americans would oppose colonization with their last breath. While some Cherokee people became convinced that it would be better to relocate west away from avaricious, violent whites who had invaded their lands, Ross continued to fight for the majority of Cherokee people who desired to remain. After a competing faction of Cherokee citizens and politicians, including Phoenix editor Elias Boudinot, signed the Treaty of New Echota in 1835 agreeing to remove, Ross launched a fervent campaign against Senate ratification. But victory just eluded Ross and the Cherokee nation. On March 1, 1836, the Senate ratified the treaty by a single vote.37 The narrow loss must have been heartbreaking, but Ross continued to press his anti-­removal message. In a letter to the Senate dated March 8, 1836, he coupled legal and sentimental arguments to make yet another case for the Cherokee people’s legal and moral right to remain. Ross’s letter opened with a detailed examination of recent developments in the Cherokee case and an offer to provide further documentation, should the Senate desire it, to support his version of events. Then he ended with a flourish of sentiment calculated to hit the Senate not in the head but in the heart. In his closing paragraph, Ross described the Cherokee as kneeling “with hands elevated” in supplication to the United States. Like an “unfortunate child,” the Cherokee nation asked: “Our Brothers, is it true you will drive us from the tombs of our Fathers and of our Mothers?”38 Ross rhetorically sketched the Cherokee in a position like that of the kneeling slave in Wedgwood’s anti-­slavery medallion: a figure who supplicates

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on the basis of shared humanity. First created in Britain in 1787, the medallion became a symbol of the transatlantic anti-­slavery movement, a powerful image that appealed “to reason and to . . . sentiment.”39 In portraying Cherokee people in the image of this medallion while also reminding senators of their connection to the tombs of their fathers, Ross blended the powerful sentimental tactics of two overlapping social movements. His words protested the plight of the Cherokee people and attempted to stave off their deportation.

The Rural Cemetery Movement and Native Americans’ Graves In Anglo-­ American culture, graves carried a different, though similarly salient, significance. In the early nineteenth century, this is perhaps best exemplified in what is known as the “rural cemetery movement.” In this movement, a “graveyard school” of American romantics began to promote and celebrate the cemetery as the place to commune with the dead. When Thomas Jefferson arranged the burial of his best friend, Dabney Carr, in 1773 he followed the tenets of this “graveyard school.” Jefferson had Carr’s body placed under an oak. He also ordered his gravestone inscribed with a verse from the Iliad. The phrase espoused Jefferson’s eternal affection and grief at Carr’s passing. In 1808, Jefferson prepared a similarly melancholic setting for his own burial. That year he ordered a double line of weeping willows planted near his future funeral site. Willows were part of a new, modern funerary ornamentation symbolizing spiritual weariness of the bereaved. Gracefully bent in an expression consistent with sentimental mourning, weeping willows replaced the grimmer skulls, bones, and coffins of the seventeenth century. For viewers these earlier motifs focused attention on the threat of death and the decay of the corpse. In contrast, the romantic willow and its frequent companion, the urn, obscured this physical decay. The willow symbolized grief and mourning while the urn stood in as a symbol for the corpse. Such funeral ornamentation exhorted viewers to engage in an abstract contemplation of death—and, as importantly, to weep.40 The rural cemetery movement also gained steam from white American Protestants who were beginning to reenvision the places of graves and the dead in the cultural and religious life of the country they dominated. This reenvisioning occurred in parallel with the centrality of the dead and territorial claims in anti-­removal debates. Much of the force behind the rural

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Figure 3. Embroidered Mourning Picture. Photograph © 1810, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Nineteenth-­century Americans also wove the urn and willow motif into mourning art, a genre that grew in popularity as the century progressed. In this picture made from embroidered silk, a willow tree hangs over a girl and a boy who are mourning at a tomb on which two urns rest. The inscription embroidered on the tomb reads, “Sacred to the memory of Luther F. Carter, AE 18 months, & Charles A. Carter, AE 14 months.” Possibly by Ann Carter, American, 1804–1894, American, about 1810, Silk plain weave embroidered with silk, with hand-­applied color and ink, 20½ x 22 x 1 in. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Berger in memory of Susan Jeannette Westafall, 2003.406.

cemetery movement came from a female-­inflected, lay-­driven faction within the Protestant Church that amounted to what one religious historian has described as a “cult of the dead.”41 In keeping with this veneration of the dead, proponents of rural cemeteries focused on burial grounds as places of “sleeping” (the literal meaning of the word “cemetery” in Greek) because it accommodated the Christian belief in resurrection and its related emphasis on familial reunification, be it in Heaven or on Earth after Christ’s second

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coming. Proponents of the cult of the dead and of rural cemeteries also celebrated graves as sites of memory and moral uplift for the living. Around the same time the Jackson administration was responding to anti-­removal activists, rural cemetery proponents launched campaigns to rebury the dead in beauteous, tranquil, pastoral settings. The new pastoral rural cemeteries found initial success on the other side of the Atlantic. The first rural cemetery, Père Lachaise, opened in Paris in 1804. From there, the design spread across the channel to England. For the next few decades, Europeans established new cemeteries that situated the dead in pastoral landscapes characterized by lush, immaculately manicured lawns laced with meandering foot and carriage paths, punctuated by babbling brooks and decorated with flowers and plants, many of which were grown on-­ site in cemetery greenhouses. Lawns, paths, brooks, and foliage were not decorative trimmings. They were integral to the philosophy of the movement that aspired to maintain the physical sanctity of the corpse as well as the memory of the deceased. A peaceful, pastoral setting encouraged visitors to mourn and remember and provided an environment conducive to doing so. In the United States, the rural cemetery movement would eventually find its greatest success in the urban Northeast of the 1820s: the same region and the same decade from which the majority of the Cherokee people’s white allies had come.42 While the impulses emanating from the rural cemetery movement would seem to naturally ally with Indigenous defenses of the graves of their fathers, it was not the case. In addition to serving personal goals of mourning and familial reunification, the rural cemetery movement also served purposes of U.S. nationalism. In 1820, Washington Irving, the same writer who used the seventeenth-­century sachem’s speech to support the myth of the “vanishing Indian,” declared that one of the rural cemetery movement’s most important contributions would be to “bolster a sense of national heritage.” Irving saw the movement as promoting patriotic heritage by perpetuating people’s (by which he meant white Protestants) memories of their deceased loved ones. Moreover, Irving believed that creating such naturalistic burial places would inspire “melancholy, uplifting sentiments” among Americans: sentiments that would, in turn, “improve the national character.”43 As the temporal coincidence of Irving’s support for the “vanishing Indian” myth and the rural cemetery movement suggest, the rise of the lament for the “vanishing Indian” among white Americans tracked a rise in melancholic sensibility more generally. So too did the fallacy of the “vanishing Indian” play a central role in the nationalism of white Americans’ rural cemeteries.

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As white Americans dedicated rural cemeteries across the Northeast in the 1830s and 1840s, they also spread a message of vanished “Indians.” Daniel Appleton White delivered such a declaration at the dedication of Harmony Grove Cemetery in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1840. In his speech White described how “one of the pilgrim fathers of Plymouth” had seen “a rural cemetery of the Indians” near where White and his contemporaries were celebrating Harmony Grove. But White did not equate the rural cemetery of the “Indians” with the one opening that day. Instead, he declared the “Indian” cemetery of the past to be a model for “civilized successors” like himself. White’s formulation of Harmony Grove rooted the new cemetery in a supposed American tradition while simultaneously declaring the creators of that tradition to be dead and gone.44 In his address delivered at the dedication of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 24, 1831, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story made an allied argument. Story began by situating Mount Auburn in a long-­standing tradition of humanity’s “tender and universal respect for the dead.” This tradition included Native peoples who, according to Story, had routinely visited and strewn flowers at the graves of their dead, a practice akin to those advocated by the rural cemetery movement. Mount Auburn, Story declared, represented a modern, Christian version of care for the dead, a continuation of a venerable tradition that had long been practiced by “Indians” in North America. Story’s address simultaneously celebrated Indigenous care for the dead and placed them squarely in the past. For the assembled audience and readers of Story’s published address the message was clear: Mount Auburn represented a white present and future in New England.45 As Story and members of the rural cemetery movement spread the myth of “vanished Indians” across New England, many also lent their support to the Cherokee nation’s anti-­removal campaign. A few months before he addressed the crowd at Mount Auburn, Story, in his capacity as Supreme Court Justice, threw his support behind the Cherokee people’s cause. Concurring with the dissenting opinion authored by Justice Smith Thompson in the case of Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, Story sided with the counsel for the Cherokee who had argued that the Cherokee had a right to be heard in Court. Writing the opinion for the majority, Chief Justice John Marshall declared that the Court could not hear the case because the Cherokee and other Indigenous nations were not foreign nations but domestic, dependent nations who could not bring a case against Georgia. The decision dealt a heavy blow to the Cherokee anti-­removal campaign. But the following year, the Cherokee lawyers would emerge victorious from the Court. In the 1832 case of Worcester v. Georgia

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the Court ruled in favor of Cherokee sovereignty and declared their nation to be exempt from the laws of Georgia. At the time that momentous legal victory proved hollow. Jackson, unwaveringly committed to removal, refused to enforce the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of Cherokee sovereignty and, thus, their right to remain.46

Deportation and the Continued Defense of Native Place As the 1830s progressed, federal and state forces empowered by the Indian Removal Act combined to deport more than one hundred thousand Native peoples from the graves of their ancestors. The resulting expulsions amounted to what historian Claudio Saunt has described as the first modern, state-­ sponsored deportation. And yet, as another historian has shown, even when faced with this state removal campaign thousands of Indigenous peoples managed to remain near the graves of their fathers. Some years after the government had forced the Creek nation west a German tourist stumbled on a Creek man living in a cabin in a densely wooded forest. The man begged the tourist not to reveal his hiding place, lest he be removed and prevented from resting with the “bones of his ancestors.”47 Tens of thousands of Native peoples, force marched west by the United States, would not have that opportunity. Even with their opposition strategies exhausted, and the moment of their departure from the graves of their fathers imminent, Indigenous peoples paused to tell whites that the places they were leaving were no less Native for their departure. From the deck of a steamboat poised to carry him to Indian Territory, Choctaw man George W. Harkins composed a farewell “To The American People.” Published on February 25, 1832, in the Niles Weekly Register, Harkins began by walking his readers through the Choctaw’s excruciating decision to comply with deportation. He ended with a reassertion of the Choctaw people’s claim to their native lands: “Here is the land of our progenitors, and here are their bones; they left them as a sacred deposit, and we have been compelled to venerate its trust; it is dear to us, yet we cannot stay, my people is dear to me, with them I must go.”48 Harkins’s message reasserted what Indigenous people had been saying all along: that the graves of their fathers definitively marked their lands as Native places. Three years later, Creek Principal Chief Yoholo did not mince words when, on the eve of Creek deportation, he likened U.S. military and land speculators to anatomists and corpse robbers. In seizing Creek lands, they

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had stolen “the pail [sic] remnants of what heretofore composed the bodies of our fathers and of our children our wives and our kindred.” With these words, Yoholo placed the military and land speculators in one of the most derided social categories in nineteenth-­century America: grave robbers.49 At the same time, Yoholo reminded white Americans that the land they now physically occupied was already possessed and inhabited by dead Creek peoples. As such it was and always would be Native space. Harkins and Yoholo used their words to convey proofs of American Indian persistence to whites. Other Indigenous peoples provided marks on the landscape. Prior to removal, many Native Americans spent their final moments in their homelands physically marking and memorializing graves of their ancestors. In 1843, the Wyandot marked “the graves of . . . loved ones with stone or marble tablets” before leaving Michigan for Kansas. In erecting these markers, the Wyandot helped fix their dead in place: for themselves and for invading settlers who liked to imagine Native land as empty space.50 Even as the United States forced Native peoples to leave their land and their dead behind, Native Americans took steps to protect and remember their dead. Before their deportation the Shawnee leveled and covered their ancestors’ graves with sod, ostensibly to hide them from future trespassers. But while the Shawnee obscured the physical presence of their dead, they perpetuated their memory by holding a “Feast of the Dead” to celebrate those who had passed and to name an individual “to carry on their worthy and good attributes.”51 The Miami also carried their dead with them. Before leaving Indiana, they collected a “clod of dirt or a small stone” from their people’s graves as a sacred memento to bring to Kansas.52 Such actions demonstrate that, even when physically separated from the graves of their fathers, Indigenous peoples remained connected to their ancestors’ graves and to their homelands. In taking time to strengthen these connections to the graves of their fathers and to perpetuate their memory, Native peoples exerted a modicum of control over their deportations. In 1830, the United States began forced deportations in the South by focusing first on the Choctaw because they were located on the western edge of Mississippi. But before the Choctaw would depart, they told the army general in charge of operations that they must first properly bury their recent dead. For centuries, the Choctaws had practiced a ritually driven, multistage burial. They had no intention of letting deportation disrupt that. As the army general and his men waited, the Choctaw performed their traditional burial ceremony. First, they built scaffolds for their dead. Next, they laid their loved ones on these scaffolds and waited for the

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flesh to naturally decompose. Following that, skilled bone-­pickers cleaned the corpses after which they bound and interred the remains in mounds or other communal graves. Weeks passed before Choctaw leaders told the army general that they were ready to depart.53 Shawnee leaders also forced U.S. officials to wait while they memorialized their dead. When Guy W. Pool, the major in charge of Shawnee deportation, first realized that the Shawnee had not begun their journey he called the chiefs together to ask why they had “deceived him.” The Shawnee leaders replied that they would not depart before they could pay their respects to “the burial sites of their family and loved ones.” The Shawnee had performed this ceremony at six-­month intervals for as long as they could remember, and they had no intention of leaving before it was completed. Pool was frustrated but, as the Shawnee leaders likely knew, he had neither the manpower nor permission to forcibly prevent the ceremony. And so, in a show of their power, the Shawnee leaders formally invited Major Pool and some of the other military leaders to attend their ceremonies. Somewhat surprisingly, Pool and some of his colleagues decided to attend, but the scene only increased their irritation. Assistant Conductor John Shelby recalled that the Shawnee performed the ceremony in a very deliberate manner and reflected that “under no circumstance can we hope to hurry an Indian to any purpose.”54 Shelby’s account attempted to shift focus from a Native victory to what he saw as an innate, blameworthy racial trait of Indigenous lethargy. But the fact remained that the military waited as the Shawnee purposefully and carefully conducted the traditional ceremony for their dead. Eventually, Pool and Shelby moved out with the Shawnee, but even then, they did not manage to remove all of them. A contingent of female elders had taken their plea to remain to President Jackson himself. These Shawnee women asked Jackson that they be allowed to remain because they wanted nothing more than to die at home and be buried alongside the graves of their fathers. Surprisingly, Jackson ultimately granted these women the right to remain. When Shelby and the other conductors finally managed to start the Shawnee west, these women remained behind on their homeland.55

Dying, Death, and Indigenous Resistance on Trails of Graves For most Indigenous people, deportation was not something they could evade. Under duress, the elderly, men, women, and children embarked on

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marches hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles long. For decades prior to their removal, Indigenous activists had declared that forced marches west would kill them. On march after shameful march, they were proved correct. Racism coupled with bureaucratic ineptitude stilled the hearts and silenced the voices of as many as a quarter of the Native peoples who began their journeys west.56 The aches of the aged faded as tired lungs breathed their last. Babies, who had crashed into the world with wails of arrival, prematurely departed with gasps so inaudible that whiplashed parents may have wondered if it had all been a dream. For some Indigenous communities, mortality rates began to climb months before their marches had even begun. This was true for the Cherokee ­people who, after being forcibly rounded up by the military in May 1838, spent the summer in internment camps deprived of clean water and air and with only limited access to medical supplies necessary to treat the diseases they contracted in these unsanitary conditions. Methodist Daniel S. Butrick, a missionary to the nation, described how the forced internment of the Cherokee during that sweltering summer made the people “almost familiar with death.”57 In his capacity as missionary Butrick administered Christian last rites and burials to Cherokee mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, sons, and daughters. In one especially agonizing episode, two parents arrived at his mission door carrying their dead infant in their arms. The girl had died of measles that morning and her mother and father “had carried her all day in the hot sun” to reach Butrick.58 As the sun beat down on the devout parents their dead baby would have grown colder and stiffer, the increasing contrast in temperature an unavoidable reminder of their loss. Measles and other infectious viral diseases became the immediate cause of death for many Native peoples forcibly deported by the United States, but it was a bacterial disease, known colloquially as Asiatic cholera (because of its origination in India), that likely claimed the most lives. Medical practitioners in the 1830s did not know how to treat cholera, caused by the comma-­shaped bacterium Vibrio cholerae, nor did they understand its epidemiology. This lack of knowledge contributed to cholera deaths during deportation, but the biggest factor was likely the crowded conditions in internment camps, on steamboats, and on overland trails west. But even though medical practitioners and the public had some understanding that cholera could be transmitted from person to person, and that crowded conditions increased this risk, they did nothing to mitigate Native exposure to the deadly bacterium.

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For instance, in 1832 U.S. representatives deported the Choctaw to Indian Territory during a global cholera pandemic. U.S. deportations created crowded conditions that were as conducive to spreading cholera as the better-­known urban centers of the disease. On their journey, the Choctaw traveled in both crammed wagon trains and densely packed steamboats. Two years later, similar crowding helped make cholera the leading cause of mortality among a detachment of Cherokee deportees.59 The deportees did what they could to shield themselves from infection, but their efforts had limited success. After more than five Cherokee people died of Asiatic cholera within twenty-­four hours, the rest of their community scattered “through the woods, building their campfires as remote from each other” as possible. That night, the company camped over an area of two to three miles.60 The unique challenges and stresses of deportations also made Indigenous peoples more vulnerable to potential fatality. Cherokee public health practice, for instance, depended on access to a wide variety of medicinal plants native to their homeland. Once on the move, doctors and other caregivers could not access these remedies.61 The stress of moving in strange places and the inability to access medical care or the emotional and physical support of loved ones increased cholera’s terrors and its fatalities. In addition to being short on medical supplies, deportations were also short on care workers. Joseph Harris, who expelled a detachment of Cherokee in 1834, tried to hire extra help, but no wagon drivers would approach the diseased camp. One local doctor did come to assist but caught the disease himself and died. Meanwhile, cholera ravaged the detachment: “In the space of two days, Black Fox lost his wife and three children. Will Tucker lost four sons.”62 Harris was unusual in his sympathetic attitude toward the beleaguered Cherokee deportees, but even so his terse journal entries provide little insight into the extreme suffering that this mother and seven children endured before they passed. Before Black Fox’s wife and children and Will Tucker’s four sons died, they would have experienced the violent cramping, vomiting, and diarrhea that attended cholera’s rapid dehydration. Cholera could cause cramps so strong they could wrench hips from sockets and purging could happen so quickly that once symptoms began many patients died within a few hours. When Lieutenant Jefferson Van Horne, one of the military men tasked with conveying the Choctaw to Indian Territory in 1832, contracted cholera himself he begged a nearby farmer to let him rest in his house. Once inside, Van Horne spent hours “before the fire” in a state of “constant purging and vomiting, and terrible cramps in my stomach & bowels.” The property owner tore

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up a plank in the floor so an immobilized Van Horne could vomit through it. After some hours, the farmer had had enough. Nervous that he and his family would become infected, he ordered Van Horne to leave. Desperate for the modicum of comfort the shelter provided, Van Horne begged to remain, but the farmer stood firm. And so, bent double with pain, Van Horne walked three-­quarters of a mile back to his tent.63 Van Horne was lucky to survive his infection, but his experience reveals that even deportation conductors struggled to access comfort and care on a journey where there was little to spare. Van Horne’s massive journal makes his suffering easily accessible. Racism manifested as archival inequity obscures the deportation experiences of Native peoples. Van Horne saw the deaths of Choctaw in his care not as those of people but as statistics to be properly reported. As Van Horne tallied each death, he made sure to erase the individual name from the roll, essentially erasing their humanity. Some of what we do know of Choctaw suffering comes from a report published in the Arkansas Gazette stating simply that the Choctaw “suffered dreadfully.”64 Ever focused on moving people from point A to point B as quickly as possible, conductors such as Van Horne turned Indigenous peoples’ fears of death on the move into reality. Conductors primarily viewed Indigenous illness as a logistical challenge rather than a human problem. One conductor, for instance, breathed a sigh of relief that the Choctaws “are a people that will walk to the last,” a necessary trait given that the five sick wagons the government had procured for every thousand deportees were almost immediately filled.65 The bureaucratic management of deportation focused first and foremost on the government’s bottom line, turning a deadly deportation deadlier. In 1838, the U.S. removal of the Yellow River Band of Potawatomi was so lethal that it became known as the “Potawatomi Trail of Death.”66 The very vehicles tasked with transporting Native peoples west contributed to these deaths. Wagons, in the words of sympathetic Potawatomi missionary Benjamin Marie Petit, turned the journey into “a veritable torture.” For the Potawatomi, white-­topped covered wagons, symbolically linked then and now to voluntary white westward migration, but also purchased and rented by the government to deport Indigenous peoples, became wheeled death chambers. When people became too sick to walk or ride, conductors loaded them into wagon beds crowded with other sick people and, frequently, luggage.67 According to Cherokee missionary Daniel Butrick, conductors ripped sick infants from their mothers’ arms and placed them in wagons where “the suffering infant must lie, and die, unnurtured.”68 Imagine, Butrick

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implored his white readers, what it would be like to have one’s sick mother or wife “thrown into a great wagon,” away from her friends and family who could no longer “hear her faint listings.” Unacknowledged and alone, the woman must lie in torture until, one day, she is dead.69 Wagons tortured Indigenous people because they deprived them of the care of their loved ones and because they deprived them of breathable air. The thick canvas covers “confined” the air inside the wagon bed. Above the covers the “burning sun” heated that trapped air to excruciating temperatures. Petit declared that for the sick Potawatomi in his company it was as if they had been buried alive under a “burning canopy.”70 In these desperate circumstances Native people did all they could to care for the dying and the dead. In 1836, Creek people insisted on traveling by land rather than the quicker steamboat route so that in the event of death their loved ones could be given a “proper Creek Burial.”71 But even traveling overland could not guarantee proper Creek burials. In February 1837, the New York Observer reprinted a letter originally published in the Little Rock Gazette that minced no words about the horrific fate of the Indigenous people who died en route to Indian Territory. The Gazette declared that during the Creek deportation their dead “are thrown by the side of the road, and are covered over only with brush, etc . . . where they remain until devoured by the wolves.”72 This description captured the fear of many Indigenous peoples that the graves of loved ones who died on the way would be vulnerable, isolated, and ravaged. While this article refrained from pointing fingers at those responsible for these subpar burials, deportation conductors wielded the greatest power over and thus the greatest responsibility for Indigenous burials during deportation. For the most part, Indigenous peoples had to bend to the demands of conductors who, as the logistical managers of deportations, shouldered the burden of burying the dead themselves or hired local white civilians to do it for them. In Memphis, Tennessee, deportation conductors paid local resident William Spickernagle $10 apiece for “making two coffins and digging two graves for an Indian man and woman.”73 Spickernagle appears to have finished the job, but his burial likely lacked the personal, emotional elements that the Cherokee people would have been able to provide their deceased loved ones and citizens. Other whites reacted with outright hostility. After a Cherokee mother perished holding her “infant in her arms” on Thursday, December 13, 1838, the white owner of the closest farm refused to allow her to be buried on his

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land. So, the Cherokee people carried her corpse with them. That night they made her a coffin and the following morning buried her “near the graves of some other Cherokee who had died in a detachment that had preceded us.”74 In finding this miniature graveyard on the road, her family and friends ultimately found a more welcoming spot for her body. Seen from one angle this was a fortunate circumstance that provided comfort for this woman’s kin. Seen from another, the existence of this miniature graveyard signaled the devastating toll of deportation. In the face of constraints on their ability to ensure proper burials for their dead kin, Indigenous peoples took stands when they could. When the Creek Chief Chawwee’s daughter died in October 1832, the entire migrating company refused to move on before she was buried.75 Deportation conductors chafed against these demands. That same year, Assistant Conductor Shelby, who marched the Shawnee west, thought he had convinced them to leave just a few members behind to bury one of their party. However, when Shelby prepared to depart the next morning, he found that nearly “half the party” planned to remain to attend the burial and mourning ceremonies.76 Such victories were, no doubt, bittersweet. They also appear to have been few and far between. By the early 1840s, Indigenous deportations had created trails of graves forever abandoned in a liminal space between Native homelands and their places of exile. The Little Rock Gazette’s stirring description of deportation graves ravaged by wolves and wilderness came to characterize the burials of Native peoples on overland and river trails that spread like a spider web across the eastern half of the continent.77 Eliza Ross’s 1842 lament that the Cherokee signatories of the Treaty of New Echota had caused “the graves of their own people” to be “strewn . . . along the roads and banks of rivers in strange lands . . . amongst strangers, without one friend to watch over their bones” was one shared by deported Native peoples at large.78 In Eliza’s telling, the Cherokee dead lying across “many hundreds of miles” were symbols of the trauma that the treaty party and the United States had inflicted on the Cherokee nation. In dying where they had, deportees’ graves became permanent markers and reminders of Cherokee dispossession and suffering. Eliza’s letter described the vulnerability, sacrifice, and dislocation of Cherokee graves strewn along what became known as the Trail of Tears as dislocated and vulnerable. But this vulnerability and dislocation also heightened their significance. Because of their isolation from their nation,

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rather than despite it, these graves took on an outsized role in Cherokee history and national identity.

Landmarking White American Deaths in Unsettled Country Soon after Eliza’s letter to her uncle John, emigrants began to dig and fill similarly isolated graves along the Overland Trail. These graves joined existing landmarks of death in a region that whites perceived as unsettled country and which was, in fact, Native land. After the “discovery” of the Trail in the late 1820s, early white American explorers codified a series of landmarks of death in their published reports and adventure narratives. By the time emigrants began traveling the Trail in substantial numbers in the early 1840s, these landmarks included, in geographical order from east to west, Scotts Bluff in western Nebraska; Ogden’s Hole in Utah, a narrow and deep hiding place where a hunter supposedly hid himself and died; and American Falls, a fifteen-­foot drop in the Snake River in Idaho that Theodore Talbot (who traveled with famous explorer John Charles Frémont) described as being named after “the melancholy fate of some six or eight Americans who were drowned here some years since.” As numerous historians have shown, landmarks like these were and are key to making distant territory knowable, significant, and capable of being imaginatively possessed by distant audiences.79 Established ideas of the importance of landmarks of death and the precedent of established sites of death along the Trail shaped, but did not determine, the later transformation of the Trail into an American burial ground. Explorer John Charles Frémont’s failed landmark of death on what white Americans called Independence Rock—and what was in fact a turtle-­shaped granite outcrop and Lakota landmark—provides some insight into the contingent evolution of the relationship between death and the Overland Trail. Now widely regarded as better at narrating his explorations than at exploring, Frémont, with the help of his wife and promoter Jessie Benton Frémont, wrote reports that quickly became riveting must-­reads. They would also help propel thousands of white Americans west across the Trail. In his 1842 report, Frémont described how when he visited Independence Rock in what is now southeastern Wyoming, he found the granite edifice, one hundred feet high and more than a mile in circumference, “thickly inscribed with names.”80 Amid these names Frémont chiseled and then painted with “Indian Rubber” a large cross. He described his decision to create the cross as following in the

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tradition of seventeenth-­century English explorer George Weymouth, who had planted a cross in Wabanaki land (later seized and renamed Maine) in 1605 to communicate Christian English presence to the Wabanaki as well as any visiting rival Europeans.81 With similar intent, Frémont declared that his cross transformed Independence Rock into “a giant gravestone.” This gravestone was a monument to white American explorers who had preceded him and many of whom “have long since found their way to the grave” and “for whom the huge rock is a giant gravestone.”82 Armed with nothing other than the unassuming tools of chisel, paintbrush, and pen, Frémont declared that he had remade this granite landmark on the Plains into a cenotaph: a memorial to dead who lie elsewhere. In chiseling his cross and then writing about it, Frémont attempted to create one of the first American mass memorials outside of the United States. In so doing he aspired to buttress U.S. territorial presumptions to Native lands. But Independence Rock never became the cenotaph Frémont wanted it to be. Few emigrants remarked on Frémont’s cross. Instead, they inscribed their names on the edifice, climbed to the top to survey the landscape, and celebrated the Fourth of the July in the granite’s shadow. In the 1850s the cross became a political liability for Frémont. During his 1856 presidential campaign Democrats pointed to the cross as evidence that their Republican opponent was a secret Catholic. Such a charge was enough to tank a political career in mid-­nineteenth-­century Protestant America.83 Eventually, an early and historically large snowstorm, rather than human-­ wielded tar and brush, set the stage for the transformation of the Trail into an American burial ground. The migration of the Donner Party began much like any other overland journey. In the spring of 1846, a group of well-­to-­do farming families and their hired hands left Illinois for Mexican California. Were it not for a confluence of poor decisions and that unexpected snowstorm, the Donners may have remained historically obscure. As it happened, the sufferings of these bedraggled, misguided emigrants at an alpine lake and campsite perched high in the Sierra Nevada during the winter of 1846–47 catapulted those emigrants and that site into the annals of the Trail and U.S. history. Washoe narratives confirm that the Donners had reached the Truckee River (near present-­day Reno-­Sparks) by early fall. Their presence startled these local people who had had little contact with whites and who could not understand why anyone would ascend the mountains so late in the season. When the Washoe realized that the foreigners were stranded, they tried to

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offer them food, but the emigrants shot at them. In a desperate attempt to help, one Washoe man threw fish across the ice to the starving emigrants. A few Washoe men did make it to the Donner camp, but they quickly recoiled in horror when one of the emigrants offered them the “hand of a human.”84 When the first white rescuers arrived from the Sacramento Valley in February 1847, they encountered similarly gruesome evidence of cannibalism among the stranded emigrants. By early spring 1847, the horrors of the Donner Party’s alleged cannibalism, printed in black ink and devoured by a highly literate American public, forever linked the Sierra Nevada with emigrant death and despair. First, they titillated English-­language readers in Mexican California and in Oregon, which had, less than a year earlier, become U.S. territory. On April 9, 1847, Alexander J. Rodgers wrote from Oregon to his sister Isabel telling her that he had heard that the survivors “had . . . to subsist on the Bodies of the Dead one woman saw her own husband heart eat.” After spreading along the Pacific Coast, the news traveled west to the Kingdom of Hawaii and then south to the port cities of Latin America. Eventually, folded in quarters and tightly wrapped in a bundle, the news was carried on the pages of the California Star that made its way around the Horn of Africa on a ship called The Sterling.85 As the survivors recuperated at Sutter’s Fort outside of Sacramento, print media trumpeted what they had done. By July 1847 news of the gruesome claims had reached their hometown of Springfield, Illinois. By September 1847, an Illinois paper had printed a letter from survivor Mary Ann Graves detailing how, in their deprivation, emigrants were “subsisting on human flesh” including that of “Two Indians” they had killed and “whose flesh lasted until we got out of the snow.”86 The details published that same month in the Nashville Whig were even more gruesome, describing how “an eastbound traveler” had found Mrs. Murphy’s body “lying near one of the huts with her thigh cut away for food, and the saw used to dismember the body lying alongside of her.”87 Through published and unpublished writings, white Americans broadcast the Donner tragedy, marking the Sierra Nevada as a place of emigrant death. These reports described the site as the scene of horrific cannibalism, but later emigrants likened their visits to pilgrimages to a sacred site. In 1848, fourteen-­year-­old Rufus Burrows spent a day at what had already become known as the “cannibal camp” “to gather up and bury the bones and skeletons of the people that had perished.”88 While Burrows helped to bury the dead other emigrants collected them. Charles Ben Darwin, for instance,

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“picked up . . . bones” from the Donner Party encampment “as souvenirs of the sad spot.”89 By pocketing these “souvenirs,” emigrants did what white Americans had been doing for decades at tourist tombs. These were tombs, like George Washington’s resting place at Mount Vernon, that white Americans deemed graves of national significance. As another historian has shown, tourists to Mount Vernon yearned to collect relics from Washington’s tomb, and they likened their visits to sacred pilgrimages. Visiting the site and leaving with these relics fostered a sense of national belonging. Emigrants who followed the Donners across the Sierra Nevada engaged in the same tourist practices. Through visiting, collecting, and writing about their time in the Sierra, emigrants fostered a greater sense of national belonging and helped cement the significance of an emergent American landmark.90 The abstract contemplation of mourning and suffering that was an established tenet of the rural cemetery movement also infused emigrant accounts of their visits to the Donner landmark. In 1849, Charles Parke wrote after seeing the remains of cabins and tree stumps, “It would be a cold hearted cuss that could stand on this sorrowful spot without showing some feeling for his unfortunate fellow emigrants who perished here in 1846.”91 John Steele described a similar experience the following year, noting the “charred remains” of the burned cabins “and the whitened bones, half buried among wither pine leaves” as “sad memorials” of the Donners.92 Thomas Van Dorn found little material evidence of the Donners’ suffering but nonetheless felt “a melancholy gloom” when standing near the spot. Knowing the “facts connected with the fate of this party” colored Van Dorn’s impression of his surroundings. He even imagined that “the tall pines sent forth a deep and melancholy moan as if to remind us of the suffering and fatality which here had been.” On his way to California in 1852, Augustus Ripley Burbank paused to experience the valley of Donner suffering. Burbank declared it to be so filled with gloom that he proposed renaming it “mournful, or melancholy valley.”93 Eventually white Americans would officially add the appellation “Donner” to the pass and to the nearby lake where the unfortunate emigrants pitched their last, desperate camp. With this renaming white Americans codified the Sierra Nevada as a white American place. These settler memorial practices and renaming campaigns did not go unopposed. Soon after the members of the Donner Party had gone the Washoe returned to the site. Washoe oral history describes how, in the spring months following the emigrants’ winter in the mountains, their men returned to the

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grisly scene. “Any discovery made, such as a cup or piece of cloth, was buried. They buried these objects away from the sites so no one could find them and unbury the objects.” Burying the detritus of the horrors that had occurred that winter was designed to cleanse their valley of white suffering and cannibalism. To Washoe people, “the remains of the strangers were taboo, and by burying and burning,” them they forced the spirits to depart.”94 The emigrants who later passed through the valley imagined connecting with these spirits, feeling and paying homage to their suffering. But from the Washoe perspective the Donners and their horrific acts had been cleansed from their homeland and the safety of a place they had occupied since time immemorial had been secured. During the formative nineteenth century, Indigenous and white culture entangled. Native peoples’ emotionally affecting defense of homelands on the basis of their “ancestors’ graves” sprung from deep-­rooted cosmology. White Americans responded to this defense according to their own cultural pillars: the growing importance of sentiment and sentimentalism, novel developments among Protestants that resulted in what one historian has characterized as a “cult of the dead,” and private and municipal reforms driven by the rural cemetery movement that embraced a new form of physical and memorial care for the deceased. These shifts also helped Indigenous activists gain traction. These activists included Cherokee people, who fused territorial contests with the rhetoric of death and graves and who waged protracted, and occasionally successful, campaigns against removal.95 In articulating their attachment to their homelands in terms of their sacred and emotional ties to the graves of their fathers, Indigenous peoples broadcast a particular form of placemaking that also became the metric against which their opponents measured white attachment to home. By the time white Americans began to create landmarks of death on the Overland Trail, they did so in a context defined by Indigenous activism against removal. Voluntary westward expansion and the contingencies of the Donner tragedy did not emerge out of a cultural vacuum but rather a decades-­long cross-­ cultural conversation about death, graves, and territorial claims. The members of the Donner Party had intended to create a different kind of place on the Pacific: profitable farms that would sustain themselves and their descendants for generations. Instead of nurturing seeds for profit, their failures and deaths became a different kind of seed, one that blossomed into a national place. The Donner tragedy was a dramatic bang that tightened the link between the Overland Trail and death.

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It was Vibrio cholerae that would redefine the relationship between death and the Overland Trail. The Donners marked the Sierra and sped emigrant wagons faster westward.96 But an invisible bacterium, not a snowstorm, would prove responsible for remaking the entire Trail into a place of American death. Vibrio cholerae transformed the fear and threat of death into a widely shared experience of dying along the two-­thousand-­mile route, and in the process, the bacterium helped white Americans begin to transform the Trail into U.S. space.

CHAPTER 2

Cholera’s Ravages

By 1849, the trickle of emigrants that the Washoe had watched ascend the Sierra Nevada in 1846 had become a “great rush across the Plains.” The boom years of travel across the Overland Trail left an altogether different order of magnitude of destruction and death in their wake than those of the 1840s. Emigrants and their animals trampled essential flora and fauna, upsetting the delicate ecological balance in the West. On the Plains they destroyed groves of cottonwood trees that had sheltered Cheyenne camps for generations. They also introduced a destroyer invisible to the naked eye. At the turn of the twentieth century, Cheyenne writer and activist George Bent recorded how in 1849 a Cheyenne war party had come upon an emigrant camp full of “white men dying of cholera in wagons.” The party immediately fled “but the terrible disease had them already in its grip.” During the gold rush years, the single-­celled bacteria Vibrio cholerae propelled itself into the bowels of its emigrant and Indigenous hosts and into the pages of history.1 Cholera infections and deaths marked a turning point in Indigenous-U.S. relations and in the history of the Trail. The epidemics sparked by overland migration proved particularly deadly for Native peoples of the Central and Southern Plains including the Lakota, Pawnee, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and  Comanche. These peoples remember the cholera epidemics as a milestone in their demographic devastation and a moment that clarified the threat of overland emigrants.2 The consequences of the epidemics were distinct but no less significant for white Americans. By the end of the 1850s, the series of cholera epidemics on the Overland Trail not only took Native peoples’ and emigrants’ lives but also transformed the Trail experience from a thrilling adventure in pursuit of riches into a desultory journey weighted down by the need to care for the sick and the dying.

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Expecting to find themselves at the mercy of weather and “Indians,” emigrants instead found themselves dying from a disease associated with crowded cities. Rather than rushing headlong across the Plains, emigrants recalculated their routes and altered their travel plans in an often failed attempt to evade cholera. Once infected with cholera, companies sought to find an unachievable balance between meeting the needs of the sick and dying and crossing the Sierra Nevada before the first snowfall. The epidemics refocused the emigrant experience and Trail narratives around disease, sickness, and death. Cholera burdened emigrants with the contradictory demands to care for the sick and dying and the need to press on and induced sheer terror that the “dreaded scourge” would force them to leave their remains or those of their loved ones along the way.3

The Cholera Age of Early Nineteenth-­Century America Cholera’s uniquely gruesome pathology and rapid course induced such alarm that it is widely regarded as one of the most feared diseases of the nineteenth century.4 Vibrio cholerae first triggered a global crisis in the 1830s when British imperialists unwittingly transported the pathogen to Europe from its native home in the Ganges River of India. On the western side of the Atlantic, naive belief in European corruption and American virtue initially quelled concerns that cholera would breach the nation’s borders. But in 1832, “the blue terror”—as cholera had become known in the British Empire because of the bluish color of its victims—slipped southward from Canada into New York. In the “cholera years” that followed the United States experienced three national epidemics in 1832, 1849, and 1866 as the bacteria moved between North, South, and West in the guts of infected travelers who rode the trains, sailed on the steamboats, and drove the wagons along the trade, communication, and travel routes that united and ensnared the country.5 The combination of this budding national transportation network and urban growth accelerated cholera’s deadly march through the United States. By the summer of 1832, cholera had settled with especial intensity in the port cities of New York and New Orleans. After traveling overland to Oregon in 1831 as part of a fur-­trading expedition, John B. Wyeth spent the late summer and fall of 1832 in New Orleans earning two dollars a day digging the graves of the city’s cholera victims.6 As cholera spread unchecked, frightened

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Americans turned against each other. In Michigan, residents of suburbs around Detroit destroyed bridges connecting them to the city and threatened fleeing Detroiters with violence. In July 1832 when two mail stages ignored the city of Ypsilanti’s order that they undergo a medical examination before entering the town, local officials opened fire.7 On edge of the Plains, Osage peoples adopted the same tactic as fleeing Detroiters. When cholera appeared at their Kansas missions, men, women, and children fled west on the Plains in the hopes of evading the disease.8 Other Americans believed that their faith and moral ways would protect them from what they perceived as “a plague on the filthy and unregenerate.” Medical practitioners supported these theories. In 1832 the Transylvania Journal of Medicine blamed the filthy living conditions of cholera’s victims who shared living space with “large swarms of flies . . . overflowing privies” and an “intolerable” stench for their deaths and infections. Pointing fingers at the poor went hand in hand with pointing fingers at immigrant populations, including the Irish, whom elite and middle-­class white Protestants regarded as uncouth, diseased invaders.9 But white Americans had no one to blame but themselves. Their nation’s approach to development and nation building helped to assure that the age of the market revolution and urbanization was also an age of disease. As the nation’s economy and commercialization expanded its citizens were growing shorter and dying younger. Emigrants, many of whom entered the world in the 1820s and 1830s, were part of a cohort that had some of the lowest life expectancies of the entire century. By 1850, the average life expectancy had declined to just thirty-­nine years.10 Illnesses, including cholera, consumption (what we now call tuberculosis), dysentery, malaria, and yellow fever, accounted for many of these early deaths. Indeed, the rhythm of nineteenth-­century Americans’ lives unfolded in subservience to diseases that were constant, seasonal, and annual and punctuated by terrifying epidemics.11 The novel cholera epidemic of 1832 was the most devastating cholera epidemic in the United States, but it was far from the only time the disease would rip through the population and dominate American headlines in the early 1830s. Then, in 1836, Americans heaved a sigh of relief as Vibrio cholerae disappeared from their country. For the next thirteen years the nation enjoyed a respite from the bacteria’s terrors. During that time an entire generation who had, thus far, escaped the “demon malady” grew to adulthood unscathed but also unprepared for cholera’s horrors.12

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In 1848 cholera returned to U.S. shores. That fall two ships, bound respectively for New Orleans and New York, set sail from the Le Havre port in France. American ship captains preferred Le Havre because it was believed to be cholera free, as the disease had resurged in Europe that year. But while crossing the Atlantic, cholera broke out on both ships among the mostly German immigrant passengers. Of the 250 passengers bound for New York, seven people died before the boat docked in Manhattan on December 1. Forty more died soon after.13 On the ship bound for New Orleans sixteen passengers died at sea. Four days after docking, eight cholera patients, all from houses near the port, were admitted to the city’s charity hospital. In a haunting repetition of what had happened in 1832, infected travelers from New York and New Orleans began carrying Vibrio cholerae north, south, and west across the nation. Soon thereafter a new and surprising development that would shift the dramatic arc of the Overland Trail occurred: emigrants carried cholera farther west than white Americans had ever carried it before.14

A Surge in the West Cholera’s overland journey began, largely, in New Orleans. After arriving in the Crescent City via Europe, it sped northward in the guts of travelers riding steamboats up the Mississippi River. From there it disembarked on land, igniting surges of cases in St. Louis, St. Joseph, and Independence, and other Missouri River Valley cities. On December 26, 1848, “in anticipation of the scourge known as Cholera,” St. Louis officials passed an ordinance instructing the Board of Health to enact sanitary measures to clean the city. As early as January 2, officials began curtailing or rerouting shipping on the Mississippi River. That same month local papers began daily reports of death counts of cholera victims. Troops at Jefferson Barracks ten miles south of St. Louis also began dying of the disease. By the end of January the barracks commander ordered the post closed in the hope of preventing further infections and deaths.15 Within weeks of that order well-­heeled St. Louis residents were fleeing the city in hopes of dodging cholera. Many white Americans had long perceived the Missouri River Valley to be a sickly place, but the arrival of cholera changed the calculus of survival. Although long fearful of what they perceived to be the sickly miasmas, or airs, of the Missouri River Valley, most Missouri settlers believed that in surviving seasonal illnesses such as malaria they would become acclimated or

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“seasoned” to diseases endemic to their locality. St. Louis city officials and business leaders drew on this logic when they tried to reassure established residents that seasoning would protect them from cholera. These reassurances relied on the pervasive misconception that, like malaria and other seasonal diseases, cholera was spread through the air. Unsurprisingly, “seasoning” seemed of little use in preventing cholera infections, and residents continued to decamp from the city. Those that remained did so not because they felt safe but because remaining seemed the lesser of two evils.16 St. Louis business leaders prioritized preventing further flight and attracting new residents ahead of limiting cholera’s spread. To begin with, business leaders attempted to allay citizens’ fears by downplaying the extent of the epidemic, even going so far as to pressure physicians to misdiagnose cholera deaths as ordinary seasonal intestinal diseases. Historians have found evidence of similar purposeful misreporting in St. Joseph, Missouri, and neighboring cities near the western edge of Missouri, including Independence and Westport (also both in Missouri). Concerned for what the arrival of cholera meant for their bottom line, dissembling businessmen put the best face on the growing epidemic in St. Louis and the Missouri River Valley, helping ensure that traffic and trade would continue along the Mississippi.17 National developments would ultimately drive cholera across the Plains. The same month that cholera arrived in St. Louis, President James Polk addressed Congress confirming the discovery of gold in California. The speech was Polk’s fourth, and final, annual message to Congress. In January 1849 the one-­term Democratic president left Washington, D.C., and Whig Zachary Taylor, a former general and U.S.-­Mexican War hero, was sworn into the presidency. After leaving Washington, Polk and his wife, Sarah, traveled south to New Orleans. At the Crescent City they joined the same path cholera was taking, heading north by steamboat up the Mississippi River. The Polks disembarked in Tennessee, but if they had continued to the Missouri River Valley, they would have witnessed firsthand the beginnings of the western cholera surge. That surge would grow larger throughout the spring and summer, propelled, in part, by the gold rush emigration Polk’s December message had helped set in motion. Polk himself would not live to see the full effect of his words. He died of cholera at his home in Nashville in June 1849.18 By the time of his death, emigrants had already begun spreading cholera onto the Plains. In early spring of 1849, buoyed by the prospect of golden profits confirmed by the former president, emigrants descended from all directions on Missouri

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Valley outfitting posts that, like St. Louis, were already in the grips of Vibrio cholerae. Some of these emigrants were urban clerks hailing from seaside cities of New York and New Orleans. Others were farmers recently departed from the prairies of Iowa and Illinois. Fears of catching cholera while traveling likely deterred some from beginning the journey. For others, the disease turned them back before their journeys had really begun. In letter after letter Sarah Nichols had begged her husband and son to turn back and return home to New York. But Sarah’s husband, Samuel, and son George refused. Instead, they assured her that they took “precaution” to prevent infection.19 Their efforts failed. On a Missouri River steamboat traveling to St. Joseph, George fell ill. After a symptomatic illness of less than one day, he perished. Samuel spared Sarah the excruciating details of George’s demise, but the progression of the disease was well-­known to nineteenth-­century audiences. As one contemporary described it, the victims were “taken first with cramps in the stomach and vomiting, then . . . would begin to look a dark black color . . . then . . . [their] . . . limbs would cramp up.” Soon after they were dead.20 Despite hearing reports of deaths like George’s, emigrants still came to the Missouri River Valley. Primarily young men, these would-­be argonauts were pulled and pushed west by the hope of riches and the fear of missing out. In total as many as 187,000 emigrants would embark across the Trail during the cholera years, making that migration ten times larger than those of all the previous years combined.21 In western outfitting posts, it soon became clear that this migration was to be unlike any other. Hopeful of profiting from the great rush through the valley, business leaders in rival towns fought to attract emigrants. Camped near Independence, Missouri, in April 1849, George Murrell, lately of Kentucky, wrote his sister Mary, telling her to reassure the family that reports of cholera deaths among emigrants were a “monstrous exaggeration, gotten up by some individuals from sinister motives, to induce” emigrants to change course to rival outfitting posts.22 This tactic proved effective because many emigrants clung to the hope that they could dodge the deadly bacteria in the Missouri River Valley. Local boosters seized on this hope, exaggerating cholera cases in rival outposts while downplaying the surge in their own locales. Based on information from boosters or from other emigrants, some companies rerouted on the fly. After hearing that people in St. Joseph “were dying with cholera like hogs,” John Hudgins changed course for Westport.23 Other companies combined evasive maneuvers with maximum speed, skirting crowded urban centers before racing west as quickly as possible. Rumors of cholera cases in St. Joseph sent

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Dr. Charles R. Parke ahead of his company “to ascertain the facts.” On orders from his train’s captain Parke traveled the sixty miles west on horseback and found the city “in an uproar.” “Men of all grades, classes and conditions [were] striving to get away,” some selling out and returning east and “others crossing the river” in the hopes that getting out on the Trail would allow them to evade infection.24 Parke and his companions followed suit. Based on his report of infections in St. Joseph, his company briefly camped north of town before crossing the river and the western edge of the settled United States. Parke’s train was one of the lucky ones that avoided infection in the crowded border towns. Many others were not so fortunate. In the late nineteenth century, African American Alvin Coffey described how a man in his train began exhibiting symptoms just before his party crossed the Missouri River. The company managed to bring him with them across the river, but a few hours after crossing the man died. Terrified that they too would perish, the survivors drove “night and day and got beyond reach of the cholera.”25 Coffey and his company had already been exposed, but their logic reflected widespread nineteenth-­century conceptions that the Plains was a healthful, cholera-­free place. Emigrants generally believed that getting onto the Plains was their best bet to evade infection. This belief meant that the knowledge that their loved ones had made it west of Missouri reassured many anxious relatives. At home, Trail spectators such as Virginian Mary Waterman recounted tales of acquaintances’ hairbreadth escapes from cholera. Waterman learned from a friend that a man identified only as Henry “escaped” a breakout of cholera at “Fort Independence Missouri.” After narrowly evading the disease in the sickly Missouri River Valley, Henry traveled onto the Plains. He was now “about four hundred miles beyond and going on in fine spirits.” Knowing that loved ones were safely past the Missouri River Valley made relatives breathe a little easier. After making it thirty miles west of Independence in 1849, George Murrell wrote his family, “you all need not alarm yourselves” about his welfare during “these Cholera times . . . we . . . will soon be on the Plains in the healthiest air in the world.”26 Murrell’s reassurance articulated the logic that underlay nineteenth-­ century white Americans’ belief that it would be possible to dodge cholera on the Plains. This belief was tied to the idea that this region was an innately and exceptionally healthy place. This construction had developed in step with white American descriptions of the Trail as a preordained pathway precisely suited to national expansion. In 1847, historian Francis Parkman’s bestseller

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The Oregon Trail popularized the idea of the “prairie cure” whereby a journey across the Plains could transform enervated urban residents into models of physical strength. In the early nineteenth-­century United States, physicians frequently prescribed curative travel to male invalids in the belief that trips on steamboats or across the Plains would alleviate their suffering.27 The recognition of the health of the Plains meant that, as early as the 1830s, white American explorers and traders had begun to remark with a tone of inferiority on the admirable stature of Indigenous peoples of the Plains including, most prominently, the Lakota. By the mid-­nineteenth century, white Americans were growing shorter and less healthy. This physical decline was the direct result of unhealthful conditions in urban centers and limited access to fresh protein and vegetable sources. On the other hand, Native nations such as the Lakota, whose active lifestyle and access to meat helped ensure physical health and longevity of life, were growing healthier and taller.28 In 1832 artist George Catlin even went so far as to declare that Native peoples’ high meat and low salt diet helped spare them from the spread of cholera into the Missouri River Valley in 1833. Many early emigrants to Oregon hoped traveling the Trail would help them appropriate the good Native health for themselves. In 1845, James Taylor described how the overland journey cured a sickly child. She had “gained about 10 lbs within two months. She can run through the prairies & Eat as much Bufalo meat as any little Indian.”29 Emigrants who raced west in the hopes of escaping cholera did so because they believed the deadly disease could not survive on the Plains. Thus, during the cholera years, overlanders perceived the western border of their country as a place of danger and Indigenous territory as a place of safety. Overlanders had been culturally primed to regard crossing the line from the United States into what they called “Indian Country” or “Indian Territory” as the moment their journey truly became perilous. Like the Mason-­Dixon “line,” the Missouri River loomed large in the white American imaginary as the division between civilization and safety on the one side and savagery and danger on the other. It was, as Wellman Packard put it, when the “real journey” began.30 During the cholera epidemics it also become the moment at which emigrants hoped to emerge from the darkness of sickness into the light of health. Instead, they brought the deadly cholera west and into the Native communities they admired for their health. As eager emigrants gathered on the eastern edge of the Trail, white American newspapers celebrated the growing crowds of adventurers. In Kanesville, Iowa, a newspaper reporter marveled that the jumping off point was “literally crowded with emigrants from

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all parts of the Globe.”31 But Native peoples saw a gathering storm of death and disease. At the Shawnee Mission some twenty-­five miles west of Independence, the same emigrants whose toll money augmented Shawnee ferry operators’ incomes brought “disease and death.” One Shawnee man suffered cramps so strong that they wrenched his hips out of his sockets and turned his legs out from his body.32 Many Shawnee farmers deliberately evaded the advancing emigrants, leaving well-­tended “houses and gardens, with vegetables growing, to the mercy of travelers.”33 While they could not move their houses or fields, some fleeing Shawnee managed, in the words of George Murrell, to drive “their stock off of the road to prevent as they say the emigrants from stealing them.”34 While Murrell’s comment insinuated a racist conviction that emigrants would not steal Indigenous stock, overlanders frequently trespassed and plundered at will. Shawnee people calculated that losing vegetables or livestock to emigrants was preferable to contracting cholera from them. Along the entirety of emigrants’ two-­thousand-­mile route, Native peoples routinely distanced themselves from the gun-­ toting, cholera-­ shedding invaders. The choice proved prudent. Despite emigrant cultural beliefs to the contrary, the Plains turned out to be a perfectly good incubator for the cholera epidemics. Unsurprisingly, emigrants’ assumption that the Plains were impervious to cholera failed to check the infectious bacteria. Emigrants dispensed the bacteria when they rinsed feces-­tinged rags in wells and streams or emptied their bowels directly into the Platte River. The warm, brackish waters of the Platte during the summer proved the perfect environment for cholera. In these conditions the bacteria could attach itself to zooplankton and phytoplankton and remain dormant for long periods. Eventually it would be scooped up when, for example, a parched traveler bent to take a drink. Emigrants also caught cholera through close contact with infected companions. Absent knowledge of the importance of frequent hand washing, caregivers’ handling of clothing and bedding soaked with the “rice water” evacuations of cholera’s victims created opportunities for them to ingest the bacteria themselves. Deaths from cholera did not taper off until after emigrants had passed Fort Laramie in what is now Wyoming, about 650 miles west of where they crossed into the supposedly healthy Plains.35 Native peoples of the Plains, well-­versed in the destructive potential of colonial epidemics, could have told emigrants as much. Since at least the continental smallpox epidemic of the late eighteenth century, Indigenous ­peoples of the Plains had recognized that the arrival of colonizers also meant the

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arrival of disease. During the 1830s, smallpox epidemics introduced by European traders and U.S. military and government representatives raged across the Plains. In the winter that straddled 1831 and 1832, white American traders infected Pawnee people with smallpox. The Pawnee would lose half of their population to the disease. That winter the disease disproportionately claimed young people under the age of thirty-­three who had not gained immunity from the epidemics that had struck at the end of the eighteenth century. Then, between 1836 and 1840 a smallpox epidemic on the Plains killed over fifteen thousand Native people, including significant numbers of recently removed nations such as the Choctaw. Some Native peoples proved more fortunate than others. Beginning in 1832, the Lakota embraced an American vaccination program to safeguard their people and their power. While waves of smallpox and other infectious diseases engulfed other Indigenous peoples of the Plains, the partially vaccinated Lakota roamed in dispersed bands over an expanding territory in what one historian has described as a bubble of relative epidemiological safety.36 Cholera, brought by overlanders, burst that bubble. From the Trail, cholera spread north and south and into Native communities. In 1849 the Oglala band of the Lakota alone lost thousands to the invaders’ disease. One young man named Curly Hair lost four of his stepsisters; all the girls were younger than five. Their deaths stoked Curly Hair’s anger against white people. This anger would fuel his military expeditions against the United States under his adult name, Crazy Horse. In 1876 Crazy Horse would lead Lakota warriors to a stunning victory over U.S. lieutenant colonel George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn.37 In the 1850s, the Oglala Lakota were one of many Native peoples who suffered the ravages of the invaders’ disease. By the end of the 1854 outbreak on the Plains, Pawnee people had lost as much as 25 percent of their population. Cheyenne George Bent recalled in the late nineteenth century that after emigrants brought the “Cramps” his people never fully recovered.38 The Kiowa people also suffered irreversible trauma. Kiowa calendars record the cholera epidemic of 1849 as “the most terrible experience in their history. . . . Hundreds died and many committed suicide in their despair.”39 In the summer of 1849, the annual Kiowa Sun Dance—attended by several Native ­peoples including the Osage, Comanche, Southern Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Apache—became a major cholera transmission point. When cholera broke out after the arrival of the Osage, the Sun Dance ended abruptly. Kiowa attendees split up and scattered across the Plains. The Southern Cheyenne, in

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contrast, camped as a group along the Arkansas River. This choice increased their chances of being infected by each other or by overland emigrants.40 Cholera raged with such rapid ferocity that many Indigenous communities proved helpless to respond. When Subagent John Barrow arrived at Bellevue, Nebraska, in Pawnee country in 1849, he found many Pawnee “lying all around the agency in a ‘dying condition.’”41 Overwhelmed by the dead, the living gave up burying the bodies. “Corpses floated down the Platte River, washed up on the sand bars, and rotted in the brush surrounding Pawnee villages. Some were dragged off and devoured by dogs and wolves.”42 Powerless to thwart cholera, Indigenous people threw their energy into demanding that the United States curb the epidemic’s primary cause: overland migration. At councils and treaty meetings with U.S. representatives, Native peoples spoke their minds about emigrants’ responsibility for cholera’s devastations. In the first of their listed grievances against invading emigrants the Osage decried the wagon trains that “fouled the water.”43 As temperatures dropped and leaves began to turn at the end of the long summer of 1849, the Lakota agent Thomas Fitzpatrick told his superiors that the United States must compensate the Lakota for their losses from the disease or risk cracking “their brittle sufferance” for emigrants.44 For Indigenous peoples, the infectious detritus of the Trail signaled a polluting and potentially deadly invasion. By the early 1850s, the Trail through the Platte River Valley had become, in the words of one historian, “a swath of stinking refuse. Half-­buried corpses of humans stricken with Asiatic cholera, and rotting carcasses of worn-­out horses, mules, oxen, and sheep putrefied the air and water of the valley.” Indigenous people viewed this environmental devastation and their infection with cholera as “the effect of polluted contact, one instance in a myriad of horrors visited upon them through alien infringement.”45 In the face of this epidemic Native people took preventive steps to shield their communities from “the cramps,” a nickname for cholera based on one of its more visibly horrific symptoms. When a man in John Williams’s company died of cholera in 1850, the leader of a nearby Indigenous community prohibited Williams from burying the corpse near the village. To comply, Williams’s company hauled the body three miles before burying it.46 This Native leader was right to put distance between his people and cholera-­ carrying emigrants. Flesh-­and-­blood emigrants, not spectral tomahawking warriors of the white imaginary, were the principal cause of mortality along the Trail during the cholera years.

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The United States sensed the gravity of cholera’s spread but did next to nothing. The year after Williams’s company hauled their dead member three miles, Native peoples of the Plains traveled hundreds of miles to Fort Laramie on the main trunk of the Trail for a treaty meeting with the United States. At that meeting Lakota representatives again gave voice to Native peoples’ view of the Trail and the epidemics; they called out disease as one of a trio of factors of emigrant destruction.47 Overlanders, the Lakota told U.S. representatives, “carried death on their bodies.”48 For Indigenous peoples, the cholera years of the Overland Trail laid bare the destructive potential of an expanding United States. In so doing, cholera threatened the tenuous diplomatic balance of inter-­Indigenous and Indigenous-­U.S. relations that were critical to keeping the Trail open and white Americans’ hopes for westward expansion alive. As it happened, Lakota political decisions helped assure that these hopes would survive. If the 1851 Fort Laramie meeting gave the Lakota a platform to voice their opposition to emigration, it also allowed them to convince their U.S. allies to sanction their claim to Pawnee territory (south of the Platte) by right of conquest. The Trail was destructive and disease-­ridden but, in the Lakota’s estimation, it was nonetheless one aspect of their still beneficial relationship the United States. The Lakota may not have been able to spare themselves from infection, but they achieved the best possible outcome for their people. While cholera had depleted the Oglala population, the Lakota ensured they would not see a corresponding loss in treaty goods. When U.S. representatives tried to count their population, the Lakota bolstered the count and their treaty goods by moving their children from tipi to tipi.49 In carrying cholera west, emigrants threatened but did not overturn the existing diplomatic order.

Cholera as the Fatal Terror of the Plains In a similar fashion, the emigrant-­induced epidemics challenged but did not upset the delicate balance of cultural conceits that permitted white Americans to see themselves as the heroic victims of their nation’s dogmatic quest to dispossess Native peoples. According to folklore, literature, and guidebooks that shaped emigrants’ preconceptions of their journeys and their understanding of their nation’s history, “Indians” and the rugged western wilderness, not disease, were supposed to pose the greatest mortal threats on the Trail. Apparitions of tomahawking, arrow-­shooting, mounted warriors

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populated overlanders’ dreams as surely as glittering California gold. Once on the Trail, emigrants imagined hearing “Indians” in the bushes, conjured up thousands of eyes staring down at them from the tops of distant hills, and decided that a far-­off gunshot came from “Indians” because their outdated guidebook told them so.50 By the 1840s the once relatively expansive continuum of white Americans’ racial attitudes toward Indigenous people had narrowed almost completely to a single racist belief. That belief argued for polygenesis and innate and irreparable “Indian” racial inferiority. Even so, some emigrants recognized that flesh-­and-­blood overlanders rather than fantastical hostile savages posed the greater mortal threat. After starting on his journey in 1849, for example, John Evans Brown began to feel “persuaded that more danger is to be apprehended from the carelessness of arms among fellow emigrants, than from the hostile Indian.”51 Emigrants during the Trail’s cholera years generally agreed with Brown that “hostile Indians” posed less danger than they had been led to believe. But the presence of cholera meant that they nonetheless journeyed in fear of their imminent demise. Recalling her 1852 journey to Oregon, Mrs. L. A. Bozarth maintained: “We feared the Cholera more than we did the Indians[,] for we knew if we got that, it meant death.” In 1849 Billington Whiting’s company agreed to “shun the crowds” once they entered “Indian Country” because, as he explained to his wife, “I had rather brave the savage Comanche  .  .  . than the ravages of that horrible disease[,] the cholera.” The following year, a contingent of George Nelson Wheeler’s company made a similar decision to eschew the main Trail route because “12 of us are more afraid of the Calery [sic] than we are of Indians.” But avoiding crowds was easier said than done. If emigrants strayed too far from the main line, they risked being unable to find water or becoming permanently lost in unfamiliar territory. Emigrants’ limited geographic knowledge thus meant that most hewed as closely to the crowded main line as possible, which one emigrant famously likened to the throngs of Broadway in New York City.52 In the face of cholera’s threat, companies also relied on non-­pharmaceutical measures to try to prevent infection or to stem the spread of disease within their social unit. When Mary Elizabeth Snelling’s company learned that two trains ahead of them “had trouble with cholera” her captain ordered their route across the Plains changed. Theodore Edgar Potter reported passing wagons “halted as far from the road as they could get, each flying a red flag to indicate the presence of smallpox.” But not all infected companies warned passersby away. John Clark’s company made camp for the night only to realize

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that they were “in a distressed crowd. . . . One woman & two men lay dead on the grass & some more to die of cholera.” Clark ordered his company to pack up and hurry on. After spending an afternoon hunting alone, Ebenezer Emery Gore “came down from the hills right into the camp of a train where I found persons in all stages of cholera from the incipient stages to death.” Gore fled back to his train as fast as he could, hoping he was not taking the disease with him. When a member of a train began to show symptoms, company leaders tried to halt the spread. After an outbreak occurred in Henry Ferguson’s company, his captain divided the wagons into pods of four in the hopes of protecting the rest of the company from infection.53 But reports of companies wiped out by the “dreaded scourge” suggest that such steps did little to stall cholera’s spread. The company that Ebenezer Emery Gore unexpectedly encountered “was all lost excepting one woman and she went back home alone—I saw her going back.” David DeWolf also found evidence of how cholera ravaged wagon trains on the banks of the Vermillion River in Kansas where “there were 6 graves, all died with the Colery . . . out of a company of seven from Tenn.”54 Time and again, emigrants described companies almost or completely wiped out by cholera. In the face of this horror, some emigrants found a silver lining: that the cholera epidemics would deter “Indian” violence. In 1850 Lewis Kilbourn described how a U.S. military officer had kept “Indians” off the main emigrant road by warning that if they came near the “pale faces,” they would catch cholera and “all die with it.”55 A member of the Michigan Wolverine Rangers voiced a similar belief, crediting cholera with keeping “Indians” so far from their train “we could hardly get a sight of them.” As he put it, “they hurried away from us as if death attended our steps.”56 Indigenous peoples joined emigrants in leveraging the fear of infectious disease to distance themselves from unwelcome populations. When Charles R. Parke and a few companions trespassed into a Pawnee village four residents confronted them. Then through signs and gestures they made the unwanted trespassers understand that they were sick with “smallpox.” Parke doubted the validity of their claim but followed the Pawnee’s admonition to leave as staying didn’t seem worth risking contracting a fatal disease.57 In the liminal space of the Trail, where power was fluid and territorial claims had to be constantly articulated and defended, the threat of disease could be a useful ally. Emigrants, however, conceived of cholera’s threat to “Indians” as also posing a threat to themselves. During 1849, the first year of the Trail epidemics,

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white Americans began circulating stories that “Indians” were attacking emigrants as retribution for cholera fatalities. Reuben Miller reported that U.S. troops from Fort Laramie came to the Trail to “adjust or settle” with emigrants because a Lakota had supposedly killed a white man. In Miller’s telling, “The Indians allege or justify themselves in some measure for the act because the whites brought the cholera among them.”58 That fall, the Arkansas State Democrat reported a similar sentiment among Indigenous people who “think we brought this disease to destroy them, and they hate us for it.”59 Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, cholera-­carrying emigrants continued to see themselves as the harmed rather than the harmful. Cholera furthered emigrants’ conceptions of themselves as sufferers. Overlanders described themselves as advancing west under constant threat. Just as white Americans had long described themselves as stalked by “Indians,” overlanders now also described themselves as being stalked by the dreaded scourge. Jonas Call recalled that he and his party knew the cholera was “following” them because of the string of graves that ran parallel to their route across the Platte valley.60 Warren Foote described his experience with cholera as a series of encounters with fresh graves, scattered human bones unearthed by scavenging wolves, and “beds and beding [sic] strewed about with stains of the cholera vomit upon them.”61 To emigrants such as Foote, cholera seemed as mysterious and undetectable as a stalking Native warrior. They never actually saw cholera, just as many of them never actually saw “Indians,” but they described seeing signs of both everywhere. Along the Trail clumps of hastily corralled wagons as companies tended to the dying, melancholy funeral processions that could occur at any time of day or night, and graves that had begun to dot the Plains all became visible evidence of an invisible bacteria. In its absence of humanity, the voiceless and invisible single-­celled Vibrio cholerae proved a better foil for emigrant invaders who saw themselves as sufferers than did the flesh-­and-­blood Indigenous peoples living along the Trail. But emigrants aligned the tenor of cholera’s terror with that of “Indian” violence. Emigrants prepared for a cholera attack just as they prepared for an “Indian ambush.” When Call and his party thought “Indians” were following them they buckled their weapons to their belts in preparation for an attack. Call’s preparatory gesture resembled that which William Swain’s company made against cholera. As Swain told his wife, “We all keep cholera medicine in our pockets, which we are directed to take immediately upon the first premonitory symptoms.” In the face of cholera’s invisible presence emigrants

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came to regard cholera much as they regarded “Indians”: as posing a ceaseless and uncertain threat. Thus, when Mary Burrell gave voice to her fear that “Indians” might soon attack, but “we know not” when, so too did she give voice to the fear of the entire emigrant population that cholera might attack at any time or place without prior knowledge. In 1917 Henry O. Ferguson described how cholera had appeared in his company: “all at once, without warning, we were attacked by an outbreak of the awful scourge of Cholera.”62 The rapidity with which cholera killed also aligned it with the terrifying imaginary violence of “Indians.” In the nineteenth-­century United States many illnesses lingered. The leading fatal disease was consumption, as tuberculosis was then called, an illness that could linger for years. Even smallpox, the horror of the eighteenth century, generally presented days of visible symptoms before death or recovery occurred. Cholera symptoms, in contrast, could manifest less than a day before death claimed its victims.63 In 1849, an emigrant identified only as Miller began his day guarding his company’s mules and was dead and buried by sundown.64 Three years later a young bride named Rachel Pattison took sick in the morning and was dead by the evening.65 Such abrupt departures intensified the grief of survivors.66 So too did it augment their fear. In the early twentieth century, George Benson Kuykendall recalled how cholera’s swift onset had meant that the disease had “peculiar horror” for himself and his fellow travelers.67 In using these words, Kuykendall employed the same language as that used to describe being scalped or shot by “Indian” arrows. Even when cholera did give emigrants opportunity to react, the disease worked as deceptively as the hostile “Indians” of the American imaginary. Emigrants depicted “Indians” as feigning friendship only to steal goods or gain intelligence that would allow them to return to attack after nightfall. Cholera seemed to act in the same way, feigning defeat or disappearing altogether before taking its host’s life. Alonzo Delano and company thought that the cholera-­stricken Mr. Harris in their care had recovered. He regained color and energy, suggesting the cholera attack might have passed. Suddenly Harris started convulsing, a sign of severe dehydration. Five minutes later he was dead. Louisa Richey also seemed to be on the mend, becoming “almost easy.” Less than twenty-­four hours later, her surviving relatives were burying her with the sideboards of a wagon.68 In its uniquely horrifying pathology and in the ways it resembled the imagined hostility of “Indians,” cholera buttressed rather than undercut emigrants’ long-­standing preconceptions of themselves as under constant siege from a rapacious, violent foe.

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Caring for Cholera Victims Unlike “hostile savages” cholera did not dwell in the realm of the fantastical but in the lived reality of caring for the sick and dying. Emigrants died of cholera because they had no idea that the disease could be cured with oral rehydration (essentially drinking a lot of water mixed with some sugar and salt). This ignorance was widely shared around the globe. In the United States, members of the medical community were equally in the dark. Some doctors threw up their hands in defeat. Others tried everything in the hopes of curing their patients. Many of these treatments accelerated rather than prevented fatalities. Nineteenth-­century physicians frequently prescribed medicines laced with harmful ingredients such as calomel (which contained high percentages of poisonous mercury) and laudanum (another popular remedy that was laced with opium). Clueless doctors poisoned vulnerable patients and dehydrated victims already suffering from dehydration. During the cholera epidemics, the most common physician-­administered cholera treatment was bloodletting. In reducing the body’s fluid, the treatment increased the stress on cholera victims already suffering from dehydration and weakness. Other physicians denied their patients water. One overlander recalled how the “old doctor in the train” would not permit two boys sick with cholera to drink even “a drop.” The young patients begged and begged but the physician refused to yield. Years later, the memoirist could still recall the “pitiful” sounds of the suffering children.69 Caring for the sick while traveling augmented their suffering. After a wagon wheel ran over his chest, the men in Amos Josselyn’s company decided to travel on, pausing to rest only when he looked especially pained. While traveling overland to Salt Lake in 1851, train captain Alfred Cordon periodically halted his company unit to allow Catherine Booth (the wife of a high-­ ranking church member) to rest and receive care. Cordon also slowed the pace of the train’s travel to ease her pain. For instance, on August 18 after traveling for a few hours, the train paused at 10:30 a.m. to allow Booth to rest for fifteen minutes. At 1:30 p.m., when the train stopped for dinner, Cordon thought about stopping for the rest of the day to allow Booth to “rest easy.” However, after deducing that she might “lay to [survive] all day and perhaps two days,” the train moved slowly on until reports indicated that she was at death’s door. The train stopped again at 4:00 p.m.—just ten minutes before Booth drew her final breath. The company cut the timing so close that the wagon drivers did not have time to pull off the road and corral into a circle. Instead, Booth

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died in her wagon in the middle of the road in a string of white wagons, the yoked oxen flicking their tails against the relentless flies, the reins and wooden wagon boxes creaking as the oxen shifted their weight against their restraints as their drivers held tight, waiting for Booth to die. Only after she died did the captain issue the order to pull “long side the road” and corral.70 John Pratt Welsh’s journal record of his friend Thomas’s lingering illness and ultimate death conveys the difficulty of balancing the need to travel with the needs of the sick. Thomas fell ill soon after Welsh’s company started their journey in the spring of 1849. From April 15 until his death a little over a month later, Thomas was confined to his wagon, the closest approximation of a sick room on the Plains. Welsh spent most of his time tending to his friend and traveling companion, finding a doctor to administer quinine, and spoon-­ feeding Thomas rice water and camphor. The near constant mobility of the train seems to have both helped and harmed Thomas, who had a troubled relationship with his wagon sickbed. On some days, the jolting of the moving wagon helped lull him to sleep; at other times, his delirious attempts to exit the moving conveyance almost killed him. Through it all, Welsh remained committed to caring for his sick friend.71 The tension between caring for Thomas and traveling on reached its peak while Welsh’s train waited to ferry across the Platte River. Welsh and his company arrived at 11:00 a.m. on May 25, 1851, but they did not advance near the front of the line until six hours later. In the interim, Thomas began to fail. Welsh cut off a lock of Thomas’s hair to send home to his mother while he and two other companions rubbed Thomas’s ice-­cold knees and legs with brandy. Then, just as their wagon was poised to cross, Welsh decided Thomas was about to die. He asked the ferryman to wait, to hold back the mass of impatient emigrants, so Thomas could draw his final breath in a still wagon. The ferryman did so, and for an undisclosed amount of time, the entire cavalcade paused “for the final throe.” In Welsh’s recounting, he successfully battled the westward tide of migration to carve out a moment of peace for his dying companion. As soon as Thomas had departed the world of the living, the ferryman “hurr[ied] the wagon across.”72 As they had during Indigenous deportations, wagons on the Trail proved no place for the sick. During his 1852 overland journey, Addison M. Crane described how he nursed his company member Albert in the confines of their 3½ by 9 wagon box during a terrible thunderstorm. The “cooped up” sick man spent the night “writhing with pains in the head back and bowels” and “almost screaming with agony under a burning fever.”73 When he began

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to feel ill William Holmes Walker went in search of a doctor, only to end up lying exhausted and immobilized on the side of the road. A wagon from his company picked him up but provided little in the way of sickbed accommodations. Although “completely over done,” Walker could only “partialy lie down between some Pork Barrells.” As an unexpected bonus, “an occasional spray of salt brine splash[ed] on me by the surge of the waggon over rough roads.”74 Uncomfortable, mobile wagons were no place for the sick, but caregivers suffered as well. In letters home to his family Riggin described how after he took sick with an unnamed disease, he was afflicted with chills so bad “I thought I would freeze to death.” But his sickness, he acknowledged, was equally hard on this traveling companion William, who had to drive all fifty-­ three miles while Riggin rode prostrate in the back of the wagon.75 Such scenes contradicted hyperbolic descriptions of the Trail as a place outside the bounds of nursing care. Arguing for the creation of Oregon Territory before Congress in January 1845, Representative John Wentworth of Illinois cited the sacrifices emigrants made on their journey to the Pacific as a reason for extending U.S. territory to the Pacific. “In sickness they have no physician; in death there is no one to perform the last sad offices.”76 In the telling of Wentworth the lack of health care amplified the sacrifices that emigrants made to expand their nation. Emigrants traveling to California during the gold rush reiterated Wentworth’s claim. At the start of his journey to California by ship via Panama, J. E. Clayton wrote his wife that if he fell sick, he would have a hard time finding a nurse. As he put it, “California is like going to sea—no one goes to nurse, so if one gets sick[,] he must get well as he can.”77 Overlander Pardon Dexter Tiffany framed the dilemma this way: on the Plains there was “no more nursing than mere strangers who have no interest in you.”78 It was not, emigrants were saying, sickness itself that marked emigrant sacrifice. Indeed, for Americans across the nineteenth-­century United States illness was a near constant. In focusing instead on lack of proper care, emigrants and expansionists amplified the especial sufferings and sacrifices of those who traveled the Trail. Despite these assumptions, emigrants prepared to provide care on the Trail. Before starting their journeys most gold rush companies drew up constitutions that, as Joseph Wood put it, bound travelers “together for mutual benefit and protection.”79 One of these protections was an oath to care for the sick. Article X of the Essex County and California Mining and Trading Company’s bylaws declared that its members “shall . . . in all cases of sickness administer to each other’s wants and use all possible means to restore

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each other to a usual degree of health.”80 Holmes D. Van Schaick’s company worded their clause regarding health care this way: “If any of said Company shall, during the route, become sick, or in any way incapacitated, he, or they, shall have good care and attendance from the balance of the company.”81 In his recollections written at the turn of the century Carlisle Abbott put it more succinctly. Before they started he and his company had agreed to “stick together, sick or well.”82 Critiques of companies who failed to care for their sick underscore that most emigrants expected to receive basic care while traveling. An indignant Bernard Reid described how the for-­profit Pioneer Line abused a sick passenger. The line confined the man to a baggage wagon in which he traveled alone and unattended by nothing but the material accoutrement of overland travelers. One day the passenger was found there “dead, as the train came into camp.” Reid’s outrage that a man died unattended in a jolting wagon reflected a broader concern of white Americans that the individualism of the market revolution was sundering ties of community and fellow feeling. Aspiring writer Charles Ben Darwin voiced such a concern, declaring that the “selfishness” of gold rush emigrants meant that when a companion fell sick they had no “thought for the poor sufferer before them” but to “roll his carcass out of the path to gold.”83 In these critiques, greed denied emigrants health care altogether or meant that they received very little attention. But the records of emigrant companies traveling during cholera’s gold rush years tell a different story. Overlanders did their best to meet the challenge of managing an epidemic while traveling. The horrors of the Donner Party lit a fire under emigrants to rush across the Plains, but the miseries of cholera demanded restraint, putting emigrants in a nearly impossible bind. David Jackson Staples described how he and his traveling companions cared for their partner George Winslow after he contracted cholera. Winslow was first “taken with diarrhea and vomiting” on May 25. He felt better that evening and the train traveled on, with the company doctor caring for him. Despite these efforts, two days later, Winslow experienced the “worst kind of cholera attack.” Alarmed, the company immediately put Winslow’s well-­being over their own. Although there was no water and they were more than a half mile from wood when Winslow showed signs of getting worse, the train immediately halted. That night, Staples watched over Winslow. The next morning, ­Staples was so exhausted that he felt “near sick in consequence.” The emigrants stayed in camp that day and then the next to help Winslow and their other sick members recover. After two days, the sick seemed well enough to

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travel on. Within a week Winslow had taken a turn for the worse. Around 8 o’clock on the morning of Friday, June 8, 1849, his company “gathered round him in the tent to witness the last struggle of breath leaving his body.” After Winslow’s death, Staples declared that “all and everything was done to save him, but it was of no avail.”84 In narrating their treatment of George Winslow, Staples assured his readers and, perhaps, himself that he and his companions had done their best for him under trying circumstances. Staples, however, did not contend that George Winslow had received the best care. The deadly nature of cholera refocused white Americans’ expectations of care from the curative to the palliative. Antebellum Americans expected this palliative nursing care to be intimate and to be female. While today we primarily discuss end-­of-­life care in terms of access to modern, sanitized hospitals and cutting-­edge technologies, dying antebellum Americans wanted access to their female loved ones: their mothers, their sisters, and their daughters. They yearned not for the touch of a trained professional but for the cooling sensation of a beloved palm held long, the familiar contours of a face long gazed on, and the unique cadence of a voice that sparked memories of events long past. This expectation of emotional and physical support was so strong that when Rebecca Ketcham fell ill with a headache on the Trail she bemoaned her distance from her beloved female friends: “If they had been with me I don’t believe I would have sat their [sic] all that time without a word of care or sympathy.”85 In dominant white American culture, singular, feminine qualities such as nurturing and affection were thought to make women uniquely suited to providing the care and sympathy for which Ketcham and other patients on the Trail yearned. This established construction of care tracked with the mid-­ nineteenth-­century belief in true womanhood and the ideology of domesticity. Such care was about not only the physical work of nursing but also the emotional labor of providing mental comfort. H. C. Thompson evoked this dual role of nurses when he described his emotional parting from “Miss Sarah” who accompanied his overland party in 1859. “She had been our ‘good angel’ the entire trip; had tied up our sore fingers . . . and, as we separated, her eyes were not the only ones that showed moisture.”86 In her autobiography recounting the thirteen years she spent dressed as man, Mrs. E. J. Guerin described how her masculine disguise prevented her from properly comforting a new widow she met on the Trail.87 Clothed in masculine costume, Guerin could not provide her typical comfort because doing so risked revealing her true sex.

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Despite nursing’s classification as a feminine form of labor, men also performed important care work duties. Typical gendered divisions of care in rural communities in the United States positioned women by bedsides and men on horseback riding to find doctors and supplies.88 Men fulfilled similar roles on the Trail. While most companies came prepared with medical supplies and many others had their own physicians, emigrants still found themselves searching for help when someone in their company fell ill.89 The environmental context of the Trail made this already challenging task even more arduous. The case of Alexander, an enslaved African American member of P. F. Castleman’s train who fell ill with cholera while encamped on the Platte River in 1849, illustrates this challenge. In most cases, falling ill in camp was the best-­case scenario. Because the train had already halted, members could immediately make the sick man comfortable and procure whatever remedies they had available. But Alexander’s case was not so simple. His company had camped in two locations: half on the south side of the Platte River and half on the north. By chance Alexander was on one side and Castleman’s wagon with the medicine chest was on the other. Whether this was good or bad luck for Alexander depended on which of the dubious nineteenth-­century remedies were contained within it. But his company members were confident that the medicine would help. Once Alexander started showing symptoms Castleman ordered the chest sent across the river. But before it could arrive, a terrific thunderstorm arose. The storm turned the typically slow-­moving Platte turbid. Alexander suffered through the night, no doubt spewing vomit and exploding diarrhea as violently as the rain thundered down on his wagon’s thin canvas cover. In the morning, after the storm had dissipated, Castleman asked around for a doctor, finally finding one a few companies over. But the physician refused to visit the sick man, brushing Castleman off with the declaration that “there was but little hope for our companion to recover.” Castleman, however, did not give up. Instead, he made his way across the river and then dosed Alexander with large quantities of “physic” (the generic term for medicine). Despite this hard-­won intervention, Alexander died the next day. Castleman failed to save Alexander’s life, but his narrative of his attempt underscored his commitment to care.90 Even in the United States, this male commitment to care meant that some men found themselves soothing fevered brows rather than searching for doctors or medical supplies. In a span of just four months in 1834, Archibald Knode, a Maryland storekeeper in his twenties, played nurse at the sickbeds

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of a friend, a friend’s child, and a cousin.91 Knode and his patients’ distance from home and family required him to step into a role usually reserved for female kin and neighbors, but even at home men could assume nursing duties for close female relatives, principally their wives. Mormon Lorenzo Dow Young fulfilled this care work on the Trail. Young spent the entire journey from Nauvoo, Illinois, to Salt Lake in 1846 caring for his “dreadful sick” wife, Harriet. The combined labor of traveling and nursing left Young feeling so exhausted that one night “I actually felt as if I had not strength enough left to undress myself.”92 By the time Young exhausted himself caring for his wife, white men across the United States had become more likely to experience the physical and emotional toll of care work. Increasing migration within the nation separated men from their families and from traditional nurses. In response, antebellum middle-­class men joined a variety of fraternal organizations such as the Odd Fellows and the Masons. These organizations provided mutual support in the form of disability benefits, funeral expenses, and, in many cases, nursing. On the Trail, the role of fraternal brothers in caring for the sick was especially celebrated. This nursing support demonstrated that the national network of fraternal organizations would also extend outside the bounds of the United States. For observers, this nursing showed that fraternal organizations had all the “emblems of the true meaning of friendship.” Many orders made provisions for “watchers” who were assigned to sit up with sick brothers during the night and to “gladly minister to his weaknesses and wants,” “wiping the clammy sweat from his pale brow . . . and holding the cooling draught to his parched and burning lips.” Such descriptions paralleled those of contemporaneous male romantic friendships, in which young men developed intense emotional and physical intimacy.93 And yet, membership in fraternal organizations depended on cold hard cash.94 Unable to pay their dues because of logistics or financial hardship from the Trail or later from California, argonauts asked their families to pay for them. In 1850, Augustus F. Unger added a postscript to his letter to his wife: “I hope you have kept up my interest at the Odd Fellows by paying up my dues if possible.” That same year John Thompson Kinkade beseeched his brother and sister-­in-­law to “please pay my dues for another year.”95 Unger and Kinkade knew that if they wanted to have “brothers” (and potential nurses) in California they had to pay for them. The language of fictive kinship employed by fraternal orders and gold rush companies described male emigrant nursing labor as in line with the unpaid

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nursing work typically performed by women. Van Schaick, for instance, recorded in his journal that after he fell ill “our faithful boys gave me the best of care.”96 Samuel Nichols told his wife, Sarah, after their son George’s death that when he fell ill with cholera, “three gentlemen from St. Louis” assisted him in making his son comfortable. The men helped him rub George’s limbs to ease the cramping, acting “as Fathers & brothers to my Dear son George.”97 Although Nichols did not specifically identify the men as, say, Masons or Odd Fellows, his use of the term “gentlemen” suggests that he did not pay them but may have identified them as fraternal brothers. In other cases, fraternal members explicitly described fellow members as caring for them like family. One forty-­niner from Alabama told his wife that upon finding himself ill and without funds to hire a nurse, he sought out another Mason for assistance. Finding one from Ohio, he was nursed by the man from breakfast until the following morning. We would consider this man a stranger, but to the forty-­niner he “felt like a brother.”98 This emphasis on the familial dimensions of nursing care on the Trail to California comforted sick emigrants and their distant relatives. In his letters to his wife, Sabrina, William Swain minced no words about the poor care he believed a Mr. Lyon had received. But when Swain himself became “very sick” with an unnamed disease he was sure to reassure Sabrina that he had not suffered the same fate as Lyon: “All the mess, Mr. Hutchinson in particular, are very kind to me; and the doctor is as attentive and kind as though I was his own brother.”99 Like his deliberate vagueness regarding the cause of his own sickness (although two of his company had cholera), Swain chose his words to allay his beloved wife’s fears for his well-­being. When Clayton, who wrote his wife about being “at sea” with no one to nurse him, became ill, his friend Taylor nursed him back to health. After his recovery Clayton wrote in his diary, “No mother could be more kind and attentive to her children than he was to me.”100 Clayton’s experience on the Trail revised his assumption that nursing could not be had in the homosocial world of the gold rush. Instead, he found in his male friend a source of affection and care that rivaled that of a mother. Thus, while commentators of the time likened the Trail to a “magic mirror” that revealed emigrants’ true character, the Trail was also a carnivalesque mirror in which male peers could be transformed into maternal figures. Clayton’s language described a gendered flexibility that defied nineteenth-­century constructions of a strict gender binary and confirmed what white Americans knew: in times of care white masculinity could

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incorporate typically feminine attributes.101 Because of cholera, the masculinity of the mid-­century Trail was not the martial masculinity of violence and aggression that some historians have seen in the California Gold Rush but rather the nuanced mid-­nineteenth-­century masculinity where men acted as brothers, sisters, and mothers to care for the sick.102 Indeed, the homosocial worlds of male emigrant companies amplified men’s feminine attributes to a far greater extent than the other major event of the nineteenth century for which we have the greatest documentary record of personal narratives: the Civil War. In describing his friend as a “maternal surrogate” Clayton foreshadowed a phenomenon that would become more pronounced during the Civil War. During that conflict, female nurses frequently described themselves as acting as sisters and, even more commonly, mothers to their patients. These nurses fulfilled the role of maternal surrogates by creating homelike atmospheres in field hospitals and by engaging soldiers in relationships of sympathy and emotional reciprocity. In fulfilling these roles for soldiers far from home, nurses during the Civil War transported the emotional and physical support of the domestic sphere to battlefields and field hospitals. But on the Trail (and likely in the gold fields) men stepped in to perform the physically and emotionally intimate task of palliative care typically attributed to women.103 Male emigrants also provided critical emotional support for the dying. As with palliative nursing, white Americans wanted their female loved ones by their sides at the point of death. Crawford captured this cultural expectation when he recorded how a dying man in his care on the Trail called out, “Oh Mother, Mother, I want to see you.” Told that she was far away in Maine and could not come, the dying man asked instead to see his brother’s wife. The man’s sister-­in-­law was on the Trail, but she was a few hours ahead of the sick man, and despite trying he failed to reach her in time. White Americans believed that women were uniquely suited to emotionally support the dying. In the cultural construction of the “good death” they described end-­of-­life care work as the work of spiritually and emotionally comforting the dying, who in turn would comfort the assembled audience with professions of faith and in some cases a revelation of religious teaching.104 These cultural expectations of the deathbed support privileged feminine qualities attributed to women, but men could sometimes fulfill these expectations. On the Trail, Dr. Charles Glass Gray described how in attending to the physical care of Denman, one of his company members, he also attended

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to his emotional needs. Gray’s account of Denman’s death begins clinically, describing his physical decline and likening his uncontrollable finger twitches to “as though he [were] playing on a piano.” Despite being nearly completely incapacitated, Denman managed to communicate his desire that Gray give him a “common breastpin” he was wearing. Gray did so, “fastening his shirt together with it” and producing immediate comfort for the dying man.105 The feel of the pin, for Denman could no longer see it once it had been attached, likely provided material order and familiarity for him as he lay dying in a tent in territory white Americans perceived as unsettled country. It also might have helped him imagine that it was a pin that had been lost or left at home and long treasured, perhaps even one that contained a loved one’s locks. Gray did not express any strong emotional connection with Denman, but in sharing his “common breastpin” he provided exceptional emotional relief for one young man as he died of a horrible disease in distant territory. The coincidence of the gold rush and the cholera epidemics meant that many all-­male emigrant companies had no female loved ones or even an unfamiliar woman to nurse them. In this absence, some men suffered more while others had men step in to nurse them. In both cases, this unfamiliar face of nursing compounded the suffering and trauma of cholera’s emigrant victims. By heightening this suffering and trauma and emigrants’ responses to ameliorating the same, male nursing also helped push sickness and death to the center of a vulnerable overland experience. By the mid-­1850s, the Trail was littered with bodies of dead men, nursed, laid out, and buried by their (predominantly) male compatriots. Cholera challenged the popular mythology of deaths by so-­called hostile savages, but emigrant narratives perpetuated this same mythology through casting cholera as akin to the imagined violence of “Indians.” In so doing, emigrant narratives preserved the colonial story of white victimhood. At the same time, the challenge of nursing cholera victims on the Trail expanded on preexisting tales of emigrant suffering. Descriptions of painful deaths far from home made vivid the personal sacrifices overlanders had made to pursue a better life in California or Oregon. In ravaging travelers, the cholera epidemics realized emigrants’ preconceived fear: that they would die out of place before they reached Oregon or California. For all the ways cholera sickened and killed, it showed how disease became the transformative event that consolidated the relationship between death and the Overland Trail and, ultimately, helped transform the Trail into

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an American burial ground. In killing emigrants, cholera initiated a transformation of the landscape of the West. While the common breastpin temporarily transported Denman home to loved ones and family, his body was buried on the Trail. The legacy of the cholera epidemics was a West strewn with dead bodies of emigrants, bodies that occasionally mixed and mingled with those of dead Native people. In the 1850s, emigrants encountered a landscape riven with the disordered debris of the dead. These dead changed the experience of the journey as well as Americans’ imagined map of the continent.

CHAPTER 3

The Disordered Dead

Death touched some stretches of the Trail more than others. Along the Humboldt River in Northern Paiute and Shoshone territory, it reached what one historian has described as a “fearful climax.” Emigrants passed “oxen still living with their eyes eaten out by insects,” watched helplessly as struggling mules and horses sunk to their deaths in the desert sands, and ran their wheels over a “horse that was scarcely done breathing.” Some emigrants shed tears over dying livestock, others quenched their desert thirst with the blood of cattle.1 Shell-­shocked travelers blamed the desert for the deaths of their human and animal companions, but white migration had set the stage for this destruction. During the 1840s, California emigrants’ livestock nearly exhausted the wildrye and other indigenous grasses in the temperate desert basin, leaving so little for those who came after that by the end of the 1850s decomposing animals blocked the road and poisoned the air with their nauseating effluvia.2 Emigrants who triumphed over this desert of death reinforced its formidability in prose and verse. In the combined words of Howard Cutting and Mendall Jewett, the Humboldt was a “bone orchard” of “the Genus Homo taking rest with the animal.” Cherokee author and poet John Rollin Ridge evoked the darkness of his overland journey by likening the Humboldt to “A Stygian stream of the Dead!”3 For the less rhetorically inclined, J.  M.  Hutchings’s mass-­produced lettersheet, “Panoramic Scenes—Crossing the Plains,” imprinted with thirteen captioned Overland Trail vignettes including “Scene on the Desert” provided gold rush miners writing home after 1853 with a pre-­printed visualization of the traumas of the Trail. The elision of deserts and death came easily to white Protestant farmers who likely dominated the overland migration. For a people familiar with the biblical Israelites condemned to wander the desert for forty years and for whom life and livelihood depended on fertile soil, the arid stretches of the far

Figure 5. George Holbrook Baker, “Hutchings’ Panoramic Scenes—Crossing the Plains.” One of thirteen captioned vignettes, “Scene on the Desert” depicts three vultures hovering over and feasting on petrified livestock corpses. A fourth perched on a wagon wheel attached to a broken axle surveys the destruction. In the foreground, a white cross driven into mounded dirt marks an emigrant grave. An approaching wagon train seen in the background will soon encounter this lonely memorial. Robert B. Honeyman, Jr. Collection of Early Californian and Western American Pictorial Material, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

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West evoked exile and destruction. Fertile fields sustained life. Deserts, like the Sonoran described by Bayard Taylor in 1850, as “sown with the bones of man and beast,” were deathscapes.4 Paradoxically, living desert inhabitants contributed to the apparent deathscape of the Trail. In the Mojave Desert Southern Paiute people picked discarded emigrant debris clean. Clothing, nails, harness buckles, and metal fittings suitable for repurposing as arrow points were given a second life. Left behind were the carcasses of animals and humans.5 Deserts did not have a monopoly on the alignment between the Trail and mortal destruction. Though white Protestant cultural preconceptions as well as Hutchings’s lettersheet aligned ruination with the desert, emigrants described the entire Trail as an expanse of death. Eyewitness reports from the Trail expanded the bounds of death beyond the deserts and into the Plains. New Yorker George Swain never stepped west of the Mississippi, but he read enough accounts of the Trail and spoke with enough returned Californians (the term for those who had tried their luck in the gold fields) to envision the Plains as “a kind of golgotha [the hill where Jesus was crucified] inhabited by savages and armed with storms, pestilence and famine to obstruct your passage to the golden land.”6 Of these four terrors pestilence did the most to transform the Trail into a place of the dead. After reaching Sacramento in September 1849, Louis Warner wrote his wife at home in Illinois that cholera had “lined” the road “with dead.”7 Earlier that summer, D. T. McCollum reported to a former neighbor that the “road itself is a graveyard.”8 In Pennsylvania, a returned Californian explained how he had relied on “dead bodies and graves along the road” to guide his footsteps to California. Louise Smith Clappe, writing for The Pioneer, summed up this elision of road and graveyard by designating the Trail a “boundless city of the dead.”9 “City of the Dead” was a synonym for cemetery, but there was nothing tranquil or beatific about the disordered dead of the Trail.10 Emigrants described wagon trains as hemorrhaging people, livestock, and goods and leaving them strewn in their wake. As emigrants traveled, they passed a suggestive scatter of scraps of clothing, tufts of hair, and bits of bone. In other cases, whole corpses appeared as when one child preparing to sit on a blanket that his mother had spread for a picnic saw a foot sticking out from the sand.11 For corpses afforded the luxury of being buried underground, makeshift markers appeared without warning until they were underfoot, on the roadside covered with fine, white alkali dust, or nearly concealed by foul-­ smelling sagebrush far from the main path. Emigrants determined to pay

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their respects pioneered jagged footpaths through rocks and prickly pear, a far cry from the serpentine footpaths that wound around predictably positioned marble monuments sprouting from lush, manicured lawns that characterized the rural cemeteries of the United States. In those cemeteries, gridded, pre-­purchased family plots organized the dead, but on the Trail, timing largely determined where and how the dead would rest. The vagaries of Vibrio cholerae gave life to clusters of dead who drank from the same polluted water source or passed the bacteria to each other. On the Vermillion River in eastern Kansas six Tennesseans out of a company of seven lay beside each other in death.12 Accidents, the second-­leading cause of death on the Trail after disease, also shaped the geography of the Trail dead. In 1852 the wagon in which the recently deceased Henry Howland was laid in preparation for burial overturned, killing the woman assigned to ride with his corpse. Having not yet dug Howland’s grave, his company decided to dig one large tomb, laying the two bodies “side by side in the same” hole.13 Even when grouped together Trail graves did not meet the orderly requirements of cemeteries. Seeing the “long parallel lines of graves of cholera victims” interred in Sacramento’s cemetery inspired an elegiac feeling in draftsman J. Goldsborough Bruff that was absent in those he witnessed along the Trail.14 During his overland journey, the draftsman turned prospective miner visited nearly every emigrant grave he saw, creating one of the most comprehensive narrative records of the Trail dead. Bruff did not map these graves, but if he had they would have appeared as a beaded chain lain carelessly across the West. This physical disorder of bodies strewn along the Trail was matched by a cultural disorder in which mortuary practices intermingled among white emigrants and Native peoples of the West. Emigrants entered an evolving, syncretic world in which peoples adapted cultural traditions to shifting circumstances. Overlanders adapted as well. Fearful that wolves, weather, or some combination of the two would physically displace their dead emigrants modified their burial practices, sometimes by adopting elements of Native mortuary practices. In attempting to prevent the physical disorder of the dead, emigrants contributed to their cultural disorder. The blurring of emigrant and Native mortuary practices meant that emigrants often failed to identify whether a grave was that of an “Indian” or one of their own. Convinced of their historic role in bringing white American civilization west, emigrants instead confronted a dizzying array of partial human remains that defied easy racial categorization.

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Blurred Burials Emigrants began their journeys prepared for the West to disorient them. Shimmering desert mirages and some of the highest mountain peaks in the world, coupled with the fabled flatness of the near treeless, sun-­bleached Plains, knocked emigrants raised in the wet lowlands and forested East off balance. In the 1840s, trees such as the lone tree, a solitary cottonwood tree in central Nebraska that had long been a Native gathering place, became landmarks that helped orient emigrants on the foreign Plains.15 Similarly, the remains of dead American Indians placed carefully in tree forks or secured to wide branches culturally oriented emigrants. In Nebraska, Silas Newcomb’s company spent hours under a cottonwood tree near a government-­operated ferry waiting to cross the Platte, with “a pappoose” just above them. As they waited, the child’s exposed hair was “moving in the wind.”16 Likely laid to rest by kin and community with all the care and tenderness afforded a beloved child, for Newcomb this deceased child’s aerial sepulture confirmed his conviction that when he entered the West he had crossed a line as culturally potent as it was invisible: the supposed divide between white civilization to the east and “Indian” savagery to the west. For Native peoples of the Plains, including the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Pawnee, Lakota, and Osage, aerial sepultures such as that of the child Newcomb observed were the result of carefully orchestrated religious and cultural practices. Elevating the dead took two principal forms: placing (and securing) bodies to thick tree branches or in accommodating forks or building wooden scaffolds to support the corpse. In the late nineteenth century, Marie McLaughlin, the white wife of a U.S. Army officer, described such a scaffold in her transcription of the Lakota story “The Resuscitation of the Only Daughter.” To prepare the burial of this young girl her community placed “four forked posts into the ground and then lashed strong poles lengthwise and across the ends.” Then, at the top, approximately five to seven feet from the ground, they “made a bed of willows and stout ash brush” to support the girl’s body, which had been rolled “in fine robes and blankets.” In 1843, Theodore Talbot visited a scaffold constructed and maintained with similar care near Lancaster Lupton’s fur trade post in Arapahoe territory. Talbot described how the “young Arapahoe boy buried on a platform . . . serves for a perpetual memento mori” for the community who returned each year to maintain his sepulture. For the Arapaho and other Native peoples of the Plains elevating their dead was a sign of respect. Burying them belowground marked their

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ostracization. The Osage, for instance, practiced belowground interments only for murderers who had broken their nation’s social compact by taking the life of another.17 The cultural conventions of white Protestants inverted this relationship between elevation and respect for the dead. In the United States, white Americans occasionally left murderers who broke the social compact unburied. More frequently, they displayed the corpses of Black and Native people who dared to defy the pillars of slavery and dispossession on which U.S. society rested. During the Seminole War, military officers killed and strung up Seminole warriors as a warning to others who might be contemplating opposing deportation.18 On the Trail, emigrants recoiled at Native bodies laid to rest aboveground. Print had familiarized overlanders with aerial sepultures of the Plains; their journeys brought them to life.19 Some overlanders hurled epithets at the aerial sepultures they passed, labeling them products of a “horrid custom” and likening them to “crows nests.”20 Others struggled with how to describe the aerial sepultures. James Wilkins documented this difficulty in a journal entry: “Passed yesterday an Indian’s ‘grave’ if a corps [sic] lying on the top of a tree can be called a grave.” In contrast Israel F. Hale ignored the limits of emigrant terminology, writing, “saw an Indian grave in a Tree.” William Pleasants followed suit, describing the elevated Native dead some of his company members climbed trees to get a closer look at as placed in “aerial graves.”21 Hale’s and Pleasants’s contradictory descriptions were a way to make sense of what was, perhaps, the defining characteristic of cultural life on the nineteenth-­century Plains: its syncretism. When emigrants started across the Trail they entered a world of interracial families, of European and American traders who had adopted the clothing and language of the Native peoples with whom they lived and worked, and of American Indians who had incorporated elements of white American material goods and religious beliefs and turned them to their own purposes. This world precluded the easy distinction between Native and non-­Native burials that print had promised. Instead, emigrants often passed burials of white and Native peoples that looked more similar than different. From the Santa Fe Trail (a portion of the Southern Trails) in 1846 Dr. Friedrich Adolph Wislizenus recorded passing “several graves of Indians, as well as of white men  .  .  . erected in the usual prairie manner.”22 Traveling through Kansas three years later, the California-­bound William B. Lorton witnessed such a convergence of Native and white burial practices that he was unsure as to whether the “several picket railings” he

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passed “indicat[ed] a grave of some chief or white person.”23 An overlander who camped with Shoshone people near Fort Hall was similarly uncertain. He asked his hosts if the “two graves near their camp . . . were emigrants” and was told that they were actually “those of the Indians.”24 Lakota scaffolds exemplify the syncretism of Trail burials. By the 1850s, evolving Lakota cultural practices began to make their sepultures look more familiar to emigrants. On the high Plains near Fort Laramie—a former fur trade post turned U.S. military fort and a popular stopping point for emigrants traveling the main trunk of the Trail—emigrants observed Lakota people laid to rest in coffins. As early as 1848, Jessy Quinn Thornton observed that while many bodies had been wrapped in buffalo robes, a “few . . . were inclosed in boxes.”25 When Edwin Bird passed the same place four years later, he paused to appreciate one of these boxes that Lakota people had “trimmed in great taste” in “red flannel.” In this trimming Bird perceived a care for the dead like that of his own people. In the mid-­nineteenth century white Americans decorated coffins with a variety of cloths and treated the pine wood with paint, stains, and oils. Additional decorative finishings including ­handles, hinges, and ornaments; wreaths and floral sprays also helped to create aesthetically pleasing coffin exteriors. White Americans sometimes incorporated flannel into their burials too, although it seems to have been more commonly used as a liner rather than a surface covering. When Bird saw the red flannel–trimmed box near Fort Laramie he saw a familiar-­looking coffin.26 For the Lakota, using white American material elements such as red flannel trade cloth likely made sense because of their beneficial economic and political alliance with the United States. In addition to flannel trimmings and wooden coffins, the Lakota also incorporated American flags that they received as diplomatic gifts from U.S. representatives into the decorations of their dead. Near Fort Kearny, Nebraska, in 1849, Bernard J. Reid spent a morning visiting an “Indian lodge.” Inside he found “two corpses buried in state,” one on the ground and another on a scaffold. High above the lodge there was an “American flag flying.”27 Another white observer came upon a Lakota aerial sepulture where the corpse had been “wrapped in splendid buffalo robes ornamented with beads & quills—and covered over with the stars and stripes.”28 By the mid-­1840s Lakota use of the stars and stripes was common enough that a group of Shoshone travelers initially mistook John C. Frémont’s exploring expedition for a Lakota war party. The incident unsettled Frémont and his men, who saw the flag as a symbol of the United States and the United States only. When emigrants arrived at Fort Laramie, they

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often remarked on how seeing the flag flying over the fort inspired feelings of patriotic pride.29 In decorating their dead with the stars and stripes the Lakota transformed a symbol of the United States into a representation of their Indigenous empire. Incorporating the U.S. flag into Lakota burials cloaked the Lakota dead in a sign of their advantageous alliance with the United States. Blending Lakota burial practices with written English could also provide protection for their dead. On his journey James Bennett passed a Lakota scaffold sepulture to which “a rough board was suspended at the side, stating in English  .  .  . that the body should not be disturbed.”30 This written warning was necessary because emigrants were notorious for desecrating the Native dead. Despite this well-­known desecration, most emigrants exclusively concerned themselves with the potential disruption of their own dead. As they traveled, overlanders spied evidence of this destruction all around them. Scattered aboveground in a disturbing disarray, fragmented remains murmured of wind and rain removing the thin layer of sod that covered the traveler unfortunate enough to have lost his life on the way, and of hungry wolves, scenting decaying human flesh, digging into fresh graves with blunt claws. White Protestants prepared their dead for eventual heavenly resurrection, imagining the dead would “sleep” until God’s “trump shall summon them from their repose.”31 On the Trail, weather and wolves prematurely made the dead rise and disassembled the physical remains that were supposed to stay intact until summoned forth by the divine trumpet. Of the two threats of weather and wolves, emigrants worried most about the latter. For nineteenth-­century overlanders, the Trail made familiar colonial tales of wolves assaulting the dead come alive. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries British colonists (with the help of Native allies) had eliminated the gray wolf population from the northeastern seaboard and the woodlands. And by the time emigrants were crossing the Trail in the mid-­ nineteenth century, gray wolves had been all but exterminated in the eastern United States. But on the Plains the carnivorous canines flourished: hunting large, hoofed animals in packs and, according to emigrant sources, sniffing out the buried dead to feast on human remains.32 These attacks prompted an innovative emigrant response to the aerial sepultures of Native peoples. After encountering “human bones scattered about” two violated emigrant graves where “the wolves had taken charge of the ‘last sad rites,’” Quaker abolitionist Helen McCowen Carpenter’s company endorsed aerial sepultures. Seeing the destruction of the belowground burial

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made them “feel” that a Native scaffold “is the only thing for them to do.” The height of scaffolds promised to protect the dead from scavenging canids, but Native peoples, emigrants noted, did more than that. One overlander described passing a tree burial where the preparers had removed the bark from the trunk to prevent wolves from climbing up. Another saw a scaffold where the burial party had fastened the deceased “down to the platform by . . . smaller poles tightly lashed so that they could not be dragged away or disturbed.”33 Emigrants’ reassessment of scaffold burials as offering the best protection from wolves was common enough that it figured in Laura Preston’s 1868 children’s tale A Boy’s Trip Across the Plains. In the book the main character, ten-­year-­old Guy, discovers a human skull on the prairie. The horrifying encounter makes him decide that “the Indian mode of sepulture, of which they saw examples every day, [is] by far the best.”34 With evidence of disorder of their dead all around them, white Americans looked up to Native aerial sepultures as potential models for caring for their dead on the Trail. But potential was all this would be. Although short on tools and time and working in difficult soil, emigrants doubled down on belowground interments. They cut into sod with pocketknives and hatchets and scraped shallow graves by hand. When the rocky granite soil failed to yield, they laid corpses in wagons and moved on to search for more accommodating ground. But even then, emigrants could sometimes only dig eighteen or twenty inches— less than a third of the six feet deemed culturally appropriate and physically useful for protecting the corpse underneath.35 Depth was not all emigrants sacrificed. In June 1850 Madison Berryman Moorman tallied the fresh graves he passed as fifteen, and the bodies buried within them as eighteen.36 In burying bodies together emigrants stretched limited resources of time and labor, but they sacrificed the discrete burials that their culture prized as the best means to memorialize the individual deceased. Emigrants may not have adopted aerial sepultures, but they did incorporate other elements of Native burial practices. Overlanders found nothing to appreciate about the spiked prickly pear or cactus they encountered on their journey. But what these plants lacked in aesthetic properties they made up for in protective ones. Crossing through the Platte River Valley in 1859, E. H. N. Patterson climbed a hill to investigate what appeared to be “a bunch of feathers floating from a pole on top of a high bluff.” On reaching the top, Patterson and his companions “found a new made Indian grave;  .  .  . the whole mound was thickly covered with prickly pears, gathered and placed there, so that no wolf would ever dig into the sand.” Emigrants appear to

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have adopted this practice. In 1852 Caroline Richardson recorded passing a new emigrant grave “covered thickly with prickly pear.” Richardson deemed this protective cover as “showing the most respect to the departed that we have seen on the road.”37 Emigrants also used sage to defend their graves. The smell of sage repulsed emigrants such as Mrs. E. A. Hadley, who had “got so tired” of what she described as mountain sage “that I can’t bear to smell it.”38 While distasteful, the strength of the smell showed emigrants its potential as olfactory camouflage. Some emigrants, like Esther Bosworth, burned sage on top of fresh graves to mask the smell of the corpse underneath and, hopefully, protect it from wolves.39 In Native communities, smudging, or burning sage, was a purifying or cleansing process. In emigrants’ hands it became a deodorizer designed to safeguard the dead from desecration. Piling additional covering over graves became another favored emigrant protective strategy. White Americans had inherited a British settler practice of placing large, heavy stones, known as “wolf stones,” on graves to shield against wolves’ claws. Some companies replicated this practice on the Plains with “fine large rocks” and “sandstone slabs.”40 Natural and man-­made materials added directly on top of the corpse before filling in the grave with dirt served a similar purpose. In coyote territory, the men in Lydia Milner Waters’s company “cut cottonwood and laid it over” the corpse of Mr. Myers “to quite a thickness to prevent” the canids “from unearthing his body.” When Mrs. L. A. Bozarth’s train buried her adult female cousin near Scotts Bluff, Nebraska, in 1852, they “covered her with a cracker barrel and pieces of old stoves” that they found in their wagons “to keep the wolves from digging her out.”41 Such wooden coverings had precedent not only in British wolf stones but also in a practice white people had adopted from people of African descent who laid planks across their coffins before covering them with dirt.42 In likely drawing inspiration from this Black practice, emigrants revealed that the syncretism of Trail burials resulted not only from singular conditions of the Trail but also from the demographic realities of the mid-­nineteenth-­century United States. Necessity may have made emigrants adopt new burial practices and materials, but they yearned for the comforting familiarity of coffins. Ordinary boxes made principally of pine, mid-­century coffins were solid and serviceable. They were also culturally critical talismans that protected the dead and proclaimed the good intentions of the living. In white Americans’ perspective, only wood could create the barrier that allowed the body to

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decompose peacefully, protected from the dirt, worms, and other elements that might harm the corpse. Coffins were so important that some families packed boards in their wagons with as much care as they packed flour, bacon, and other provisions for the living.43 In 1859 the consumptive Mrs. Raymond protected herself from the prospect of a coffin-­less burial on the Trail by having a metallic coffin specially made to accompany her on her journey.44 The members of some fortunate burial parties were able to make coffins out of wood they found on the Trail. When the elderly Sarah Keyes became the first member of the Donner Party to perish, “a cotton-­wood tree was felled, and the trunk of it split into planks, which being first hewn with an axe and then planed, were constructed into a coffin.”45 Other travelers leveraged their mobility to improve burial conditions, carrying their dead to water sources where timber was more likely to be found. When a man in Vincent Geiger and Wakeman Bryarly’s company died, the survivors dressed their dead companion “in his best suit & put him in the sick wagon” in preparation for the seven-­ mile journey to the river where they were confident they could find “plenty of timber.” Resourceful wagon trains also pooled the supplies of their members, in one case taking a board from each family’s wagon to complete a pine box.46 When appropriately sized boards could not be found, emigrants engineered wooden coverings from “short board,” crackers barrels, and provision chests.47 The men in Mrs. Ashley’s company took “a provision chest 3 feet long, knocked the end out,” then nailed on some extra boards “to make it long enough for her feet to rest on.” When completed, “the chest . . . covered back to her hips, & the ballance was covered with sand for want of a board.”48 Absent wood, emigrants cut the earth to mimic the shape of a coffin box. Coffins were typically designed with a wider head and a tapered space for the feet. Harriet Smith’s company dug the grave of a male member of her company “in the shape of a coffin” then placed quilts and pillows in the dirt for the body to rest on. When Samuel Mathews’s company buried Benjamin Adams they dug a grave of the “usual depth” then made “an excavation . . . shaped like a coffin” in which they placed Adams’s body. Doing so brought none of the benefits that white Americans believed wooden coffins provided. And yet, cutting the earth in the shape of a coffin assuaged survivors’ anxiety over their loved ones’ strange burials.49 For further comfort emigrants turned again to Native practices to protect their dead. In the United States, white Protestants typically clothed corpses in loose-­fitting, open-­backed shrouds. Female relatives usually sewed these garments. Sometimes they covered them with a gummy substance to preserve the

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wrapping and the corpse it covered.50 With coffins so often unattainable, emigrants shifted attention to wrapping corpses in thicker, tighter, and more protective coverings. These coverings included featherbeds, blankets, comforters, and, in some cases, extra layers of clothing. In 1849, Catherine Haun described how her company wrapped the bodies of a mother and her infant “together in a bed comforter and wound [them] . . . with a few yards of string that we made . . . of a cotton dress skirt” before depositing them in the “desert.” The corpses, Haun wrote, appeared “quite mummyfied [sic].” With this description Haun used the same term emigrants employed to describe the Native dead wrapped in buffalo hides that they spied laid on scaffolds and cradled in tree forks.51 Haun’s choice of words suggests that the tight wrappings emigrants adopted were inspired by the practices of Native peoples. Emigrants adopted not only the tight wrapping commonly practiced by Native peoples of the Plains but also the materials they used to wrap their dead. On the Trail, many emigrants began wrapping their dead in buffalo robes. Overlanders routinely purchased and traded for these robes as they traveled. This adaptation tempered some emigrants’ anguish, but it did not satisfy their hopes for proper burials. When Mrs. Marsh’s company buried her husband “wrapped . . . in a buffalo skin,” but without a coffin, she felt “very bad.”52 Archaeological evidence suggests that other emigrants likely used buffalo skins to bury their dead but used the term “blanket” to describe the wrappings in their letters and diaries.53 In choosing the term “blanket,” emigrants revealed how deeply they had adapted to the material world of the West— describing robes not as foreign objects but as comforting blankets akin to the cotton and wool ones typically used at home. But for audiences at home, their chosen terminology severed these same cross-­cultural modifications. In adopting the familiar term “blanket,” emigrants suggested that they accepted the multicultural inflections of the West, an acceptance that paradoxically occluded the extent to which emigrant and Native burials materially blurred on the Trail. Likely unintentional, this terminological choice perpetuated the divide between emigrants and Native peoples of the West.

Narrating the Dead Racist preconceptions that “Indians” would attack the dead as well as the living was symptomatic of this divide. On the Trail, emigrant stories of “Indians” digging up the graves of their loved ones contributed to their sense of

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being under constant siege. Such tales were not new to the Trail. What was new were the modern mechanisms that broadcast emigrant presumptions of “Indian” violence against the living and the dead across the Trail and back home.54 In many ways, the 1840s marked the start of modern communication. In that decade white Americans became accustomed to sending letters cheaply and rapidly through the U.S. Postal Service, to reading local newspapers that broadcast news from around the country and the world, and, after the invention of the telegraph in 1844, to near instant transmission of information with a few presses of an electricized key.55 On the Trail, which had no formal communication system, emigrants created their own. They built ad hoc post office boxes, paid Native peoples and others headed east to carry their letters to the closest official U.S. post office box, and, with tongue-­ in-­cheek humor, christened the human and livestock bones on which they broadcast Trail information the “bones express.”56 In creating this ad hoc communication apparatus, emigrants concocted the semblance of a modern information system and ensured that what happened on the Trail would reach a wide audience. Grave markers became part of this Trail communication system. In the United States, gravestones served as memorials for the deceased. These monuments were typically inscribed with a name, dates of birth and death, and, in some cases, a simple epitaph. On the Trail grave markers doubled as message boards for travelers and as warnings of environmental dangers. One, for instance, displayed the tin cup of a victim who, after eating a poisonous root nearby, “was in such pain that he tore this cup down with his teeth.”57 Some companies replaced gravestone epitaphs with emphatic warnings such as “This water is Poison!” “Death!” “Poison!” “Beware!” or the calmer statement “Drank of this water and died.”58 Other grave inscriptions provided news on emigration violence. Lodisa Frizzell, for instance, paused to read a board reporting how a company had found a man “horribly murdered . . . his shirt was lying there, with the blood & wounds upon it.” The company buried the unidentified man as well as they could. However, lacking identifying information they could not erect a proper monument. Instead of memorializing his life, this man’s grave marker described his demise.59 A similar notice “posted by the road side” alerted Abigail Scott Duniway to the murder of an unidentified emigrant who “had been killed with buck shot and stabs with a buoy [sic] knife.” Duniway and her company surmised that the man “had probably got into some affray with his company who had served him in this manner.”60 While Duniway’s

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company did not provide any explanation for their supposition, it is likely that the company surmised the murderers had been emigrants because of the weapons used: a gun and knife, both of which were typical weapons emigrants carried. Although by the 1850s most Native peoples of the Plains also used guns, many emigrants clung to the tired trope of tomahawking, arrow-­ shooting warriors. On the Trail, stories on grave markers seemed to bring these stale narratives of “violent savages” from the realm of fantasy into the realm of reality. When two Missourians “found two fresh graves,” marked by headboards carved with the initials of “two of their Party whom they had left well,” they supposed the men “to have been killed by Indians.”61 Other markers explicitly replicated emigrant narratives of Native violence with the short epitaph “killed by Indians” or a longer description of a violent encounter witnessed first-­or secondhand.62 Material mnemonics like the “arrow, clotted with blood” that Bruff discovered stuck “in the breast” of a grave also evoked violent “Indians.” As if an arrow lodged in the chest of a buried corpse was not obvious enough, the burial party had attached a small card to the shaft that read “This is the fatal arrow.”63 The visibility of emigrant graves like one with the bloody arrow that grabbed Bruff ’s attention advanced emigrant misconceptions of the constant threat of “Indian” attack. Emigrants took steps to ensure their fellow travelers would see their handiwork and comprehend this message. When Harrison Rowe’s burial party interred his body they placed the Wisconsin merchant’s grave on “top of a conspicuous mount.” Then, for expected visitors, the company left “on the grave . . . a written warning, against leaving the main body of the company in the Indian country.”64 Rowe’s grave did indeed attract attention from the road. It also eventually reached national audiences in newspaper reports, including one published in the New York Daily Sun. In so doing Rowe’s grave perpetuated narratives of emigrants under siege from “Indians.” In other cases, emigrants had to piece together narratives of the dead from partial human remains that appeared unexpectedly on the Trail. During their journeys, emigrants discovered fragments of the dead: skulls, finger bones, and tufts of hair. These fragments became pieces of evidence—shards that shed light on what had been, what was, and what would be. In 1850, while traveling through the canyons of the Great Basin west of Salt Lake, emigrant Calvin Taylor’s company encountered a “human skull” that “looked fresh[;] some of the sinews were yet attached to the jaws.” Taylor’s company decided “from appearance” that this was a white person’s skull.65

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By the 1850s many white Americans had embraced the interrelated popular sciences of phrenology and craniometry. At home and on the Trail, emigrants pressed and traced their fingers around the skulls of relatives and friends to read their “true character.” Such practices were part of parlor games played by middle-­class Americans who could afford leisure time. But these “sciences” also undergirded an ideologically fallacious and materially and physically violent racial hierarchy. Emigrants deployed phrenology to this end on the Trail. In one case, William Rothwell forcibly read the skull of a terrified, bound Paiute man who had just watched his emigrant captors murder his companion. When Rothwell approached with his hands outstretched the man, in quick succession, screamed in terror, exclaimed that Paiutes aren’t robbers, and declared that he had children he wanted to see again. Undeterred, Rothwell grabbed the man’s head with both hands and moved his fingers around as the man continued to scream.66 Rothwell did not record the results of his phrenological reading, but the violence with which he conducted it was evidence enough of his conviction in the terrified Paiute’s supposedly inferior racial status. The “science” of phrenology promised both to yield insight into individuals and to typify the races. In the nineteenth century, white Americans defined “the races” as Caucasian, African, Indian, Malay, and Mongolian.67 Arriving on the Feather River in early fall 1849, Charles Ben Darwin discovered a skull that he read as “near little intellect & very small mental development of any character,” concluding that it was “a skull of indian.” Three years later, W. S. McBride came to a similarly quick conclusion that the “well-­bleached human skull” he claimed to have found at his company’s campground was “probably a Pawnee skull for it seemed wanting in most of the organs that make the individual good, kind and great.” But fragments of the dead sometimes failed to yield the clarifying answers for which emigrants hoped. One emigrant discovered two “men with hickory shirts on and scalped dead so long” he could not determine their race.68 Forcibly taking Native remains (just as Rothwell forcibly grabbed the Paiute man’s skull) helped provide the physical evidence of racial hierarchy that emigrants craved. Sanctioned by scientific racism, spurred by avarice, and buoyed by boredom, emigrants dug into Native burial mounds, pulled corpses down from trees, shot up another laying at rest on a scaffold, and, in one instance, opened a grave along the Platte, then “sat with their feet in [it] . . . playing with the bones of the red man.” Farther west, Major Osborne Cross witnessed emigrants unearth Native (likely Cayuse) skulls from along

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the Columbia River before dropping them in the road. The wheels of wagons that followed ground the skulls into dust.69 Native peoples defended their dead from these attacks. Desperate to protect their dead but overstretched by waves of settler-­induced epidemics, Cayuse people poked holes in the skulls of deceased loved ones in the hopes of making them less attractive to white collectors.70 When a Pawnee man saw an emigrant sitting on a grave mound he went over to him and told him in “English that this was the grave of one of his people and I must not sit upon it.”71 As we have seen, the Lakota attached signs in English warning emigrants not to disturb their scaffolds. Native Americans drew on knowledge of white American “science” and the English language to defend the graves of their kin and community. Several emigrants, however, imagined vengeful “Indians” attacking emigrants in retribution for this desecration. Joseph Waring Berrien told an emigrant he caught stealing from Native graves that “he was doing very wrong.” Berrien also warned the thief that “some innocent person may yet suffer” because of his actions. Laura Brewster Boquist recorded a similar fear in her journal. After some men in her train stole “beads and other Indian souvenirs” from a Lakota aerial sepulture along the Platte, Boquist “advised” them to return the “sacred mementos.” They refused. Boquist vented her frustration in her journal: “This thoughtless disregard by white people, of the most sacred rites of the Indians, has doubtless added much to the trouble between races.”72 Like Berrien, Boquist worried that desecrating Native graves would bring the wrath of vengeful “Indians” to the Trail. These accounts show how emigrants shifted focus from white violence to “Indian” attacks. Overlanders also wrung their hands over imagined “Indian” attacks on their dead. Because of this misplaced fear, they made their dead even more vulnerable to something else: being permanently lost. Time and again emigrants described their decision to hide graves or to bury bodies in the road as necessary to protect their remains from plundering “Indians.” One of these hidden dead was a young boy named Enoch Garrison. When Enoch was wounded by a wagon, his fifteen-­year-­old elder brother Abraham, with their father dying of rheumatism in their wagon, assumed responsibility for the boy’s care. Enoch’s wounds proved fatal, leaving Abraham to arrange his burial. Intent on protecting his brother’s physical remains, Garrison decided to dig his brother’s grave in the middle of the road. When it was finished, every one of the train’s wagons save that of the Garrison family ran over Enoch’s grave to hide it from potential desecrators.73

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Like preconceptions of Native violence, such burials had deep roots in American culture. Since the eighteenth century, Americans had read the tale that George Washington had buried General Braddock in the road during the Seven Years’ War to conceal his grave and preserve his remains from “Indians.”74 But whereas Braddock’s burial was witnessed, recorded, and remembered by a contingent of military personnel and memorialized in print, no such commemoration awaited emigrants such as Enoch. Instead, his concealed grave became the responsibility of another boy, his fifteen-­ year-­old brother, who carried the memory of the grave with him to Oregon. In some ways the culmination of the transformation of the Trail into a graveyard, burying bodies in the road laid a foundation of unmarked dead and created the possibility that, sans any visible evidence, the entire Trail route had become the sacred repository of emigrants’ remains.

Locating Loved Ones Every one of the roughly 6,600 graves that appeared on the Trail in the mid-­ nineteenth century would have distributed the burden of location to approximately five to ten living survivors. Mothers, fathers, wives, daughters, sons, sisters, and brothers, as well as extended relatives who knew that one of their own flesh and blood lay somewhere along the 1,500-­mile route, would have felt the tug toward the Trail. Draftsman J. Goldsborough Bruff captured the power of this pull in a letter to Harper Brothers. Bruff hoped the publishers would consider accepting his overland journal. As Bruff saw it, his record of Trail graves would ensure that his book would reach a wide readership. In Bruff ’s telling, his “topographical itinerary” would interest overlanders past and future, and the grave record would attract the many more numerous readers “who will here receive” news of their lost loved ones’ final resting places. Harper’s, citing Bruff ’s refusal to reduce his extensive journals, declined to publish them.75 But Bruff ’s contention that white Americans yearned to learn of their loved ones’ final resting places rang true. If we imagine five to ten living survivors for every one of the 6,600 emigrants who perished on the way, across the United States we can count some 30,000 to upwards of 60,000 white Americans for whom the death of a loved one on the Trail permanently transformed their familial geography. This geography encompassed their extended network of kin and loved ones and included the living and the dead. In the

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Figure 6. Leaving the Old Homestead illustrates how white American families navigated the divides between east and west and heaven and earth. Wilkins, who traveled the Trail in 1849, was likely inspired by the emigrant families he witnessed during his journey and by the culture of death. Here the focus is equally on the young family leaving for the West and the older generation they are leaving behind. The grandmother’s gray pallor suggests she is unwell and not long for this world while the open door and vines growing overhead, both symbols of heaven, suggest the elderly man will also soon pass from this earth. Viewers of this painting would have taken comfort in knowing that even as the young family left “the old homestead” for the last time, the door to their heavenly home and to heavenly familial reunification remained open. James Wilkins, Leaving the Old Homestead, c. 1853, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

increasingly mobile United States, the immobility of the dead tethered the living to burial plots that held their genetically similar remains. And, in an increasingly mobile society, permanency of physical location often became an exclusive property of the dead, making graves (the dwellings of the dead) more permanent anchors of familial geographies than homes of the living.76 The deaths of emigrants along the Overland Trail in the 1850s linked tens of thousands of white Americans to the Trail. Absent their living, breathing loved ones, visiting the deceased’s grave became the closest approximation of being in their presence. Secular changes

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in burial standards in the 1830s and 1840s worked in tandem with the religious belief in resurrection to deepen the familial connection to the graves of loved ones. One of the major claims of advocates of the new rural cemeteries was that these places of peaceful, pastoral repose would facilitate survivors’ ability to maintain connections with deceased kin. By the 1850s, many middle-­class Americans had become accustomed to visiting their dead in beauteous, tranquil surroundings. Such settings appealed to the living, who came to view cemeteries as idyllic environments in which to commune with dead relatives. Thus, as the expansion of rural cemeteries supplanted the practice of burying family members in close proximity in urban churchyards and on farms and family lands, the dead became hyper-­domesticated. In fact, visiting graves became a scene of moral instruction, much like the domesticated parlor. Grieving relatives often visited their loved ones’ graves multiple times in the days following burial, in some cases exhuming the body for one last look at their departed’s physical remains.77 In the years following, survivors incorporated graves into their daily lives, hanging pre-­printed memorial lithographs on their parlor walls or keeping a careful watch, as Narcisa Whitman did, from her front door.78 This incorporation was a way to cope with what Sarah Nichols described as living somewhere between “heaven and earth” until the day she would be reunited with her dead son.79 Dying on the Trail precluded this idyllic physical proximity to the dead for which white Americans yearned. In the pre-­embalming, pre-­railroad days of the Trail of the 1850s, it was all but impossible to transport the dead long distances. The saga of the transport of Sarah Nichols’s son George from Missouri to New York illustrates just how difficult it was to move bodies in the antebellum United States. In the weeks before George died of cholera on a steamboat headed toward the eastern edge of the Trail, Sarah had penned desperate letters begging her son and her husband, Samuel (who had organized the California expedition), to return home. Sarah was sure that if they continued to California they would die. George’s death a few days later realized Sarah’s worst fear. It also fulfilled her desperate hope that he would return to her. Immediately following George’s death, Samuel wrote to tell Sarah that “for your feelings . . . I abandon my enterprise & journey & return with the remains of my Lovely Son.”80 Doing so was costly and challenging. First, Samuel employed “mechanicks” to create a special, two-­layer coffin, the inner layer consisting of tin filled with alcohol and the second of wood. Between the layers, the mechanics inserted wood charcoal to further insulate George’s

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corpse for transport. Samuel initially wrote Sarah that he hoped to arrive home in Buffalo, New York, in ten or twelve days, but the weight of the coffin forced him to wait for a larger vessel to carry the coffin east. Eventually Samuel returned with George. It was too late for Sarah to gaze on her son’s face (her reverend advised against it because of his state of decomposition), but she found consolation anyway. She knew George’s grave was close by and she likely visited his tomb for the rest of her life.81 The importance of these visits meant that emigrants forced to bury their dead on the Trail agonized about leaving them behind. When Keturah Belknap’s young son spiked a fever overnight, she clung to his hot body and prayed that he would survive the night. If he did not, she contemplated lying beside him in the cold earth rather than leaving him behind on his own. After burying her husband and then her youngest child on the Trail, Mrs. Brown spent the rest of the trip knitting, unraveling, and reknitting a stocking “over and over again” in a failed attempt to distract her from thoughts of the loved ones she had left behind. Mrs. Brown’s sacrifice deprived her of physical proximity to the dead for which she yearned, but it did nothing to lessen familial responsibility for the dead. Trail passersby assessed the quality of Trail graves according to the standard of whether they “show near [in affection] although far away.”82 The innovative substitutions of scraps of wood for coffins and of buffalo hides for open shrouds to protect corpses became signs of affection as did carefully fashioned headboards, including one crafted by a widower for his beloved wife out of a cherished violin. So too did location of the grave signal affection. Emigrants tried to bury their loved ones in places that most evoked the environments of rural cemeteries in the United States. This meant that emigrants dug graves near rivers, under bending trees, and other locales that approximated the aesthetic standards of cemeteries. After Abigail Scott Duniway’s mother died from a long illness, she and her family buried her mother in an attractive “eminence” on the otherwise flat Plains. Vincent Hoover described the similar care with which he buried his brother John. He and his family placed John’s grave close to the Platte where the sound of the river would provide him some companionship after their departure.83 Such arrangements consoled emigrants forced to abandon their dead on the Trail. While environmental features could provide some sense of society, emigrants also sought the proximity of other emigrant graves to provide their loved ones with the same fellowship they would have had in cemeteries in the United States. Elizabeth Elliott declared it “a great satisfaction” that she was

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able to bury her son Fremont next to another child on the Trail. In her words, “we did not have to leave him alone.” When Charles Ben Darwin lost a friend on the way to California, he regretted that the man had had the misfortune to die in the mountains where he was buried alone rather than on the more densely populated thoroughfare along the Platte River. In Darwin’s telling, “it seemed near home comparatively to be buried on the Platte[,] & then there too was a companionship of graves & town of dead who all & each night find someone to whom he was linked by a bond of sympathy[,] be it ever so slight & attenuated.”84 Emigrants went out of their way to provide this society for their dead. Draftsman J. Goldsborough Bruff passed the graves of W. W. Freeman and A. J. McDaniel, two “particular friends on the route” who had died ten days apart but whose company had buried them next to each other.85 Evidence of clusters building up over time illustrates how a single grave attracted more burials. Mrs. E. J. Goltra passed three graves, two dated June 4, 1850, and the third dated June 4, 1852, exactly two years after the first graves had been dug. E. C. Springer passed a cluster of three graves, “1 of last year . . . 1 . . . of yesterday,” and one “of today.”86 In 1863, stagecoach driver F. E. W. Patten described a cluster of six emigrant graves created over the four-­year span of 1850–53 near the border of Wyoming and Idaho Territories.87 In creating these clusters, emigrants provided a semblance of sociability for their loved ones that mirrored the orderly design of U.S. cemeteries. Separating the emigrant dead along lines of race accomplished a distinct social goal. In 1849 an Alabama overlander wrote home to his brother describing the burial of a white man and a black man from his company. The men had died within twenty-­four hours of each other in the same Arizona campground, but their company buried their bodies one hundred yards apart. The white man, identified as Dr. W. Fagan was “interred . . . under a large Muskite tree” as “Tears . . . roll[ed] down the cheeks” of the attending emigrants. The African American man, identified first as “Mr. Thibaults black boy” and later as Jordon was buried without ceremony “about 100 yards from” Fagan.88 For the Arkansas emigrant’s brother and readers of the Arkansas State Gazette in which his letter was published, one hundred yards, the size of a modern football field, was deemed enough to maintain racial segregation that in the United States was accomplished through partially or completely segregated cemeteries.89 Emigrants perpetuated the division between Black and white through separating their graves and by marking tombs of African Americans with their race.90

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Emigrants successfully replicated the racial divisions of the United States, but they could not reproduce the geographic precision of home. In the United States, most white Americans knew exactly where the remains of their loved ones lay. In 1852 Thomas White easily located his son Milton’s grave in the Kanesville Cemetery on the eastern edge of the Trail on the “south side” of the town’s burying ground.91 The burden of geographic description was much greater for emigrants who died on the Trail. After John Pratt Welsh lost his partner to cholera, he recorded how he and his company placed the grave “in a knoll of white sand . . . nearly 1/2 mile from ferry & 1/4 from river somewhat burned at the ground, branching to the west about 14 ft from ground, dig the grave on the south of tree 4 or 5 yards off.” At some point in writing this description Welsh added “beneath a large cotton wood” with a caret (after sand) in the hopes of further clarifying the grave’s location.92 A similar attention to detail characterized Augustus Ripley Burbank’s list-­like description of the location of the Rev. J. Owen’s grave as being “one mile 1/4 to the right of the road (Six & 1/2 miles from the Confluence of the Independence road) on the slope of a ridge, at or near the foot of a cotton wood tree & on a small stream.”93 So too did this strategy guide Samuel Mathews’s description of the grave of Frank Adams as being “on the north side of the road . . . about 4 miles west of the junction of the Independence road with that from St. Joseph.”94 Despite this hopeful precision, the shifting geography of the Trail made it difficult to correlate these geographic narratives with physical graves on the western landscape. When Frank Adams’s brother Chad asked a neighbor or friend to visit Frank’s grave using the description provided by Samuel Mathews, the man found that Frank’s tomb was no longer on the north side of the road. Instead, “the Road Runs to the south from 1/4 to 1/2 of a mile in Consequence of a bad Ravene.”95 A confluence of environmental and human factors resulted in a constantly shifting Trail geography, as emigrants altered their trajectory to avoid obstacles or to find essential services or resources made scarce by their livestock’s decimation of grass and water sources.96 The constancy of change meant that the passage of time hindered rather than helped the legibility of the Trail and thus the ability to locate the emigrant dead. Although emigrants had been traveling overland to California for some time when James Wilkins began his journey in 1849, he and his company soon found themselves “on a road, that has been travelled but a few weeks.” Their printed guidebook failed them, making “it very difficult to get information as to where we shall find water and grass ahead.” When J. A. Wilkinson left Michigan for California ten years later, he had a

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reasonable expectation that his overland journey would be geographically legible, if physically challenging. After all, he was following in the footsteps of upwards of 250,000 emigrants over a route nearly two decades old and traveling in company with several “Old Californians” including a man affectionately known by the company as “Uncle Dan.” But when “Uncle Dan” tried to locate the place west of Box Elder Creek, in what is now Colorado, where he and his companions had discovered a water source a decade earlier, he couldn’t “tell where it is located.” With great effort another “Old Californian” who could only walk with a cane eventually succeeded in locating the source.97 To compensate for this disorientation, emigrants relied on oral information from passing emigrants and, most importantly, Native peoples who obliged such requests for information by drawing maps in the sand or pointing the way west.98 In turning to Native Americans for help and away from their pre-­ printed guidebooks and maps emigrants illustrated a failing of national cartographic imaginings that presumed the West was emergent American territory. So too did these geographic failures undercut the viability of familial hopes that survivors could understand the geographic location of their distant loved ones. The failure to find graves on the Trail confirmed the delusions of white Americans’ geographic fantasies. When William Pleasants passed a grave made just a few days earlier he noted that “the head and foot board are almost completely gone” and predicted that it would soon be returned to the wilderness. While encamped at the spot where he believed he had buried “A Lady by the name of Eleson who died with the colary [cholera]” three years earlier, neither Mr. Parks nor his companions “could . . . find the grave.”99 William Hoffman searched for the grave of a Mrs. Elizabeth Campbell at the “urgent request of her brother” but “could not find it.” Hoffman speculated that, based on the “description given me,” “the grave has been washed away by the river.”100 Weather deteriorated graves and transformed Trail geography, threatening the geographic legibility of Trail graves. Ongoing traffic which necessitated the creation of new roads through not yet depleted resources contributed to the dislocation of Trail graves, but it also provided a means to repair and resituate these graves in familial geography. In 1854 Elisha C. Mayhew’s company left one of their members behind so that he could “spend a day in repairing his sons grave . . . who had died two years previous.”101 Friends and neighbors also assisted in the project of preserving Trail graves. Before bereaved mother Lucia Loraine Williams left her son John’s grave on the Trail she ensured that it was protected as best as

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she and her company could manage and that it had a board clearly marked with John’s name and age. Before she left Williams expressed her hope that “if any of our friends come through I wish they would find his grave and if it needs, repair it.”102 In the twentieth century, Susan Isabel Drew recalled that before leaving Kentucky a neighboring family “begged my Father to visit the grave” of a son they had left on the Plains a year earlier.103 Traveling friends like William Hoffman, Drew, and the unnamed connections with which Williams consoled herself, were an important subset of a cohort of proxies who located and repaired Trail graves on behalf of physically distant survivors. Family members provided specific instructions for their proxies. At the behest of relatives of Mrs. Eunice Stone, Elisha C. Mayhew, the same man whose company left a father to repair his son’s grave, replaced the aging headboard at Stone’s grave.”104 A friend or neighbor asked by Chad Adams to visit his brother Frank’s grave first located the grave. Then, seeing that the weather on the open Plains was deteriorating the marker, he reinforced it. In addition to repairing the physical location of the grave, this friend or neighbor composed a letter to Adams describing his efforts and enclosing some leaves, flowers, and seeds that he collected by the side of Frank’s grave. In sending these items, which he thought Adams might like to plant in his garden at home in Ohio, Adams’s proxy strengthened his connection with his brother’s distant grave. Proxies did not always satisfy familial hopes. Mrs. Jones, the neighbor of Missourian Elizabeth F. Knowlton, was dismayed to hear what Knowlton and her company had done to her son Andrew Garrison’s grave. Knowlton and her company easily located Garrison’s wooden headstone according to the directions Mrs. Jones had given them. When his brother buried Garrison, he had used wood from his wagon to create a headboard and foot marker that included Garrison’s name and date of death. In her reminiscence, Knowlton was careful to note that she and her company were pleasantly surprised by the physical state of the marker. Even so, the company decided to improve it, thinking that that was what Mrs. Jones would want. Knowlton and her collaborators created a new marker from the wood of their own wagons. Next, they filled the grave in with dirt, apparently to raise it to the level of this new foot marker and headboard. Knowlton recalled with pleasure that she and her party had transformed a fragile tomb into a secure one. Garrison’s mother, however, was displeased. She told Knowlton that she should “not have done” what she did. The source of Mrs. Jones’s displeasure is not specified in her letter. But perhaps she was distressed that her former neighbors had replaced the original marker created by her other son for his brother. Now, instead

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of that token of brotherly affection, there was something new and no longer familial. In Mrs. Jones’s view, the proxies had disturbed an original tomb, not preserved it.105 Mrs. Jones never traveled west of Missouri, but she imagined the site of her son’s grave on the open Plains to be part of her familial geography. The graves of loved ones on the Overland Trail created affective anchors that transformed the Trail from a foreign road of travel into a place marked by the permanent presence of a loved one.

A Proto-­National Graveyard The marks the Trail dead made on the landscape were not only familial but also emergently national. While individual and familial ambitions frequently pulled emigrants west, expansionists had long couched overlanders’ sacrifices in national terms.106 In 1845, John Wentworth argued for federal protection for the Overland Trail based on the sacrifice emigrants made for the nation. In addition, he described the risks and hardships that attended emigrants’ corpses after they had died: “Their bodies are buried by the wayside, to be exhumed and defiled by the Indians, or devoured by the wolves.”107 In Wentworth’s telling, in dying of disease in foreign territory emigrants were nevertheless made victims of foreign violence through the potential of their bodies being attacked by wolves or “Indians.” This, in Wentworth’s view, was a sacrifice that merited national intervention. In 1850 the Alta California issued a similar patriotic call to citizens of San Francisco. The Alta urged San Franciscans to contribute to relief for incoming emigrants to prevent another disaster like that of the Donners, which had already marred “the experience of our youthful country.” A month later, the Alta reported gratefully on the many donations received for the relief of “suffering immigrants” who had benefited from the efforts of San Franciscans to assist “their distressed countrymen.”108 The same year that Wentworth made the case for the nationalism of emigrants’ mortal sacrifices, Officer Stephen Watts Kearny stressed the transitory nature of emigrants’ presence to the United States’ Native allies. At a summer meeting on the Plains in 1845, Kearny declared that emigrants headed to Oregon and California “go to bury their bones there and never return.”109 Kearny’s statement drew on the cross-­cultural language of death and territorial claims to assure Native peoples that emigrants’ presence was fleeting. But his words directly contradicted the messages of Wentworth and other

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pro-­expansionists. U.S. officials said one thing to white Americans and another to Native peoples. Time would reveal the fallacy of Kearny’s words. By the 1850s, the Trail that emigrants, as the Alta bewailed, were “strewing  .  .  . with their bodies” constituted an invasion not dissimilar from the better-­known invasion of the iron bands of the railroad that the United States would begin building over the central overland route in the next decade. Attempting to cleanse their homelands of these emigrant dead could be dangerous. In the California gold mines, a pair of Yaqui miners nearly lost their lives for cremating the remains of two white men. Benjamin Harris recalled that “Hang ’em—Hang ’em resounded  .  .  . all over town” but that the “evidence exonerated the prisoners—it having been clearly established—that it was customary among these people to burn the dead” and that the maggots found on the corpses confirmed that they had been killed several days prior, rather than by the Yaqui miners.110 The Yaqui were not the only Native people who participated in and joined the rush to California. Beginning in 1849, hundreds of Cherokee emigrants (including John Rollin Ridge) left their nation in what whites called Indian Territory to travel the Trail.111 While their material accoutrement and ambitions mirrored those of white emigrants, these miners identified, first and foremost, as Cherokee citizens. Thus, while white diarists frequently noted their increasing distance from the United States (or simply, “civilization”), Cherokee John Lowery Brown noted his distance with respect to Cherokee national geography, recording on August 26, 1850 that he was “1,662 miles from this place to Grand River Cherokee Nation.” While references to the distance from the Cherokee nation provided Brown and his community with a way to locate him in the West, their graves created sites of Cherokee belonging on the Trail. While at Fort Bridger in southwestern Wyoming on the Green River, Brown learned from passing emigrants that “one of the Cherokees” in Oliver’s company up ahead had died. These white informants “did not recollect his name” but Brown and his company soon came to the grave of their countryman Charles McDaniels.112 In visiting and recording the location of McDaniels’s grave, Brown connected it to his people and marked it as a Cherokee site, albeit one many miles west of their nation. A similar project of incorporating white emigrant graves into the United States attended emigrant recordings of their dead on the Trail. By the 1850s, the role of the dead in transforming foreign soil into sacred sites of American memory had precedents in a handful of graves within and outside the boundaries of the United States. In addition to the Donner Party site high in

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the Sierra, another sacred landmark of death was Scotts Bluff on the plains of western Nebraska. While the focus of visiting tombs in the mid-­nineteenth-­ century United States remained primarily familial, the American public also consistently mourned at a few prominent burials, including the tomb of George Washington at Mount Vernon. In so doing these tourists participated in what one historian has termed a “civic pilgrimage.”113 The transformation of the Trail into a graveyard in the 1850s also promised to transform the West into sacralized American soil. Despite the disorder of the dead on the Trail, emigrants clung to the idea that the white dead catalyzed otherwise unremarkable expanses of tufted prairie, sandy desert, and craggy mountain recesses into national spaces. Burial parties anticipated and encouraged such pilgrimages by designing graves to attract the attention of later passersby. Pink sunbonnets perched atop wooden crosses and fluttering white cotton flags tacked to the top of grave markers were some of the ways that parties attempted to draw attention to Trail graves. So too did placing the dead just by the roadside, “on some knoll near the road,” or underneath a prominent tree.114 Such prominence helped reassure survivors that their loved ones would not be forgotten. In many cases it worked. For instance, such visibility meant that Origen Thomson was able to write home with the news that his neighbor Mrs. Watkins was dead, news he gleaned from her grave that he had passed two or three days prior.115 In visiting Trail graves, and recording and disseminating their details, emigrants demonstrated that their community was not only familial but also emergently national. Emigrants felt a responsibility not only to properly inter and remember their loved ones but also to note and visit every emigrant tomb, not just the ones to which they had a personal or even a local geographic connection. Elizabeth Maria Campbell remembered that her mother “went to visit all the graves she saw” during her family’s overland trip.116 Failure to pay respects could induce guilt, as evidenced by Abigail Scott Duniway’s description of her failure to take note of the several graves she had passed each day during the previous week as “negligent.” In addition to visiting graves, some women also brought offerings to lay at the tombs. When Esther Belle Hanna went to one newly made grave, she “placed a bunch of flowers on it as a mark of my respect for the departed[,] whoever it may be.”117 While women may have felt visiting tombs was part of a gendered responsibility that placed the onus of mourning and memorialization more heavily on their shoulders, men participated as well. John Christian carried a small memorandum book that he used to record the names of “all the emigrants

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that had died.” After Christian contracted cholera and died, his company preserved his notebook and the list of graves held within it.118 Recording the details of each grave to share with national audiences was another way that emigrants shaped the Trail into a proto-­national graveyard. Passing emigrants recorded the notations on emigrant graves with what one historian has described as a “bookkeeper’s care.”119 James Aitken used a combination of hashmarks and tallies to keep track of the graves he passed along the way.120 When John Hawkins Clark asked a man he encountered who had painstakingly recorded the details of every grave he had passed why he did what he did, the man told Clark that he did so to show respect for the fallen and to communicate their whereabouts to people at home.121 On the Bear River in 1849, emigrant Charles Stackhouse encountered “a man from Oregon who was recording all grave inscriptions, planning to publish the information back East.” When Stackhouse inquired into his motivations, the man replied that he was creating his record to honor the deceased and communicate their final resting places to family and friends at home.122 Feelings of national community motivated emigrants to visit and record these graves, but they were ultimately driven by the hope of reforging familial ties. While the root purpose of these grave lists was familial, their publication also breathed life into an emergent national community. Published lists generally contained all the information recorded including, in most cases, place of origin. In the United States, place of origin was only described on tombs when the deceased had died outside his or her home community. Because all emigrants on the Trail were from somewhere else, this information was incorporated into nearly every grave marker. In 1852 Dr. John Hudson Wayman reported that “on the head board, you may see rudely carved by the hand of affection the Name, Age & Residence of the departed.”123 Place of origin was sometimes deemed an even more important identifier than the individual’s name. This was the case of one dead emigrant identified on his tombstone only as a “young man” from “Finley, O.” (Findlay, Ohio).124 These residential designations, described as particular cities, towns, or counties rather than states, reflected that even as emigrants and white Americans more generally nurtured a fellow feeling for each other that was both racial and emergently national, they privileged ties of family, locality, region, and religion over that of a national community.125 It was for this reason that John Brown rejoiced to find emigrants from neighboring counties in North Carolina and Tennessee and that Daniel Budd felt a sense of consolation when he buried a member of his company beside another man from Tennessee.126 The fact that, on the Trail, a region or

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a state, a town or a single county, could constitute a sense of shared identity showed how the Trail expanded geographic identity to larger and larger areas. While emigrants continued to privilege the localized and regional nature of white identity in “these United States” of the 1850s, conditions on the Trail precipitated a proto-­national identity. Back home, a national newspaper network spread the news of Trail graves across America. These newspaper lists of the dead were a practice to which Americans had become somewhat accustomed. During the U.S.-­Mexican War, newspaper casualty lists had become the primary means of communicating the names of the dead.127 In contrast to newspaper reporting of male war casualties gleaned from officers in the field, on the Trail private citizens created lists of emigrant dead largely without the assistance of the U.S. Army. These grave lists were volunteer, ad hoc affairs, published directly by emigrants after they completed their journeys or sourced from informants, including military men, who relayed the information to newspaper correspondents, principally those based on the Trail’s eastern and western edges. From there, lists were reprinted across the nation. A list of graves compiled by emigrants John H. Hays was reprinted first in the Sacramento Union. After that the list was reprinted in at least three more newspapers including the Alta California, the St. Joseph (Missouri) Weekly Gazette, and the New Orleans Picayune.128 When published as part of grave lists in newspapers, emigrant deaths performed a type of geographic alchemy that repositioned residents of distinctive localities and regions alongside each other. For instance, a list of graves sourced (in an example of army assistance) from General Twigg and published in the summer of 1849 relayed information on the graves of four emigrants from Missouri, Kentucky, Indiana, and Vermont in black ink just centimeters apart.129 Even though the four were buried between St. Louis and the St. Joseph and Independence Road junction (a distance of some three hundred miles), Twigg’s printed list repositioned these graves alongside each other. In another example published in the St. Louis Intelligencer, “John  S. Harnett, died May 30, Lafayette County, Mo; David Matthews, Putnam county, Ohio; . . . Watkins of Pennsylvania; . . . Joseph Fledge, died June 1, of Illinois; . . . J Postewaite, aged 36, of Crittenden county, Ky” appeared just inches from each other.130 John H. Hays’s list included a similar smattering of dead from various counties in Ohio, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Illinois, Kentucky, Arkansas, Michigan, and Iowa. Even though miles may have separated the tombs, listing the dead together helped immortalize the

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geographic diversity of this migration. Newspaper lists of the emigrant dead from records made on the Trail described white Americans from nearly every state of the Union lying beside each other in death.131 Such lists anticipated the competing Union and Confederate cemeteries that would spring up in the mid-­1860s in response to the deaths of over seven hundred thousand soldiers in the Civil War. Like those soldiers, most emigrants died of disease, but violence did increase along the Trail in the late 1850s. Some of this violence was a response by Native peoples to an increasing burden of an emigration that, at best, cared ­little for the people and places through which they passed and, at worst, attacked them for sport. But it was a group of whites playing “Indians” who enacted the most high-­profile attack on emigrants in the 1850s. In early October 1857 reports began appearing in Los Angeles that Mormons had attacked their “fellow-­citizens” and had left “the bodies . . . lying naked upon the ground.”132 The confirmation of the rumors printed in the Los Angeles Star on October 10 described the massacre as “the foulest . . . which has ever been perpetrated on this route” and called for government intervention. Later that same month a recently arrived emigrant described how he and his company had intended to visit the site “to go and bring our deceased countrymen” but were advised against it by their Mormon interpreters.133 Then in March 1858, Senator Gwin of California stood on the floor of the Senate and called for a federal response for the “American citizens” who “had been murdered and left unburied.”134 For the next two years, accounts of the massacre and the “dead unburied” circulated in emigrant accounts and newspaper articles across the United States. Reports of the massacre culminated in a brief narrative account titled “The Massacre at Mountain Meadows, Utah Territory” and printed with an accompanying sketch of the scene in Harper’s Weekly on August 8, 1859. In the words of the author, identified only as an unnamed correspondent, the Mormons were to blame for the emigrant massacre. The “Indians” were pronounced innocent. The disorder of the dead at the site evoked the violence of 1857 and the absence of justice for the peaceful emigrants whose “bones” had been “left for nearly two years unburied bleached in . . . the mountain wilds.” The remains were also left to the mercy of wolves, which the sketch depicted running toward and dragging human skeletons beneath the light of a full desert moon.135 In appearing in one of the most widely read periodicals of the 1850s, this article exemplifies how the disorder of the Trail dead constructed a national

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geography in the decade that preceded the Civil War. Because of this disorder and its cultural visibility, the emigrant dead promoted a regionally expansive and diverse white American identity. During the same decade, sectional tension reached its zenith. The emigrant dead, therefore, became a pinprick of white unity in the eye of an increasingly violent sectional storm. Historians have centered the Civil War as the pivot on which nineteenth-­ century death practices turned. But more than a decade prior emigrants adapted materially and culturally to the necessities of Trail burials. And, by the end of the 1850s, intangible and invisible bonds of affection linking American citizens with their dead loved ones, flung like a net over the continent, had transformed the relationship between the Trail and the United States. Emigrants would have liked nothing better than to prevent their relatives from being buried in foreign territory. Their inability to transport their dead home forced them to shift their attention and affection for deceased loved ones to the West. Every body buried on the Trail represented the location of a relative—a node of family geography—for the dead’s survivors. The distinct properties of the Overland Trail both aggravated and mediated the liminal condition of the emigrant dead. The mutability of the Trail made the dead even more vulner­ able. At the same time, national reporting on this migration and repeat migrations permitted subsequent travelers, and in some cases family members, to visit and maintain emigrant graves. Thus, the Trail as a living organism of people, livestock, military, Native Americans, and environmental forces alternately reaffirmed and threatened immobilized corpses and static graves. This constellation of emigrant graves created affective ties to the foreign territory of the Trail and incorporated it into American familial geography. Even as graves embodied the failures of American mobility, they also became the seeds of a reimagined geography of the far West. Emigrants would continue to trace these ruts and reinscribe this geography during the 1860s while the conflict of the Civil War raged across the continent. That conflict was like a magnet, drawing the attention of white Americans away from the dead of the Trail and toward corpses of Union and Confederate soldiers strewn across battlefields pockmarked by cannonballs and shells. During these years, the federal government also extended its reach deeper into the U.S. West. Union forces accelerated the push to move Native peoples onto reservations, sparking a resurgence of the intercultural conversation around death, graves, and territoriality that had set the stage for emigrant conversations about the Trail.

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These late nineteenth-­century conversations had much in common with antebellum-­era removal debates, but they were distinct to the times, places, and, of course, peoples who articulated them. This new chapter of death and territoriality reminds us of what has become an emerging scholarly truism: that there was nothing regionally specific about a Civil War that helped to violently reshape a Union and, ultimately, a continent. America, however, was not the only player in this process. By the end of the nineteenth century, several Indigenous activists had transformed their dead and their graves from symbols of “vanishing” to proofs of unassailable persistence. Their efforts show us that the continent was home to multiple nations rather than a singular nation of suffering.

CHAPTER 4

Peoples of Suffering

One hallmark of civilian migration across the Overland Trail was that it was seasonal. The growth of grass in spring marked the start of travel, and the fall of snow in autumn, its closing. The quieting of the Trail after the summer months was a respite for residents of the Plains and Great Basin. Without emigrant trains, a great swath of the West was restored to a semblance of normalcy. Winter also brought a reckoning with game, grass, and water reduced, or in some cases eliminated, by overlanders and their livestock. The road emigrants traveled west was likewise a year-­round presence on the Plains. When Lakota man Curly Hair ascended the Overland Trail landmark of Scott’s Bluff for his vision quest in late fall 1855, the emigrants were gone but their ruts wound around the bluff ’s base. By 1860, the Trail was a 1,500-­mile longitudinal tract of pounded sod and soft granite scored by emigrants’ wagon wheels. At some points this gash in the landscape widened to a hundred feet or more. Strung along this expanse, crosses, wooden grave markers, and stone piles signaled emigrants’ year-­round presence. Absent the living, the dead remained fixed in Native places.1 By the end of the 1850s, U.S. attention also remained fixed on the strategically important Overland Trail. To protect it, the United States bolstered army presence at western forts, expanding military power across the Central Plains. The start of the Civil War in 1861 pulled those troops east initially. After Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter on April 12, President Abraham Lincoln ordered western forces back to the eastern theater, rendering the string of military forts across the West understaffed and under armed. But this military abandonment of the Trail proved short-­lived. By 1862, Union forces returned en masse and called up western volunteers from the more populous states and territories.2

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Renewed in strength, the U.S. threat of military force became less implicit and more explicit. The Union military objective was to keep the Overland Trail open by preventing Confederate forces from taking it over and by holding off Native peoples of the West.3 The advent of the Civil War coincided with an increase in U.S. military action against Native peoples and a reduction in diplomatic negotiations. In previous decades, the distinctive interests of the United States and some Native nations, especially that of the Lakota, were compatible. But, as the pressures of emigrants increased and the United States became less accommodating diplomacy gave way to war. This war overlapped with but was also distinct from the Civil War. For generations, historians submitted to the same pull that initially drew army regulars to the East. In histories of the nineteenth-­century United States, the four years of the Civil War are often identified as the pivot on which enduring themes of slavery and freedom, race and citizenship, and death have turned.4 So, too, have historians largely permitted the Civil War to overshadow the many wars the United States fought in the nineteenth century, including the long-­standing war to dispossess Native Americans. For Native people, the war in 1861 only marked a discomfiting continuity with ongoing efforts toward their dispossession. That broader and long-­lasting conflict, which intensified into what I call the “War Against Native America” during the 1860s, framed the next stage of the development of the Overland Trail into an American burial ground.5 Connecting the history of death and the Overland Trail with both the Civil War and the War Against Native America allows us to see the Trail just as closely identified with army-­issued repeating guns, howitzers, and blue-­suited cavalry as it is with sunbonneted mothers ushering children alongside white-­ topped wagons driven by husbands and fathers. While a number of historians of the Overland Trail have extended their studies into the 1860s, none have as yet grappled head-­on with the collision of the Overland Trail with the Civil War.6 Similarly, historians working in the burgeoning field of Civil War West studies have recognized that the start of that war amplified the importance of the West and the Overland Trail, but they have not considered the ramifications of this increased military importance on civilian migration.7 Protecting emigrants justified military violence against Native peoples. In the four years of the Civil War alone, the U.S. military committed two assaults officially recognized as massacres and countless other acts of brutal violence. The military’s Indigenous victims—male and female, young, old,

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and somewhere in between—are as much a part of the making of the West as the hastily buried emigrant dead. Indigenous activists turned their dead to anticolonial ends. They invoked the dead to dramatize Native peoples’ plight for a white audience uncomfortably aware of the brutalities committed in their name, and they pointed to their dead to defend their territorial claims. Native dead and graves also became vehicles to call for radical change to federal policy and to popular white perceptions of “vanishing Indians.” In the hands of anticolonial activists, the Indigenous dead and their graves were not simply sites to lament and commemorate; they were political tools to achieve diplomatic and territorial goals. As the nineteenth century entered its final quarter, Native activists launched a resurgence of a long-­standing conversation around death and land that would further intertwine the dead and territorial claims with the history of the Overland Trail. Indigenous activists also used the dead to assert a broader cultural memory-­making campaign. Centered around graves of key figures, these campaigns spotlighted Native proofs of persistence and their significance: to the past, present, and future of the West and the United States. Indigenous successes in regaining homelands and reforming U.S. policy were mixed, but in advocating for their land claims and in establishing a Native perspective on U.S. colonialism, activists emphasized persistence over disappearance and their suffering over that of white aggressors. Typical studies of death tend to depict the late nineteenth-­century United States as a whitewashed nation sagging under the weight of the Civil War dead: widows weighed down with black crepe (if they could afford it) and an audience with hearts made heavy by torturous photographs of men in blue and gray strewn in pieces across fields and roads. Indeed, one historian famously termed the nation that emerged from the Civil War as “the republic of suffering.”8 To those white audiences clothed in black, Native peoples argued, often with great effect, that their deaths and their graves—not those of Civil War soldiers— defined the type of nation the United States was and would be. Regardless of white public acknowledgment, by the end of the 1880s, Indigenous activists had successfully recast the continent as home to multiple peoples of suffering.

The War Against Native America Suffering—in terms of both its temporal breadth and its mortality rates— was greater for Native people than it was for white people.9 The same U.S.

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colonialism that had been stalking Native lives, land, and lucre east of the Mississippi since the republic’s inception emerged west of the Mississippi in the 1840s. In 1846, expansionists at the highest levels of the U.S. government helped spark a war with Mexico. Two years later, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo added five hundred thousand acres of land, Mexican in name but largely Native in fact, to U.S. maps. In the attempt to make territorial control on the ground correspond to those maps, the United States initiated a series of conflicts that historian Elliott West, in 2003, termed “the Greater Reconstruction.” With this innovative concept, West proposed that the nineteenth century is best understood as a great national political and territorial reconfiguration that stretched from the conclusion of the U.S.-­Mexican War in 1848 to the end of the U.S.-­Nez Perce War in 1877. West’s configuration promised to radically recenter the West and Native experiences in the history of the nineteenth century, but later historians have proved unwilling or unable to relinquish the Civil War’s central role. Instead, they seem satisfied with appending any U.S.-­Native conflicts in the West to the Civil War. In continuing to center the Civil War in histories of the late nineteenth-­century West, this scholarship flattens or, even more insidiously, outright ignores the history of Indigenous people.10 The Civil War did intensify U.S. efforts to violently dispossess Indigenous peoples in the West, but the War Against Native America neither started at Fort Sumter nor ended at Appomattox. This long-­lasting war intertwines with the history of the Overland Trail. U.S. power did not march smoothly westward alongside emigrants; rather it leapfrogged over much of the Plains, skirting Native political powerhouses such as the Lakota and waxing and waning when federal attention was distracted or resources grew short.11 U.S. power first began to coalesce in the Trail’s western terminuses of California and Oregon. In the late 1840s and early 1850s, an assemblage of white miners, farmers, laborers, and politicians, many of them former emigrants, waged genocide against Indigenous p ­ eoples. One historian has termed the War Against Native America in Oregon a form of “folk imperialism,” but this was civilian violence backed by the federal government. In the 1850s, the California state government created war bonds that raised over $1.5 million to support militia expeditions against California’s Native peoples. The federal government, even while cash-­strapped because of the Civil War, later reimbursed $1 million of those payments to California.12 Settler violence, materially and militarily backed by the United States, laid bare a central fallacy of manifest destiny: that Native people were destined to die and white people destined to inherit their land. This misconception

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was perhaps expressed best by Thomas Farnham in his overland travel guide: “A saddening fact. The Indians’ bones must enrich the soil, before the plough of civilized man can open it.”13 In the mid-­nineteenth century, critics of U.S. colonialism positioned the relationship between Native death and white expansion differently. In 1857 emigrant John Beeson released his manifesto, A Plea for the Indians. Beeson wrote and published the book in New York, where he had fled after fellow Oregon settlers threatened to kill him for opposing their war against Native peoples. In Beeson’s telling, these were not wars at all but rather a “deliberate massacre . . . of supplicating dependents.”14 White Americans, Beeson wrote, had stolen Indigenous lands and lives: they had “hunted them in their own woods, murdered them on their own hearth-­stones, violated their homes, and thrust the plow into their sepulchres, until its very corn becomes a vampire, and sucks up the sacred ashes of their Fathers’ Graves!”15 Beeson’s formulation disputed the passive language of romantics, casting white settlers as the murderers many of them were and describing U.S. expansion as vampiric. In transforming Oregon into a killing field, white settlers perverted the land and corrupted their nascent communities. On the Plains in the 1850s Lakota people also leveraged the symbolism of death to push back against U.S. colonialism. Even as emigrants asserted territorial control on the Pacific, Native sovereignty reigned supreme across most of the Trail in the 1850s. In 1854, the U.S. military impinged on Lakota sovereignty when it demanded that Sicangu clan leader Mato Oyuhi turn over High Forehead for allegedly killing the lame cow of an emigrant. When, following Lakota custom, Mato Oyuhi refused the demand but offered horses instead, Lieutenant John Grattan arrogantly decided to bring force to bear. Within minutes of Lieutenant Grattan’s attack, Lakota warriors bested his forces. After their victory the Lakota demonstrated their disdain for their routed attackers by crushing their heads, cutting off their limbs, and filling their corpses with arrows. Grattan himself was so mutilated that the army officers who recovered his body had to identify him by his pocket watch.16 But soon distant forces increased the U.S. challenge to Native sovereignty along the Trail. Beginning in 1859, the promise of profit and the push of violence in a fracturing nation accelerated U.S. expansion across the Overland Trail. Hopeful emigrants took to the Trail to reach new gold and silver mines in Colorado, Nevada, Oregon, and Montana. Others were driven west by political frustrations and tensions. As a result of losing a state race to a Free Soiler, proslavery politician Thomas Cramer left Kansas for California. After

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the Civil War began, the West offered a haven for secessionist sympathizers, such as E. S. McComas, escaping enlistment in the Union army. McComas left Iowa for Oregon in 1862. He was not alone. One historian estimates that twenty thousand guerrilla secessionists departed overland from Missouri in 1864 alone.17 In attempting to escape one conflict, emigrants exacerbated the War Against Native America that was already underway. A few specific incidents illustrate how U.S. military action couched as emigrant protection transformed into offensive assaults on Native peoples. The first takes us to the five-­hundred-­mile stretch of the Trail running west from Salt Lake City across the Great Basin and the Sierra Nevada and into California. In the summer of 1860, emigrants traveling west on this segment of the Trail petitioned and received a U.S. military escort across Nevada because of the ongoing Pyramid Lake War between the Northern Paiute and white settlers. (The war had begun in May 1860 after the Paiute discovered that the Williams brothers, who operated a stage stop in eastern Nevada, had kidnapped and repeatedly raped two Paiute girls, ages ten and twelve.) In requesting military protection, the emigrants indirectly contributed to U.S. violence against Native peoples of the Great Basin. After escorting nearly two hundred overlanders across Nevada in the summer of 1860, Officer Stephen H. Weed stationed his forces in the Ruby Valley of eastern Nevada, a station from which he patrolled the Trail for the rest of the summer. By the time he returned to Camp Floyd near Salt Lake in late September, Weed and his men had killed approximately forty Native people.18 In March 1861, Congress established the Emigrant Escort Service on the same day that it passed other bills designed to facilitate white settlement. These bills organized the Dakota and Nevada Territories and ordered the completion of geographic surveys in Oregon and Washington. Congress justified the Emigrant Escort Service as necessary protection in the wake of the combined Shoshone-­Bannock attack on the Utter-­Van Ornum wagon train in September 1860.19 The escort service would “protect” Oregon-­bound emigrants from 1861 through at least 1865. Medorem Crawford, an Oregonian who had crossed the Trail in 1842, assumed command of the service for its duration. Described as protective escorts, Crawford’s forces would launch aggressive action against Native people he presumed to have attacked or killed emigrants.20 Crawford’s report of his service reveals that he frequently based his presumption of “Indian” attacks on information gleaned from emigrant graves. Emigrant burials of the 1860s looked much like those of the 1850s. While the expansion of stagecoach lines meant that some emigrants found it possible to

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transport their dead longer distances to cities such as Salt Lake, the majority continued to rely on proximity to existing settlements for burials. This was the case for Ruth Shackleford’s family, who managed to carry “little Annie” to San Bernardino, California, for burial in 1862.21 Other emigrants were forced to bury loved ones on the Trail using the same insubstantial materials as those of the 1850s, such as the board marked with black lead pencil erected at Buffalo Creek, Nebraska Territory, for Ann Mitchell, who died on August 7, 1862.22 Along the Bozeman Trail to the Montana mines, learned knowledge from the Overland Trail shaped at least one burial. When Adelia French’s baby sister died on the way to Montana an “old Californian” told Adelia’s father “to put large flat rocks all over the top of the grave.”23 But not all graves were as secure. In 1862 Jane Gould passed two or three corpses with just “a bit of sand tossed over them.” Just as emigrants had in the 1850s, Gould read these poorly buried dead as evidence of an attack by people she termed “red demons.”24 Medorem Crawford followed the same logic of this emigrant racism. In the summer of 1862, Crawford declared the grave marker of emigrant Patrick Moran inscribed with “killed by Indians” as the “first evidence of Indian depredations we saw.” The next marker Crawford’s company encountered had a more complex message. A notice on this sepulcher said that another train had opened the emigrant burial chamber with the intention of relocating the deceased but found the corpse “too badly decayed for removal.” Upon exhuming the body, the emigrants also found two wounds: “One shot in the temple and an arrow shot.” Based on the evidence the overlanders concluded: “Supposed to have been killed by Indians.” Crawford suspected their assumption was inaccurate, declaring that “there are strong reasons for believing that white men bore a part in this massacre.” Crawford’s hunch, however, did not inspire him to shift his attention from Native to white perpetrators. Instead, he kept his escort service focused on punishing the former.25 Other western military men held the same view. In 1862 California volunteers under the command of Colonel Patrick Edward Connor were dispatched to Salt Lake City. Once there, Colonel Connor and his troops established themselves at Camp Douglas, from where they completed several of what one historian has called “Indian-­killing expeditions.” Connor justified these expeditions as necessary to secure the Trail and protect white settlements. In January 1863, the news that a few miners had been murdered in Cache Valley (on the border of Utah and Idaho) gave Connor the excuse he needed to attack. That month, Connor’s men, clad in Union blue, knifed and shot more than 200 fleeing Shoshone civilians at their camp on the Bear River in southern

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Idaho. As women and girls bled out onto the grasses growing along the riverbank, the cavalrymen raped them. Some Shoshone survived with the help of desperate displays of bravery. Twelve-­year-­old Da boo zee (Cottontail Rabbit) was saved by his grandmother, who instructed him to lie quietly among the dead until the soldiers left. In total, Connor’s California volunteers slaughtered roughly 350 Shoshone, committing what has become known as the Bear River Massacre. Just a few months after the massacre the army promoted Connor to brigadier general for his role in the morning’s slaughter.26 Less than ten months after Connor’s promotion, his commander in chief stood on a wooden stage in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to memorialize the Union dead. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address quickly became one of the most famous speeches in U.S. history. In the short but powerful speech, Lincoln declared that the mortal sacrifices of the eulogized Union soldiers would not be in vain. Rather, their deaths would lead the United States to “a new birth of freedom.” The nation Lincoln evoked at Gettysburg was one where men of one color laid down their lives for the freedom of men of another.27 The nation being realized in the West was one where white men slaughtered, raped, dispossessed, and pillaged Native people with no consequence (and for which some were rewarded).28 Historians of the Civil War have long linked the inception of “total war” to the battle between North and South. But it was in the West, in an excruciatingly imbalanced conflict with Native peoples, that the U.S. Army first realized the full horrors of this tactic. The United States spoke of protecting emigrants and keeping the Overland Trail open, but massacring Shoshone in the dead of winter revealed the true aim of this conflict: to clear the West of Native peoples and make way for white settlement.

Diplomacy of the Dead Diplomacy was part and parcel of this war. As the 1860s began increased pressures from emigrants and declining U.S. accommodation had dramatically eroded the strength of the U.S.-­Lakota alliance. In this context, Sicangu leader Sinte Gleska, known to whites as Spotted Tail, sought compensation for the deaths of his people from cholera brought by emigrants and from direct U.S. military action. Sinte Gleska also pivoted to leverage Lakota deaths to establish memory-­making claims to the space along the Trail. In so doing, Spotted Tail furthered Lakota assertions of persistence while also memorializing his people’s presence and significance.

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For Lakota people, including members of the Sicangu band led by Spotted Tail, the Trail was a destructive invasion. Diseased emigrants infected the Lakota with cholera and overhunted precious game while their livestock gobbled up the limited grasslands needed to sustain critical bison herds. When the representatives of the Lakota nation negotiated with the United States in 1851, they arrived flying an American flag explorer William Clark had given them in 1807. During the talks, the representatives reminded the United States that emigrants had brought resource depletion and destruction, but they also agreed to allow the United States to build a more permanent road and posts along the Platte River. In another effort at accommodation the Lakota permitted the United States to reoutfit Fort Laramie, a former American fur company trading post, as a military post. This accommodation also made space for Lakota persistence in the area around the southeastern Wyoming fort. The Upper Platte Agency, from which the United States distributed treaty goods to the nation, and two trading posts, run by traders of European descent who had married into the Indigenous community, stood nearby.29 Together, these three posts signaled the continuation of the Lakota-­U.S. alliance. The alliance was based, in part, on a mutual interest in westward expansion. In the early eighteenth century, the Lakota appeared on the edges of the Plains. From there, they expanded to control territory bound to the east by the Minnesota River, to the west by the head of the Yellowstone River, and to the south by the drainage of the upper Republican River.30 Into the 1850s, the Lakota continued to expand their territory as the United States made war against a Native America that exempted them. But frays in the alliance also began to appear. In 1852, their Indian agent—a bureaucratic employee responsible for interfacing between the Lakota and the U.S. government—informed the furious Lakota that the Great Father had reduced the tenure of their annuity payments (compensation for lost game) from fifty years to ten, an arbitrary ruling that reduced their financial support from one that would sustain generations to one that would expire before their youngest children reached adulthood. Two years later an Overland Trail conflict would further accelerate the end of a mutually beneficial relationship. As described previously, Sicangu clan leader Mato Oyuhi refused to violate Native custom and turn over High Forehead for allegedly killing the lame cow of an emigrant. Because of this refusal, U.S. Lieutenant Grattan led a punitive expedition against Mato Oyuhi’s band. But it was Grattan who would be punished for bringing military force to bear against an ally. Mato Oyuhi and his forces slaughtered the advancing cavalry and its leader, mutilating Grattan’s

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corpse to send a message: the Lakota would not acquiesce to unreasonable demands.31 Over the course of the next year, warriors strategically attacked the Trail, reminding the United States that safe passage depended on Lakota acquiescence. In November, their forces gathered on the Niobrara River in the poorly defended Nebraska Territory. There they planned for winter operations against traders and spring and summer attacks on emigrants. Emigrant casualties were relatively low, but the attacks, coming at the same time sectional violence erupted in Kansas Territory, raised the probability of the United States losing their foothold in the Central Plains. By August 1855, the United States had purchased Fort Pierre in South Dakota to serve as the base of operations for military action against the Lakota. General William S. Harney was placed in command. Harney planned to defeat the Lakota in battle, but when he reached their camp at Ash Hollow on the Overland Trail, he opened with words rather than guns. After Harney sent word that he wanted to talk first, Lakota leaders agreed to a meeting. During the conversation Lakota leader Little Thunder requested that Harney allow the people to remove the women and children from camp before the battle. As Little Thunder spoke Harney’s cavalrymen were encircling the backside of the village. As soon as the talks ended, they opened fire on Harney’s orders. The Lakota fled in chaos, cutting a path through the canyon and narrowly evading being trapped and potentially massacred.32 Some escaped, but an unknown number (the military could not manage an accurate count) lost their lives. At the end of the attack the U.S. military forces had taken seventy captives, all of them women and children, whom Little Thunder had asked Harney’s forces to spare. Negotiating for the return of these captives reverted Lakota-­U.S. relations from the field of battle to the field of diplomacy. In October, Lakota band leaders Red Leaf, Long Chin, Red Plume, Spotted Elk, and Spotted Tail surrendered to U.S. forces at Fort Laramie. With their surrender they restored Lakota captives to their families and, for a time, peace to Lakota-­U.S. relations. In November 1855, the shackled leaders traveled east on the Trail to Fort Leavenworth on the Kansas-­Missouri border. They did not see their homes for more than a year.33 Their surrender opened a path to peace and accommodation, and their imprisonment would set the stage for a remarkable funeral designed to restore Lakota-­U.S. relations and Lakota presence on the Overland Trail. Spotted Tail would orchestrate this funeral, drawing on English-­language skills he acquired during his imprisonment. Interaction with white people

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was nothing new for Spotted Tail when he headed east to Fort Leavenworth. As a boy in the 1820s, he was gifted a raccoon tail by a white trapper who helped give him his adult name when the trapper told him to wear it and take his name from it. Like the history of his name, Spotted Tail’s life history manifested the multicultural world of the Plains. By the time he reached his thirties, most of his life had been contoured by the Lakota-­U.S. alliance. Spotted Tail’s imprisonment signified fraying diplomatic bonds between two prominent political powers, but it also gave him the English skills that helped him leverage the language of death in pursuit of Lakota diplomatic strategy. But first diplomacy allowed Spotted Tail to return home from prison. In 1857, Agent Thomas Twiss and General Harney helped secure a presidential pardon for the Lakota leaders imprisoned after Harney’s attack. After his return home, Spotted Tail emerged as the primary spokesman for the Sicangu band. In this role, he urged the Lakota to stay off the battlefield against the United States and on the path of diplomacy.34 For the next five years, the Lakota continued to visit Fort Laramie while focusing their territorial expansion to the north and west of the Overland Trail.35 In 1863 white miners began turning north from the Overland Trail at Fort Laramie and heading straight into Lakota Territory. In summer 1862, miners reported finding gold in Bannock lands (in a territory white people called Idaho). The following year, struggling prospector John Bozeman marked out the route from Fort Laramie to the mines. The route, which bore Boze­ man’s name, worsened tensions between the Lakota and the United States. After news of the mines and the new route reached the East hopeful miners began rushing along the Bozeman Road. The route took them north from the Overland Trail into the hills and into Lakota Territory. This was land that the United States had promised to the Lakota for perpetuity at the 1851 Horse Creek (Fort Laramie) Treaty. For the Lakota, the crisis could not have been greater. As one Oglala war leader put it, it seemed as if “white men have come to take over the entire land.”36 In response to this growing invasion, Lakota leaders marshaled military and diplomatic resources. First, Lakota raiding parties launched systematic attacks on the Overland Trail and other U.S. outposts. Then, in the spring of 1864, Spotted Tail used his newly acquired English-­language skills to tell white people that he wanted to pursue diplomacy. But the U.S. Army was already gearing up for war. In June 1864 Officer Alfred Sully pushed through Lakota lands, ordering his men to behead three Dakota warriors and hang their heads from poles as a warning to passersby. As Officer Sully advanced,

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entire communities cleared out from their villages. Sully and his men showed no mercy. When the unexpected arrival of Sully’s forces at one village forced families to flee quickly, Sully and his men discovered a baby accidentally left behind. They shot the infant dead.37 The split second it took to kill this baby lays bare the key distinction between the Civil War and the War Against Native America. By 1863, the Union had committed to a war of emancipation in the East and a war of total dispossession in the West. Less than five months after Sully’s troops snuffed out a Lakota life that had barely begun, Union volunteers in Colorado Territory slaughtered and mutilated Cheyenne and Arapaho men, women, and children who believed themselves to be under the protection of the U.S. military. Instead, troops turned on them. After the Sand Creek massacre, survivors covered their murdered kin with grass, searching among the “naked and mutilated dead” for the remains of “wives, husbands, children, or friends.”38 Their bodies signified the brutality of U.S. dispossession and catalyzed renewed Native resistance to U.S. expansion. For a year after Sand Creek a powerful military alliance of several Native peoples kept the Trail closed. In winter 1864 Cheyenne and Arapaho began arriving in Lakota villages, telling of white atrocities at Sand Creek. Wailing Cheyenne mourners, physically demonstrating their grief through hair hacked short and legs gashed and bloody, placed their hands on the heads of Lakota leaders, begging for vengeance. The Lakota delivered. For nearly nine months, Denver teetered on the precipice of disaster as Native military might kept the Overland Trail closed and supplies away from the fledgling city. Not until treaties were negotiated in the fall of 1865 did the Trail reopen.39 Lakota­U.S. diplomacy had once again secured passage along the Overland Trail. In the wake of these new agreements, Spotted Tail elected to pursue further diplomacy with the aim of ensuring that the Lakota continued to be included in the benefits of the Trail. This diplomacy centered around the funeral of Spotted Tail’s beloved daughter, Mni Akuwin. She was just sixteen at the time of her death; her story is one of a life cut short. In early 1866 the teenager fell ill as her company reached camp on the Powder River, about 250 miles north of Fort Laramie. There, she lingered for some days before succumbing to what was likely consumption, the most common cause of death in the nineteenth-­century United States. Mni Akuwin’s life span was just a fraction of that of her more famous and politically powerful father, but her death and funeral became a pivotal moment in Lakota-­U.S. relations. She also became the face of Lakota

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assertion of territorial claims to Fort Laramie, one of the most famous Overland Trail landmarks and one that many white people thought of as exclusively theirs. Fort Laramie, like the Trail itself, was a Native place. Since its inception in the mid-­1830s the Lakota had come to trade furs for tobacco, blankets, and other prized commodities. It was from the fort’s traders that the Lakota had also obtained the guns, powder, and ammunition that helped support their territorial expansion. By the early 1850s, the post had become a venue for diplomatic meetings with the Lakota’s U.S. allies. In the summer of 1851, Fort Laramie was chosen as the site for U.S. negotiations with Native peoples of the Plains. The negotiations were ultimately relocated thirty miles east to Horse Creek to accommodate the many attendees, of which the Lakota were the most numerous. Of all the Indigenous peoples in attendance, the Lakota also maintained the closest association to the fort, visiting not only for trade and diplomacy but also for the burial of their dead nearby. In 1852, emigrant Edwin Bird had remarked on “Indian” scaffolds near the post. Although he would not have known it, Bird might have seen the scaffold of Smoke, Mni Akuwin’s grandfather, who had been laid to rest near the fort grounds. Smoke’s presence in the nearby Lakota burial ground and Mni Akuwin’s childhood memories of spending time at the post explain her desire to be buried there.40 In its execution and political significance Mni Akuwin’s funeral paralleled contemporaneous, better-­known political funerals of white male politicians such as Abraham Lincoln. Yet, while largely overlooked by historians, Mni Akuwin’s funeral also continues to resonate. In June 2005, her descendants gathered at Fort Laramie to inter some of her remains and to reenact her funeral. Following the ceremony Lakota historian Victor Douville wrote an account of Mni Akuwin’s life and death that emphasized her funeral’s personal and political significance. Media coverage of the 2005 ceremony, which also described her original funeral, emphasized her role as “peacemaker” between her people and white people.41 However, her funeral reasserted Lakota presence at Fort Laramie and reminded the United States of their obligations to their estranged allies. From beginning to end, Lakota burial customs directed Mni Akuwin’s funeral. As her people brought her remains from the Powder River to Fort Laramie, freezing winter temperatures helped preserve her corpse, tightly wrapped in a smoked and tanned deerskin, for the journey. In contrast, Lincoln’s body was preserved in a lined coffin, traveling twenty miles a day by rail. Mni Akuwin’s body covered about seventeen miles daily, lashed to a wooden

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frame stretched between her two favorite ponies. For sustenance on her journey to the spirit world, her community placed a piece of suet (hard animal fat) in her mouth.42 Lincoln’s body wound its way from Washington, D.C., toward his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, stopping along the way for the public to pay their respects. Mni Akuwin’s remains traveled directly from the Powder River to Fort Laramie, where it was received by U.S. military emissaries in much the same way Lakota parties had been received for decades. This reception signaled an opening to repair Lakota-­U.S. relations but Spotted Tail used the occasion to communicate Lakota grievances. Standing before the fort’s commander, Colonel Henry E. Maynadier, Spotted Tail described his people’s “last four years of hardship and trial” and questioned whether the prospect of true peace was “real.” In keeping with his belief in diplomacy, Spotted Tail then concluded that the U.S. offer of peace was real and that he and his people welcomed it. However, he reminded his audience that peace did not mean forgiveness or acquiescence: “We have been much wronged and are entitled to compensation.”43 With this speech, Spotted Tail called for the United States to remunerate the Lakota for their transgressions. Mni Akuwin’s funeral reasserted Lakota presence at the fort. Her people erected her funeral scaffold a half mile from the parade ground and near the resting place of her grandfather, Smoke. They pinned her horses’ heads and tails to the scaffold poles and wrapped her body in a traditional buffalo robe before laying it in a pine coffin (likely made by the enlisted men at the fort) and affixing it to the scaffold with leather thongs.44 In this material arrangement, Mni Akuwin’s funeral closely followed the customs the Lakota had been practicing for more than a decade.45 Also in accordance with Lakota custom, assembled mourners placed funeral offerings, rather than flowers typically offered by white mourners, on her coffin. Accounts differ as to whether an Episcopal prayer book owned by Mni Akuwin was incorporated into the ceremony, but surviving sources agree that the fort’s chaplain, Alpha Wright, officiated the funeral.46 After the chaplain’s words faded, what remained was a material monument to a Native girl: a monument that reinforced the fort’s syncretic function and the Lakota’s persistent presence. White people interpreted Mni Akuwin’s funeral and scaffold differently. Accounts by Maynadier and other U.S. military personnel emphasize the Christian and military elements of her funeral. Maynadier described how he provided a military escort to accompany Mni Akuwin’s body onto fort grounds and how he ordered her coffin carried to the scaffold on a gun carriage. He

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also recalled placing a pair of military gauntlets as an offering on the coffin. In Maynadier’s version the funeral scaffold symbolized Lakota assimilation. Hyperconscious of the political stakes, Maynadier also declared the ceremony a diplomatic success for the United States. In a report to his superiors the colonel declared, “A man of Spotted Tail’s intelligence and shrewdness would never have confided the remains of his child to the care of any one but those with whom he intended to be friendly always.” If his superiors doubted Maynadier’s conviction that Spotted Tail had committed himself to peace with the United States, the colonel also informed them that the “oldest settlers, men of most experience in Indian character,” believed Mni Akuwin’s funeral to be “calculated to secure a certain and lasting peace.”47 Peace, in the minds of U.S. military and citizens, was important insofar as it marked a step toward possession. Soon after Mni Akuwin’s funeral, white people began spinning stories that twisted the meaning of her life and her death. As early as fall 1867 a white trapper described the Indigenous teenager as hopelessly and futilely in love with a white officer.48 Subsequent white authors took up the fiction, which has been resoundingly renounced by the Lakota. The false romance cast Mni Akuwin as a tragic maiden who embraced white society above that of her people.49 The myth of Mni Akuwin parallels that of popular tales of besotted “Indian” maidens who gave their all for the white men they adored. The tale of Pocahontas and John Smith, which rose in popularity in the nineteenth century, is one example of this genre. Another is the place-­stories of “lover’s leaps.” By the 1860s, whites had labeled several bluffs and ledges strung along the Mississippi River Valley as “lover’s leaps.” From outcroppings, white Americans declared, Native women jumped to their deaths rather than marry despised Indian suitors or, in one case, live in polygyny (as was Lakota custom).50 In memorializing these supposed sites of Native suicide, white settlers affirmed their own cultural superiority and expounded on the fallacy of “vanishing Indians.” As powerfully as U.S. troops ordered up the Bozeman Trail in 1866, tales of “lover’s leaps” and Mni Akuwin’s unrequited love for a white officer signaled U.S. aggression. U.S. refusal to abandon the Bozeman Trail through the heart of Lakota Country spurred the end of the Lakota-­U.S. alliance. Even as Spotted Tail pursued diplomacy, troops arrived at Fort Laramie. From there they proceeded north where they built additional forts in Lakota Territory. Not surprisingly, talks between the Lakota and the United States broke down.51

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Escalating U.S. aggression made it increasingly impossible to restore the Lakota to a position of power at Fort Laramie. In late April 1868, Spotted Tail signed his final treaty with the United States. In that document, he agreed to hold his people back from the Overland Trail to make way for emigrant wagons and for the building of the transcontinental railroad. Pressured and under duress, Spotted Tail put pen to paper in agreement, but he reminded the U.S. officials in attendance of broken promises stretching back to 1851 and labeled the current U.S. war against his people as no better than “robbery . . . the stealing of our land.”52 In exchange for his signature, Spotted Tail secured a permanent reservation for his people. Their new land was near Rosebud, South Dakota, some three hundred miles northeast of Fort Laramie. Soon after relocating Spotted Tail returned to Fort Laramie to collect his daughter’s remains. But Red Cloud, an Oglala leader, would not permit him safe passage. Five more years would pass before Spotted Tail was able to collect Mni Akuwin’s remains and remove them to Rosebud. In bringing his beloved daughter to their new home, he also removed her body from a key point on the Overland Trail.53 White people seem to have pretended she was still there. A photograph in the Wyoming State Archives identified as being taken in 1881 depicts two white men standing in front of Mni Akuwin’s elevated wooden coffin.54 But in fact her remains had already been moved, a signal of the shifting political landscape along the Overland Trail and the slow progression of U.S. possession. As the 1860s faded into the 1870s, the U.S. military had advanced the nation’s political project of remaking the Trail into a white American place.

Not My Father’s Grave Sustained Native resistance thwarted this effort. In 1877, the defense of their lands and graves launched the Nez Perce on a thousand-­mile journey northeast toward freedom in Canada. In fleeing to protect their way of life the Nez Perce created a trail as significant to U.S. history as the Overland Trail. This exodus challenged white ideas that migration across the Overland Trail had made Oregon a white-­controlled place. In resisting white settlement in Oregon, the Nez Perce showed whites that Oregon remained an Indigenous place. The man at the center of this resistance was a gifted political strategist known to white people as Chief Joseph and to his people as Heinmot Tooyalakekt. When Heinmot was born in the early 1840s he was baptized Ephraim

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by Protestant missionary Henry H. Spalding. Spalding had crossed the Overland Trail in 1836 to proselytize to the Nez Perce. His arrival was prompted in part by a Nez Perce delegation that had traveled to St. Louis, Missouri, to request missionaries for their people. Three years after arriving in Oregon, Spalding baptized Tuekakas, the man who would become Chief Joseph’s father, “Joseph.”55 Tuekakas was the head of the largest band of Nez Perce, who lived in area of the Wallowa and Grand Ronde Rivers, and his conversion was a coup for eager evangelists. But by 1847 Tuekakas, frustrated with the measles brought by overland emigrants and white territorial encroachment, broke ties with the missionaries. That year, baby Ephraim became Heinmot Tooyalakekt, or Thunder Rising to Loftier Mountain Heights. He would be best known to white people as Joseph and, later, Chief Joseph.56 If Protestantism had initially shaped Joseph’s identity, Nez Perce Dreamer theology made the most enduring mark on his spirituality and his defense of his people’s homeland. Joseph turned toward the movement sometime in the 1860s. (In photographs from later in the century his hair is always styled in the rearing pompadour of the Dreamer movement.) The Dreamer religion especially emphasized unity between the Nez Perce and their homeland. In a council with white agents on June 7, 1855, Dreamer Owhi declared, “God made our bodies from the earth as if they were different from the whites. . . . Shall I give the lands that are part of my body?”57 Dreamer theology precluded the separation of Nez Perce people from their homeland, making it a powerful component of their multipronged resistance to white encroachment. This encroachment intensified in the 1860s in the wake of the discovery of gold in Nez Perce land. As white miners illegally entered Nez Perce territory, U.S. officials stepped up pressure to relinquish more of their land. When the Nez Perce refused U.S. officials orchestrated a fraudulent treaty with select representatives. In the 1863 treaty Hallalhotsoot, known to white people as Lawyer, signed away land controlled by the band of Joseph’s father, Tuekakas. In a later article published for white audiences Joseph would compare the fraudulent treaty to a man, having been told by Joseph that he would not sell his horses, going to Joseph’s neighbor and, without Joseph’s permission, buying his horses from him.58 Immediately following the fraudulent treaty, Tuekakas took steps to make the borders of his people’s land legible to whites by planting white poles. These poles were also a message for his son. As Joseph later recalled, after planting the poles, his father told him that the border he had created “circles around the graves of our fathers, and we will never give up these graves

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to any man.”59 Joseph consistently communicated to U.S. representatives this commitment to remain. When U.S. representatives called a meeting with the Nez Perce in 1871, Joseph articulated this resolution on behalf of his father, who was too ill to attend the council: “Our fathers were born here. Here they lived, here they died, here are their graves. We will never leave them.”60 Tuekakas’s passing in August 1871 seems to have only strengthened Joseph’s resolve to defend his people’s lands. When Agent John Monteith visited Joseph’s camp about a year after his father’s death to pressure him to move, the Native leader told the agent that he would never depart. The 1863 treaty, he told Monteith, was invalid because “his father never traded off that country.” Furthermore, “on his dying bed” he had “bequeathed the whole valley to” his son “or his band.”61 In marshaling his father’s final words to resist U.S. expansion, Joseph legitimated his patrimonial inheritance for a white audience. That Tuekakas had bequeathed the lands on his deathbed was also culturally powerful for nineteenth-­century white Americans, who perceived words uttered by the dying to be sacred and inviolable.62 In addition, Joseph’s claim that his people’s lands still belonged to them was legally defensible. In the summer of 1875, General Oliver Otis Howard, commander of the Department of the Columbia, asked his aide, Captain Henry Clay Wood, to investigate Joseph’s contention that neither he nor his father had signed away their land. Wood’s report concluded that the Nez Perce had not relinquished their land and that the 1863 treaty was indeed fraudulent. If officials continued their efforts at duplicitous dispossession, Wood warned, the United States would write “a chapter in our history . . . which mankind shall tremble to read.”63 With Wood’s acquiescence, the United States would go on to write this dark chapter. During the centennial summer of 1876, white settlers murdered a young Nez Perce man named Wilhautyah. Following the murder, Joseph and other leaders met with Wood to address U.S. violence. At the meeting, Chief Joseph used the language of death to reassert his people’s claim to the Wallowa Valley, declaring of Wilhautyah’s murder that “the earth there had drunk up his blood, the valley was more sacred to him than ever before, and he would and did claim it now as recompense for the life taken; that he should hold it for himself and his people from this time forward forever, and that all whites must be removed from the valley.”64 Wood heard these words, but he did nothing to address white violence. At the next U.S.-­Nez Perce council meeting, Toohoolhoolzote, a Dreamer and the leader of the band who lived between the Snake and Salmon Rivers,

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rose to remind U.S. officials of the unity of his people with the earth. Such unity, Toohoolhoolzote told this audience, made it impossible for his people to sell their land. This time it was General Howard who refused to listen. Instead, Howard told Toohoolhoolzote to “talk about practicable things . . . and come to business” of giving up their land “at once.”65 Instead, the Nez Perce went to war. Violence had been simmering for decades, but open war began with a son seeking vengeance for his father’s death at the hands of a white settler. It continued with the release of pent-­up violence from frustrations sparked by white attacks and slights large and small. It ended with a child not yet three who hid in fear beneath her dead father’s legs when rescuers arrived and with a young Nez Perce warrior shot with a pistol and shotgun and then left with a smashed skull. The violence shocked the nation, but it should not have. The Nez Perce had told the United States they would not give up their land and a U.S. military investigation had concluded that they had the right to remain. But still, U.S. citizens and officials had pushed the Nez Perce to give up their territory.66 U.S. commitment to dispossession at all costs led the Nez Perce to conclude that the only way to survive was to leave. In the summer of 1877, they set out on a twisting path of over one thousand miles northeast toward Canada. What would become known as the Nez Perce Trail began not with emigrant trains gathering supplies and waiting for grass to arrive on the Plains but with a people hastily fleeing for their lives. Three weeks into their exodus, Joseph and his band encamped to rest their stock and replenish their food stores. But their military pursuers were closer than they thought. As the military approached, they located the Nez Perce camp by the sounds of noncombatants: a woman talking, an infant crying. The attack began at dawn the next day. Under a hail of gunfire, children tried to save their parents, and parents tried to save their children. Young White Bird’s mother grabbed his hand, dragging him running to the creek and, she hoped, to safety. As they ran a bullet struck the entwined hands of mother and son, slicing off two of her fingers and White Bird’s thumb. Mother and son kept running. Others hid to save themselves. After U.S. soldiers shot his mother to death, Josiah Red Wolf refused to leave her body. Desperate, his father covered him with a bison robe to hide him from advancing troops. Red Wolf survived, but other children were not as fortunate. As they marched through camp, U.S. troops set fire to tipis, burning the people hiding inside, many of them children. Soon after the smoke cleared, white scavengers entered the camp to collect Native goods. One took thirty-­two buffalo robes

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to Helena, where the robes with the greatest amounts of freshly dried blood fetched the highest prices. Removed from the battlefield where their dead owners lay, these robes became trophies of the War Against Native America.67 A few weeks later, white people collected Joseph’s words just as they had the bloodstained robes from the killing field of Big Hole. The leader spoke his most famous utterance at Bear’s Paw, just ninety miles shy of the Canadian border and safety. For five days, surviving Nez Perce forces held off U.S. troops, but, desperate to avoid another massacre, they surrendered. Negotiations stalled and dragged, but ultimately Joseph accepted surrender on the condition that he and his people would return home to Wallowa. At this moment of surrender, General Howard’s aide-­de-­camp, Charles Erskine Scott Wood, recorded Joseph’s words. As the Nez Perce leader and his ­people waited for U.S. transport at Bear’s Paw amid the stench of the rotting corpses of their fallen loved ones, telegraph wires sped Wood’s recording of the words of surrender east. In time, Joseph’s surrender speech became nearly as famous as the Gettysburg Address. White people interpreted the final line, “I will fight no more forever,” as a sign that the War Against Native America was behind them.68 For Joseph, the speech marked a new chapter of Nez Perce resistance. He never met white troops on the battlefield again, but with a deft hand and the assistance of U.S. representatives and the press, he turned the infrastructure of U.S. media—pens, cameras, and wires—to his advantage. At his people’s first stop in Bismarck, where the military brought the Bear’s Paw survivors (contrary to Joseph’s understanding that they could return to Wallowa), he dined by invitation with white settlers. Town leaders and Great Northern Railroad employees had invited the already famous “Chief Joseph” because they thought his presence would raise the profile of the fledgling town.69 Instead, it raised Chief Joseph’s. During the luncheon, the Nez Perce leader was recorded as saying through an interpreter “I expect what I speak will be said throughout the land, and I only want to speak good.”70 Joseph spoke these words for the good of his people. When Colonel Nelson Miles refused to allow the Nez Perce people to return home despite their understanding that the colonel had agreed to this condition at Bear’s Paw, Joseph published an interview with the Saint Paul and Minneapolis newspaper Pioneer Press in which he argued that, at the very least, his people should be able to winter in Bismarck.71 When the army instead forced the Nez Perce east, Joseph boarded the waiting train with tears running down his face. Once inside his car, he stood at the window, nodding to the crowd watching him depart.72

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In the years that followed, Joseph kept his gaze fixed firmly on the West. He took every opportunity to remind government officials that General Howard and Colonel Miles had promised his people they could return home. Less than two years after Bear’s Paw, Chief Joseph’s persistence netted him a hearing with Rutherford B. Hayes, president of the United States. While in Washington, Joseph gave a moving speech on his people’s history and mistreatment. In April 1879, a version of his speech appeared as an article in the North American Review.73 “An Indian’s View of Indian Affairs” was less celebrated than Wood’s rendering of Chief Joseph’s surrender speech, no doubt because it laid bare the perfidy of the War Against Native America. The article centers the grave of Joseph’s father, Tuekakas, to argue for the Nez Perce people’s right to their lands. The chief referred to his father’s grave four times in the four-­page article. He began by repeating his father’s deathbed command, “My son, never forget my dying words. This country holds your father’s body—never sell the bones of your father and your mother.” With these words, Joseph undercut the U.S. contention that his band had agreed to sell their land. He concluded: “I love that land more than all the rest of the world. A man who would not love his father’s grave is worse than a wild animal.”74 The article expressed the central tenet of Joseph’s territorial claim: he had not and never would relinquish the land made sacred by his father’s bones. Although white society may have preferred Wood’s version of surrender, the heart of Joseph’s enduring claim to his people’s land was preserved in the pages of the North American Review.

Protest and Personhood While Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce were leveraging graves to assert territorial claims near the terminus of the Overland Trail, Ma-­chu-­nah-­zha (known to whites as Standing Bear) and the Ponca were similarly claiming land near the Trail’s eastern origin. From time immemorial the Ponca homeland was located at the confluence of the Niobrara and Missouri Rivers, about one hundred miles north of the Overland Trail. The Ponca were smaller and less militarily powerful than the Nez Perce and the Lakota. By the 1850s they had established themselves as Christian farmers who got along well with their white neighbors. This specific situation helped shape U.S. treatment of the Ponca during the War Against Native America and, ultimately, the U.S. decision to sacrifice Ponca lands to keep the Overland Trail open.

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In the 1850s, the United States initially forced the Ponca to give up some of their land. However, in a supplemental treaty signed on March 19, 1865, the United States returned a piece of the Ponca homeland bounded by Ponca Creek and the Niobrara and Missouri Rivers. After the treaty was ratified in August 1867, structures from the Ponca village were dragged east and reassembled near their burial grounds on the surrounding high bluffs.75 As for so many peoples, the Ponca’s return to their burial grounds signified their return home. But the following year the United States assigned the Ponca’s land to the Lakota. One historian has excused this transfer, documented in the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, as a bureaucratic blunder. But it is in fact symptomatic of the broader War Against Native America. The United States fought this war on the fields of battle and diplomacy. Troops never attacked the Ponca with guns; instead, officials fired threats, forcing the militarily weak Ponca to acquiesce to a treaty that contradicted the one already in place.76 For the United States, the most advantageous prize in the 1868 treaty was Lakota acquiescence to a railroad route along the Platte, the same Overland Trail route followed by emigrant wagon trains. In exchange, the Lakota received, in the words of one historian, the “right to rule the northern plains as they saw fit.” For this right, the Lakota also promised to not disturb white travelers, and, specifically, to not “molest” their wagon trains.77 To keep the Overland Trail open, then, the United States sacrificed Ponca lands more than a hundred miles to the north. Even as the territorial impact of the Overland Trail radiated beyond the Trail itself, U.S. territorial designs continued to bend to the realities of Native power on the ground. The Lakota had little interest in moving to Ponca territory in 1868 and so, for the time being, the Ponca remained in their homeland. Then, in 1875, the United States, hoping to pressure the Lakota to move, negotiated with the Ponca for their removal. In response, the Lakota and Ponca negotiated their own agreement, permitting the smaller nation to remain where they were.78 More than a year would pass before the United States was able to exert enough military and diplomatic pressure to push the Lakota onto Ponca lands.79 In preparation for that push, the United States first force marched the Ponca south to Indian Territory. The storms that roiled the Plains in the late spring and summer of 1877 turned an already arduous march into a fifty-­four-­ day nightmare. Drenching rain pounded the marchers while thunder rumbled and clapped and lightning crackled overhead. Down below the Ponca people struggled over roads “mired in mud.” Nine Ponca people perished

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along the way. Many more would die after they reached their new reservation in Indian Territory. The Ponca called it “death country.” By the fall, malaria and other diseases afflicted the new arrivals with such force that the Ponca people were overwhelmed with the sick and dying. The most able-­bodied among them were forced to take the dead out to the prairie and abandon them unburied before hurrying back to nurse the sick.80 Omaha writer and activist Susette La Flesche voiced one of the most stirring descriptions of the Ponca people’s horrific reservation conditions. She likened their circumstances to a “slow fatal torture.” In her view, malaria was massacring the Ponca people as surely as military guns and howitzers massacred other Native peoples. The Ponca’s situation was so heinous that La Flesche described having seen “two little girls, six and nine years old,” drag “the dead body of their mother to a grave they had previously dug, all the other members of the family being already dead.”81 La Flesche’s accounts lay bare the breadth of the brutality of the War Against Native America. These horrific reservation conditions shaped Standing Bear’s evolving campaign to return home. During this disaster, the Ponca leader began laying the groundwork for his people’s journey back to their homeland. Standing Bear was born around 1829 and had become a clan leader by the 1860s. In his efforts to return his people home he collaborated closely with the ­Ponca’s Nebraska neighbors, the Omaha, who remained in contact with Standing Bear and other Ponca people after the United States removed them to Indian Territory.82 Uncontrollable contingencies also guided the leader’s developing plans. During the Ponca’s second winter in Indian Territory, Standing Bear’s dying son asked to be taken home for burial. The father resolved to honor his dying son’s wish. Through this intention, Standing Bear also reasserted the Ponca claims to their homeland. Upon his return to Nebraska with his son’s body, Standing Bear contacted local media outlets to tell the Ponca people’s story. This decision launched what would become one of the most successful media campaigns of the late nineteenth century.83 Within days of their arrival on the Omaha Reservation, Standing Bear and his wife sat down with Omaha World-­Herald reporter Thomas Henry Tibbles. The clan leader explained to Tibbles that Indian Territory was killing his people. Then he pointed to a trunk and said, “My boy who died down there, as he was dying looked up to me and said, I would like you to take my bones back and bury them there where I was born. I promised him I would. I could not refuse the dying request of my boy. I have attempted to keep my word. His bones are in that trunk.” Standing Bear’s wife spoke

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next, telling Tibbles that the spot where her son desired to be buried was also the grave site of her mother, her grandmother, and one of her other children. She could not imagine burying her son anywhere else, and so she asked Tibbles to ask General Crook, the officer commanded to arrest the Ponca for returning to Nebraska, that even if he planned to force them to return to Indian Territory, he would “let us have time . . . to bury him” first.84 An unexpected twist in the War Against Native America would help make the burial and the Ponca people’s return home possible. In the same summer (1877) that the U.S. military force marched the Ponca to Indian Territory, they had also removed the Northern Cheyenne. The following fall, Cheyenne leaders Dull Knife and Little Wolf, fed up with disastrous reservation conditions, led their people north toward home. Troops pursued them every step of the way. Eventually the two leaders split. While Little Wolf continued north, Dull Knife and 124 Northern Cheyenne opted to end their flight by surrendering to U.S. forces at Fort Robinson in northwestern Nebraska. The fort’s commander had been instructed to send them back to Indian Territory but, held in deplorable conditions, the Cheyenne broke for freedom on January 9, 1879. The military responded by opening fire on men, women, and children, killing almost half of the starving Cheyenne people desperate to return home. The massacre inspired such public outcry that the Indian Bureau reinstalled the survivors in their homeland.85 The horror at Fort Robinson also became a watchword for how the bureau and the military approached Standing Bear’s campaign to return home. Wary of garnering additional bad press for the army after the attack on the Cheyenne, General George Crook alerted the local press to the Ponca’s desire to repatriate.86 With General Crook’s assistance, Standing Bear secured a white audience and the support of local settlers, including the lawyers who volunteered to work on his case pro bono. Standing Bear’s effort to bury his dead son ultimately culminated in one of the most significant court rulings for Indigenous people in the history of Native-­U.S. relations. On May 12, 1879, Judge Elmer Dundy ruled in the case of Standing Bear v. United States that Native Americans were people and possessed all the rights of habeas corpus. Like Standing Bear’s media campaign, Dundy’s court ruling was based on testimony that leveraged death and the dead. In the opinion explaining his ruling, Dundy cited Standing Bear’s testimony, including his account that “he determined to leave the Indian Territory and return to his old home, where, to use his own language, ‘he might live and die in peace, and be buried with his fathers.’”87 Dundy applauded Standing

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Bear’s “parental affection,” describing how he had “carefully preserved and protected” his son’s remains before embarking on his “melancholy procession homeward.” Dundy attributed this procession to the Ponca’s “strong” “love of home and native land.” It was because of this love that the people had braved “every peril to return and live and die where they had been reared.” Dundy concluded, “Such love of home and native land may be heathen in origin, but it seems to me that they are not unlike christian in principle.”88 Dundy ruled that Native people possessed all the rights of habeas corpus because he saw the Ponca people as sharing white people’s love of home and their children. The evidence that persuaded Dundy was Standing Bear’s commitment to burying his son at home, a commitment that conveyed these two loves. In ruling in Standing Bear’s favor, Dundy validated the Native strategy of leveraging death and the dead to defend their territorial claims. Standing Bear’s campaign reverberated across the burgeoning movement for Indian reform. Following the court ruling, he launched a northeastern U.S. tour, where he advocated for changes to U.S. Indian policy and treatment of Native peoples. In front of lyceum audiences, Standing Bear also continued campaigning for his people’s right to return home. His words inspired many, including Helen Hunt Jackson, who would spotlight the Ponca’s plight in her 1881 history, A Century of Dishonor. It is likely that Standing Bear’s moving description of his son’s death and his desire to bury him at home resonated strongly with Jackson, who turned to reform in part to cope with the deaths of her husband and two sons.89

Desert Death and Resurrection Soon after its publication, A Century of Dishonor became a manifesto for Native reform on par with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s manifesto for abolition. As Stowe had avoided implicating white northerners in slavery’s horrors so did Jackson avoid implicating emigrants in the horrors of dispossession. Jackson pointed her finger instead at the government for starving, massacring, and otherwise brutalizing Native peoples. From Jackson’s position, Native attacks along the Overland Trail were, in large part, a “consequence of its [government’s] own bad faith with the Indians.”90 In Jackson’s telling, the government, not emigrants, was the primary perpetrator of the War Against Native America. Northern Paiute leader Sarah Winnemucca saw emigrants’ role in the War Against Native America differently. Winnemucca was no more than five years

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old when emigrants began traveling through her people’s land. She and her people quickly learned to avoid the often belligerent migrants. Some left the Carson and Humboldt Rivers altogether, heading south to the Walker River. Others stayed, responding to the resource scarcity caused by Overland Trail migration by selling firewood and offering their services as livestock guards or trail guides in exchange for food.91 U.S. incursions grew worse throughout the 1850s as the surge of California emigrants not only destroyed food and resources but also infected the Paiute with cholera. In 1860, miners opened the Comstock Lode in Nevada, drawing California settlers back across the Trail to western Nevada. This rush expanded the white War Against Native America eastward from California and out onto the Overland Trail. In May 1860, the Williams brothers abducted two struggling Paiute girls, ages ten and twelve, brought the children into their house, and carried them down to the cellar. There they bound their hands with rope, stuffed handkerchiefs into their mouths, and raped them for days.92 The girls saved themselves with their voices, calling out for help when they heard two Paiute men approach the house. In retribution for the kidnapping and assault, Paiute warriors razed the Williamses’ station in eastern Nevada, sparking the Pyramid Lake War, which ended with the first Paiute territorial dispossession. Winnemucca’s activism began in the wake of this conflict. The first known lecture she gave was in September 1864. That month Winnemucca joined her father, Chief Winnemucca, in San Francisco, where they participated in a parade to the Wells Fargo Express office. There, Chief Winnemucca gave a speech denying his people’s culpability for the Pyramid Lake War and asking for money for his community. His daughter, who spoke, read, and wrote English, translated this speech for the assembled crowd.93 A teenager at the time, this moment marked the start of Sarah Winnemucca’s long career of advocacy for the Paiute people. The English language became a formidable weapon in Winnemucca’s activist arsenal. When Jackson published A Century of Dishonor in 1881, Winnemucca was the only Native person to have her writing published in the historic call for Indian reform.94 Winnemucca’s ability to speak and write directly to white audiences enhanced her national stature. Between 1864 and her death in 1891, she figured in more than four hundred newspaper articles and reports, a testament to her ability to capture media attention.95 In 1876, Winnemucca became one of the only Native women to be included in an official delegation to Washington, D.C. That year, the president invited her, her father, and her brother Natchez to discuss Paiute reservation

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conditions. The invitation was partly the result of the U.S. hope to avoid further bad publicity, like that generated by Winnemucca’s speeches and letters. Winnemucca attended meetings alongside her father and brother and sat with them for the official delegation photograph. As one of the few Native women included in such a photograph, she had exceptional influence. Indeed, for a time, Winnemucca was likely the most famous Indigenous woman in the United States.96 Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, published in 1883, raised her profile to new heights. Winnemucca began planning her book in 1881, the same year that Jackson published A Century of Dishonor. Two days after Christmas that year Winnemucca wrote a letter to General Oliver Otis Howard describing her desire to write a book publicizing how white people had wronged the Paiutes.97 General Howard and Winnemucca had established a relationship in the 1870s when the military employed her as a translator during the Bannock War, and their enduring relationship is evidence of Winnemucca’s support for the U.S. military. This letter to Howard, however, is most important for showing that Winnemucca was entirely responsible for the idea of the book. Some scholars have contended that Life Among the Piutes was decisively shaped, and perhaps partially written, by white reformers. But surviving evidence, including Winnemucca’s letter to Howard and the incorporation of material from her lectures and prior publications, suggests that the book originated primarily from Winnemucca. Life demonstrates the Paiute activist’s talent for challenging the Native-­ non-­Native binary. For instance, the book incorporates an article she first wrote for the Californian in September 1882. In that essay, Winnemucca told her white readers how, long ago, her people had “exterminated” a cannibalistic Native people who were eating them. After their victory, the Paiutes claimed the cannibals’ territory along the Humboldt River in Nevada.98 In communicating this history to white audiences, Winnemucca portrayed the Paiutes as vigorous defenders of their people and explained their territorial claims as justified by the defense of their lives through military action. The first Native biographer included an extended version of this in Life. But in this revised account Winnemucca added a new twist, ending the history by describing the cannibals as red-­haired. With this addition, readers likely connected the exterminated cannibals to white people, who are much more likely to have red hair than Native peoples. The expanded description of cannibals also evoked the Paiute’s belief, after hearing of the Donner Party tragedy, that all white people were cannibals. Thus, Winnemucca’s history invoked

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the violence of emigrants, suggesting to her white audiences that people like them, and perhaps they themselves, were savage cannibals. Winnemucca did not stop there. After inverting the formulation of civilization and savagery, she smashed the binary that supported it. The text recounts how, since exterminating the cannibals, her family had handed down some of their hair “from father to son.” Winnemucca herself claimed to be in possession of “a dress . . . trimmed with this reddish hair. . . . It is called the mourning dress.”99 With this term, Winnemucca drew a similarity between the scalping and trophy taking from the dead practiced by some Native tribes and the widespread memento mori practices of nineteenth-­ century white Americans. In likening the hair rings, brooches, and earrings that many of her white readers wore to the shirts, belts, and other items Native peoples adorned with human hair, Winnemucca called on her readers to see Native and white commemoration practices as more similar than different. With a deft pen, the author of Life Among the Piutes supplanted the fallacious imagery of “vanishing Indians” and Native bones fertilizing white soil with red-­haired cannibals and a Native mourning dress trimmed in their hair. In Life Among the Piutes, Winnemucca also leveraged white fears of being buried alive to vivify the violence of the Overland Trail. Winnemucca described how, as a child, she and her cousins lay buried all day in the Nevada desert. Her mother and aunt had buried the children on purpose to hide them from passing emigrants. Their mothers covered them up to their necks with the sandy soil that lay along the Humboldt River, leaving only their faces, hidden, and shaded by bushes, aboveground. Winnemucca and her cousins were able to breathe through their sagebrush camouflage, but their bodies remained buried and immobilized. For white readers, this description would have invoked fears of the living being mistaken for dead and buried alive. At the height of the cholera epidemic in 1849, for instance, the Southern Shield of Helena, Arkansas, reprinted a letter from emigrants on the southern Trail to California. Under the header “Premature Burials” the letter reported that an unknown number of cholera patients may have been buried alive, as “patients in a collapsed state of cholera, when heavily dosed with opiates, scarcely show any symptoms of life.100 The dread of being “buried alive” persisted into the late nineteenth century, where it supported an industry of bells and pulleys for caskets marketed to middle-class and well-­to-­do Victorians who worried they might find themselves prematurely interred. So, too, did those fears of being buried alive inflect white people’s understandings of the Overland Trail. When

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Virginia Reed Murphy of the Donner Party recounted the traumas of that infamous train in 1891, she recalled how her mother kept shaking the snow off her and the other children so that they would not be buried alive.101 Winnemucca’s mother temporarily subjected her to the fearsome terror of being buried alive to protect her from emigrants like those who composed the Donner Party. As the sun traced its arch across the sky, Winnemucca lay with her body buried and her face ringed by fragrant sagebrush. The terror of that day pushed her organs to opposite extremes: “My heart [was] throbbing,” she recalled, while her lungs nearly stilled as she lay there “not daring to breathe.” If she breathed too hard, she worried, she might be “unburied and eaten up” by the overlanders who, all Paiutes knew, were cannibals.102 The reasoning behind Winnemucca’s mother’s decision to bury her daughter to protect her from emigrants is not described in Life, but her strategy resembles those of Native parents who buried and otherwise hid their children to protect them from reservation officials. In the late nineteenth century, Native parents often took desperate measures to prevent the Indian Office from forcibly transporting their children to boarding schools. Some sent them to hide in the bushes outside. Others rolled them up in rugs. Still others, like Winnemucca’s mother, buried their children in the sand. White trader Marietta Wetherill documented how Navajo mothers dug a large trench and laid their children in it. They covered their faces with wool, gave them breathing straws, and then spread dirt over them. Wetherill declared, “I would have done the same thing myself.”103 It is likely that Winnemucca’s heart-­pounding story kindled similar empathy in her white readers. Perhaps most importantly, her narrative of being buried alive had Christian echoes of the burial and resurrection of Christ. Having survived the day spent buried in the stifling, hot sand, Winnemucca was dug up in the evening by her mother and father. The unburying was a type of resurrection, after which Winnemucca rose to begin a new life as a public activist. Though she does not say so specifically, Winnemucca’s audience would have recognized the parallels between her resurrection and that of Jesus. In portraying a Native woman as a Christlike figure, Winnemucca inverted racial and gender constructions, just as she had inverted the false binary of civilization and savagery. In a short anecdote of no more than a page, perhaps less than ten minutes if spoken onstage, Winnemucca blamed white people for her suffering, compelled them to identify with her, and then elevated herself above them as a great Christian martyr.104 Resurrected from her homeland on the Overland Trail, Winnemucca went forth to advocate for her people’s right to remain there.

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Winnemucca’s activism was successful. In 1886, she saw many of her ­people return home from the Yakima Agency.105 But for most Native peoples, the 1880s proved to be a decade of U.S. land grabs. Between 1880 and 1895, the United States took 60 percent of the total Native lands seized over the entire next century.106 The conclusion of the Civil War paved the way for increasing the federal government’s power and for determining a new direction for U.S. policy regarding Native Americans. In 1871, U.S. policy shifted toward establishing and expanding reservations and away from the treaty making that had designated (at least ostensibly) Native peoples as foreign nations. This change smoothed the way for further dispossession with forced removal to reservations. This new policy can also be measured in the growth of the Indian Service, which, in the two decades following the Civil War, quadrupled in size.107 Amid this barrage of U.S. military and bureaucratic aggression Native peoples crafted pathways for survivance, leaving legacies that are evident to this day. So, too, did Native peoples challenge whitewashed narratives of the history of the Overland Trail. Concurrent with Native leveraging of death and the dead to protect their homelands, white corporations, historical societies, local communities, families, and individuals worked to create a history of the Trail as a white American burial ground. These historical memory projects describe the Overland Trail as a trail of the dead, but they also bathed this migration in the glow of the expansion of U.S. democracy, thus linking the emigrant burial ground to Lincoln’s vision expressed at Gettysburg. Many narratives of the Trail as an American burial ground denied the violence of U.S. expansion, thus further excluding Native people from the U.S. polity. These histories also proscribed circumscribed roles for white women, which helped perpetuate the failed national and state women’s suffrage campaigns of the late nineteenth century. In remembering the emigrant dead in these ways, commemorators hoped that the Trail as an American burial ground would affirm existing political, social, and cultural structures rather than refute them. But their work did not go unchallenged.

CHAPTER 5

Remembering the Dead

As emigrants traveled, they erected makeshift wooden markers and crosses over the final resting places of some 6,600 deceased travelers, hoping that they would be remembered. Before the Civil War had even commenced, the Overland Trail had become a proto-­national graveyard. This graveyard existed in situ as a site where travelers felt compelled to pay their respects to those who fell along the way. It also loomed large in the national imaginary. White Americans who never made the journey familiarized themselves with the emigrant dead from afar. Reading published and unpublished emigrant accounts and perusing grave lists that appeared in their local newspapers, eastern audiences gained a sense of the experience of dying on the Trail and the emergent American burial ground these deaths created. But the burden of remembering and marking the fallen emigrants fell, largely, on their families’ shoulders. In the decades after the Civil War, the burial ground of the Overland Trail continued to be a focal point for survivors. It also became an important foundation for white settlers and historical societies as they established themselves across the West. As iron rails and wooden fences advanced across the West in the late nineteenth century, railroad companies and settler historical societies joined survivors in remembering the dead. In the process, they sought to mark the Trail and the West as white American space. But this project and these remembrances of the emigrant dead did not go unchallenged. Across the West, Indigenous peoples remembered their dead to oppose U.S. colonialism. Intertwined with the expansion of railroads across the West was the expansion of the Ghost Dance, a religious revitalization movement that offered Native people a means to address the loss of beloved lands and kin. As the nineteenth century ended and the twentieth century began, the United States continued to use military violence to remove Native Americans from their homelands and to suppress anything perceived

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as challenging U.S. supremacy. Commemorating their dead, occasionally through cautious engagement with whites, became a way for Native people to call out colonial violence and to broadcast their persistence and survivance.1

Trail Memory and Western History Remembrances of the emigrant dead played a key role in remaking the Trail and the West at large into white American space. This wide-­ranging impact was due to the Trail’s prominence both in popular memory and in the incipient academic field of Western history. When, near the end of the nineteenth century, a young historian named Frederick Jackson Turner began thinking about why the West mattered in American history he gravitated toward the western history he knew best. As a child in Portage, Wisconsin, Turner had grown up hearing tales of the westward migration of farmers and how their exploits had transformed the river valley into productive farms. When Turner sat down to write his own account of the transformation of the West, he took what he had learned growing up in the woodlands of Wisconsin and applied it to the whole of American history. For Turner, the Trail marked the culmination of continuous westward expansion: “Stand at South Pass,” he told his readers, and you will see the same procession of civilization that had passed through the Cumberland Gap (the pass in the Appalachian Mountains) a century earlier.2 In Turner’s view the Trail was the realization of a century of American expansion, and history. This process of westward expansion and creation of farms and towns had also, Turner would come to believe, been the mechanism for the creation of a unique American identity.3 Turner’s “Frontier Thesis,” as his most famous paper came to be called, was also the product of a lifetime spent in the company of western Wisconsin settlers who were well-­versed in a shared meaning of their migrations and their collective significance for American history. Emigrants who migrated across the Trail shared a similar understanding. As they traversed the continent, overlanders attended to both migrating and memory-­making. Just after crossing the western border of Missouri, one company bound for Oregon erected a stone monument to commemorate their departure.4 Upwards of 1,700 others clambered up Independence Rock in southeastern Wyoming to paint or inscribe their names and year of travel in the granite edifice. Such marks evoked the street signage and poster

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advertisements in urban centers, much the same way the migratory Overland Trail crowds reminded one traveler of the bustle of New York City.5 Commemorative monuments, painted signatures, and inscriptions on the Trail also had a distinct purpose. On Independence Rock, emigrant signatures appeared alongside—and, likely, on top of—Native carvings. The same was true at Wyoming’s Names Hill, a thousand-­year-­old rock art site emigrants rechristened and began remarking in the 1840s.6 Through remembering their journeys, both as they traveled and in the decades that followed, emigrants and white memory-­workers cemented the Overland Trail in the western landscape and in American memory. Emigrant narratives that took shape in leather-­bound pocket journals or on cheap, blue, letter-­writing paper of the mid-­nineteenth century played a potent part in landscape remarking and memory-­making. Armed with pen, paper, and precedent that convinced them of their journey’s historic nature, exhausted emigrants eked out written records and then preserved them for posterity. Charles Edward Pancoast (first introduced in the Introduction) decided to personally carry his diary home from California; before storing the original, he made copies for his adopted sons. William H. Paine chose a different path, mailing his journal home to his sister for safekeeping. Pancoast, a Quaker from Pennsylvania, and Paine, a surveyor and temperance man from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, came from and returned to distinct walks of life after their overland journeys, but they nonetheless shared a conviction in the historical significance of the Overland Trail that ensured their migration would be remembered. Some emigrants and survivors prefaced their commemorative work with the lament that their mortal sacrifices to expand the United States were in danger of being erased. As one historian has pointed out, survivors of the Jayhawker Party—an 1849 company from Kansas that got lost in the Mojave Desert on the way to the California gold fields—feared being forgotten. But the records of their party were coveted by none other than Charles Loomis, founder of the Southwest Museum of the American Indian in Los Angeles. Today the Jayhawker papers are housed in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, one of the most prestigious archives in the United States.7 Moreover, a search in the global library database World Cat (World Catalog) reveals that, by 1920, former emigrants and historians had also published more than two thousand accounts of Overland Trail travel, cataloged in the Library of Congress under the unique subject heading “Overland Journeys to

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the Pacific.”8 The overwhelming amount of material memorializing emigrant experiences makes it difficult to take pioneer protestations that they and their journeys were in danger of being forgotten at face value. While historians of the U.S. West have tended to spotlight the roles of settlers, historical societies, and showmen in solidifying remembrances of the Trail in the late nineteenth century, it was two entwined railroad corporations that secured the emigrant dead’s starring role in American memory and western history. From the beginning of their incorporation, the Central and Union Pacific, the two companies that would link iron bands in May 1869 to complete the transcontinental railroad, leveraged histories of the “Old Overland Days” to burnish the tarnished image of railroad corporations. By the late nineteenth century, railroad critics depicted the corporations as shameless price-­gougers who exploited farmers and cared little for passenger safety.9 In response, railroad corporations produced and sponsored a voluminous corpus of materials extolling the railroad’s historic accomplishments. The impact of this corporate history-­making is best exemplified by the persistent presence of John Gast’s American Progress (1872). Commissioned by publisher George A. Crofutt for his railroad guide, American Progress tells a tale of the triumph of white American civilization. Likely at Crofutt’s behest, Gast placed the railroad, and technological progress, at the center of this triumph. In Progress, overland emigrants follow Native people and buffalo left into the West and the past. A diaphanous, white-­clad female figure signifying America’s star of empire, a telegraph wire hooked around her arm and a schoolbook firmly in hand, floats alongside the emigrants. Two railroads steam west behind her, representing the culmination of American progress. On the far right the sun rises in the East, backlighting the way as American progress brings the light of American civilization into the previously “savage” West. In one small frame, Progress synopsizes a fallacious but compelling triumphal narrative of westward expansion.10 The actual history of the railroad and the Overland Trail was, of course, neither simple nor triumphal. Northerners began pushing for a railroad route that paralleled the Overland Trail at the same time emigrant wagons first began crossing the Trail in great numbers in the 1840s. But sectional competition meant the route did not become a realistic probability until after the Civil War had started. With Southerners out of the federal government, the Union passed the Pacific Railway Act in 1862. That act outlined a railroad route following the Platte River and the main trunk of the Overland Trail. However,

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such a route could not be built without the agreement of the Lakota, who would not approve construction until the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie.11 The 1868 treaty with the Lakota assured that, for much of the route, the iron bands of the transcontinental railroad would keep the graven ruts of the Overland Trail in view.12 This alignment meant that the Trail provided the perfect foil for the Central and Union Pacific to emphasize the railroad’s civilizing and modernizing effects. Conveniently ignoring the continuation of cross-­continental wagon travel, not to mention the persistence of diverse Native peoples across the West, the railroad’s corporate history-­ makers described the railroad as initiating a new era in the history of the region. This periodization hinged on railroad company’s claims of decisive technological triumph over western wilderness. In truth, building the transcontinental was a massive challenge that claimed thousands of lives and nearly failed to surmount the Sierra Nevada. Railroad history-­makers deliberately massaged the history of the railroad’s construction to fabricate tales of technology’s easy triumph over the western wilderness. In “Stumps Cut by Donner Party in 1846, Summit Valley,” photographer Alfred Hart, working on the Central Pacific’s payroll, captured a man sitting on a fallen tree amid stumps cut by the Donner Party during their harrowing mountain entrapment. The great height of the stumps, in contrast to the relatively low height of the seated man, reminded viewers of the depth of the snow that had trapped the Donners. As art historian Glen Willumson has written, the image appropriated the trials of the Donner Party for the railroad archive, implying that the railroad had taken control of a previously dangerous landscape. Significantly, Hart captured this scene at the very moment that construction had stalled at the granite cliffs above Donner Lake, when it looked as if the building of the transcontinental railroad might end in failure.13 Railroad construction over the Sierra eventually succeeded but only at a heavy mortal cost. This cost fell largely on Chinese laborers whose racist white employers assigned them to the most dangerous and physically demanding jobs. Twelve hundred Chinese workers are estimated to have lost their lives during construction, many of them in the Sierra. Hart’s photograph periodized the dangers of the Sierra to the era of the Overland Trail, but the Chinese who died working for the railroad blurred the supposed divide between past and present. These workers died horrific and painful deaths in the snow much as the Donners had twenty years earlier. In the winter of 1867, line supervisor A. P. Partridge described how, returning from a dance at Donner Lake, he and his friends “saw something under a tree by the

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side of the road, its shape resembling the shape of a man. We stopped and found a frozen Chinaman.” Other Chinese laborers were discovered in the spring when the melting snows revealed months-­old corpses, many of them with shovels still in hand.14 Determined to paint the railroad in the best light, railroad history-­ makers continued to direct the public’s attention away from dead Chinese and toward the dead of the Donner Party. In 1869, the Central Pacific invited survivor Eliza Donner Houghton to ride on the train’s inaugural journey. Newspapers reported on Houghton’s journey by train, broadcasting her historic presence to a national audience. The Daily Alta California noted that Eliza “occupied a seat by the window on the side next to the [Donner] lake” and looked “intently at it” as the train steamed by.15 Passengers and readers were already familiar with Donner Lake as a site of emigrant suffering, but in bringing Eliza on the train the Central Pacific further evoked the tragic winter of 1846–47. Rather than visions of the sparkling blue of Donner Lake in the summer sun, passengers and readers trained their gaze on Eliza, a living remnant of the winter tragedy. By personifying twenty-­year-­old emigrant suffering in the shape of twenty-­seven-­year-­old Eliza, the railroad company facilitated passengers’ and readers’ understandings of the dramatic contrast between emigrant suffering and railroad triumph. In the decades of transcontinental passenger travel that followed, railroad guidebooks became the principal tool through which companies evoked the historic overland migration. One of the ways guidebooks did this was through contrasting the embodied experiences of railroad passenger travel with those of overland emigrants. For instance, Crofutt’s 1883 railroad guide oriented passengers once they reached the Platte River (the great corridor of the Overland Trail) by evoking the sounds and sights of emigrant trains. Seated inside railroad cars, passengers could nonetheless imagine seeing and hearing the historic whip blows of drivers urging oxen forward, the “sharp ring” of hunting rifles, and the oaths of bullwhackers urging “white-­covered wagons” on, as described in the pages of Crofutt’s guide.16 Guidebook authors also positioned themselves as interlocutors between readers and the environment outside the passenger car. Mary Blake, whose journey and travel narrative were sponsored by the railroad, declared that after seeing the desert for herself from train windows, emigrant descriptions of “refuse meat and offal drying up instead of petrifying,” which she had previously “regarded as absurd western exaggerations[,] . . . become easy of belief.”17 Blake’s account instructed her readers that seeing the landscape

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through the window of a railroad passenger car was as effective as traveling in a wagon to comprehend the desert’s dry heat. Reading and seeing the Trail from afar did not satisfy all passengers. Some travelers yearned for the access to the past that the railroad journey promised to provide. In his 1873 diary of his railroad journey from Providence, Rhode Island, to San Francisco, I. J. Baldwin described his imminent journey as a long-­standing desire finally fulfilled: “[I] often wished . . . I could make the journey across the plains  .  .  . in the regular emigrant style with trains.” But by the time he reached the Nevada desert, Baldwin joined his fellow passengers in drawing his blinds to shut out the “odious  .  .  . sight” of the “alkali and sage brush.” Shielded from the sight of the Trail, Baldwin began to feel the intent of his journey slipping away, writing, “None but those who made the journey . . . can have any conception of the toil, fatigue and dreary monotony.” Just as the past seemed to be slipping out of reach, Baldwin struck up a conversation with two fellow passengers who, he learned, had crossed the Overland Trail in 1852. How the conversation started—did Baldwin, for instance, bewail his inability to understand the Overland Trail journey?—is lost to history. He did record that the former emigrants told him that the railroad took one day to cover ground that had taken them more than a month by wagon. For Baldwin, this eyewitness testimony helped make the Trail “seem more real.”18 When the trip alone failed to vivify the contrast between the hardships of the Trail and the comforts of the railroad, survivors could help bring it to life. Former emigrants did not have to be present to help railroad passengers understand the trials of the Overland Trail. After emerging onto the Plains in her railroad car, Kate Ball Powers remarked, “I understand better what [my father] meant by the endless prairie.” One could imagine she had heard the phrase often from her father, John Ball (an early emigrant to Oregon), but seeing was understanding. The train carried her west through space but also, Powers imagined, into the past of her father’s earlier experience. Powers could not literally travel back in time, but she aligned her journey with her father’s as closely as space and time would permit, noting that she “started on my trip across the plains 57 years after father and . . . on his 97 birthday.”19 For Powers, departing on the anniversary of her father’s departure and on his birthday augmented her feeling of proximity to his past Trail experience. For Truckee historian Charles F. McGlashan a material mnemonic enhanced his sense that the past of the Overland Trail was within reach. McGlashan carried one of Eliza Donner Houghton’s recent letters in his

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pocket while traveling east over the Sierra. As he gazed out the window on “the old Emigrant road,” he allowed his thoughts to frequently turn to “she” who had crossed it as a child. At a stopping point on his journey, he paused to pen a testament to his experience of an eliding past and present, telling Eliza “there were many things that your childish eyes must have gazed at in wonderment, just as I gazed at them this week.”20 With Eliza’s letter in his pocket, McGlashan imagined a semblance of simultaneity between her disastrous journey and his own comfortable one. He was not alone. The contingencies of railroad history ultimately assured that luxurious railroad passenger travel had become a way for the Gilded Age generation to claim a white American inheritance of Overland Trail suffering.

Marking Death to Mark the Trail That suffering was epitomized by the graves of those who died along the way. For passing tourists, crosses, boards, and headstones of the dead breathed life into tales of sacrifices white American had made to win the West. Along the Trail, railroad and settler histories emphasized the story of the transformation of the West into U.S. space as one achieved by “true men” and “true women.” These men and women, Trail memory-­workers declared, were not just emigrants but also casualties of the great American effort to settle the West. Railroad guidebooks helped interpret these marks of the dead for passing tourists. In Crofutt’s New Overland Tourist, Crofutt drew on his own familiarity with the landscape outside the railroad passenger cars to decipher unassuming markers rising from the Plains and desert. He instructed passengers that when they “catch a glimpse of a lone grave, marked by a rude head-­ board, on these plains,” they should assume that “it marks the last resting-­ place of some emigrant.”21 The speed and distance with which rail passengers traveled in parallel with the Overland Trail prevented them from deciphering the inscriptions, but Crofutt’s New Overland Tourist made the human remains that lay beneath the surface legible. While this tourist guide emphasized that the emigrant dead were strung across the entire expanse of the Trail, a few graves emerged as especially important landmarks. In part because of Crofutt’s New Overland Tourist, a single grave rising from the Nevada desert became a focal point of emigrant suffering and sacrifice. This grave, designated the “Maiden’s Grave,” was one of a handful of maiden’s graves along the Trail that were said to hold the remains

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of young, beautiful, virginal white women. Stories of dead maidens stretched back to ancient times. In the medieval era they gained visual expression in German painter Hans Baldung’s 1515 Death and the Maiden. Baldung’s painting depicts a seductive skeleton (representing death) embracing a long-­haired, naked woman from behind. Three hundred fifty years later, German artist Edvard Munch drew what could be interpreted as the next stage in this seduction. In Munch’s image the naked maiden’s body entwines with the skeleton’s frame as she appears to pull his skull toward her lips for a passionate kiss.22 In nineteenth-­century America, tales of dead maidens entwined with the rural cemetery movement. Indeed, one of the impetuses for the movement was the fear that in crowded graveyards the “bodies of our wives, our daughters . . . are to be exposed to the vulgar gaze . . . of men who had no right to so intimate a glimpse of the departed.” Nineteenth-­century white Protestants also displayed what one historian has described as a “romantic tendency” to see dead bodies as “objects of beauty and desire.” Stories bordering on the necrophilic were part of mainstream culture, penned by literary luminaries such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. Tales of dead maidens cast white women as needing protection from lustful gazes and themselves. The story of Charlotte, a vain maiden who, against her mother’s advice, refused to wear a winter coat and froze to death, was so popular that companies produced white ceramic Charlotte Dolls, and the Frozen Charlotte dessert, a decadent frozen custard, appeared on dining tables across the country.23 Tales of dead maidens also promoted American nationalism. In the 1850s, white Americans began visiting the tombstone of the maiden Jane McCrea, who was allegedly scalped by “Indians” allied with British forces in 1777. Pilgrims to this maiden’s grave were initially inspired by John Vanderlyn’s 1804 Death of Jane McCrea, which depicted an “Indian” readying to strike a terrified and titillatingly disheveled maiden with his tomahawk. For citizens in the fledgling United States, the attack on McCrea symbolized attacks on their young nation. In the mid-­1850s Washington Irving gave McCrea’s celebrity a further boost. Irving was the same author who had lent his talents to peddling fallacious theories of “vanishing Indians.” He had also thrown his support to the rural cemetery movement, extolling the pastoral burying grounds for creating inspiring repositories of American history. Irving similarly perceived McCrea’s violent death as generating patriotic sentiment. In Irving’s telling, her maiden’s blood gave birth to armies that helped secure U.S. Independence.24 Taken collectively, the tales of “maid McCrea” bolstered pride

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for their successful revolution and propounded the racist narrative of vicious “Indian savages” that supported U.S. efforts to dispossess Native peoples. But neither viciousness nor a tomahawk had killed McCrea. Scholars now believe that her death was accidental, caused by a stray bullet shot by her captors.25 White Americans were not in the business of letting facts get in the way of making Native land into white American space. While white maidens such as McCrea were said to have been violently killed by dark forces, Native maidens were said to have killed themselves. “Lover’s leaps” were part of the fictional apparatus of U.S. placemaking. So too were maiden’s rocks. By the end of the nineteenth century, settler communities had designated dozens of mounds of mineral matter the property of a maiden. Some were more famous than others. Perhaps the most famous was in Wisconsin, a limestone rock that was said to be the spot where the “Indian Princess” Winona leaped to her death. In this tale, Winona’s love for a white man named Hendrick drove her to jump. When Winona learns that Hendrick, knowing they cannot marry because she is Native, plans to return to Europe alone she leaps from the rock. Hendrick, trying to save her, falls to his death with her.26 Like the white fantasy of Mni Akuwin’s unrequited love for a white officer, the myth of the limestone Maiden’s Rock described failed interracial love stories as impetuses for the deaths of Native maidens. Winona’s myth, which described her as falling in love with Hendrick during her effort to establish peace between her people and Dutch settlers, also resonated with white tales of Pocahontas, who was said to have brokered peace between her people and British settlers because of her love for John Smith. In linking maiden’s rocks and Mni Akuwin’s scaffold to stories of dead Native maidens who yearned to love and be like whites, nineteenth-­ century Americans sought to confirm white racial superiority and ground the fallacy of the “vanishing Indian” in the landscape.27 The maiden’s graves of the Overland Trail did similar cultural work. The most prominent of these is in eastern Nevada just outside the town of Beowawe. The story of the maiden’s grave appears to have been first composed by Crofutt in his popular Crofutt’s Transcontinental Tourist’s Guide (1869). This book quickly became a success after the publication of the first edition. By his own count, Crofutt had sold more than three hundred thousand copies of various editions by 1887. Each copy purchased and read included the same didactic tale of the unnamed maiden’s death and life.28 The story, in short, went like this. While her wagon train was camped near the Humboldt “the daughter of the train-­master, an estimable young lady of 18 years,” fell sick and, despite the best nursing efforts of her companions, “her pure spirit

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Figure 8. Still standing in 2023, the Maiden’s Cross rises high above the desert and into the clouds. For tourists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the cross gave credence to emigrants’ descriptions of the Humboldt Desert as an expanse of death while also adding historicity to white settlements in rural eastern Nevada. Photograph of Maiden’s Grave by the author, 2012.

floated” away. After her death, the company buried her carefully and erected a “humble head-­board” to mark her grave.29 Then they turned west and continued their journey. Without the care and attention from nearby loved ones, the unnamed maiden’s grave languished, and, as time passed, her grave marker was at risk of being destroyed. At this moment of heightened vulnerability, the “advance guard” of railroad engineers arrived to save the maiden’s grave. In Crofutt’s telling, because they were “men,” the sight of the decaying marker “awoke the finer feelings of their nature and aroused their sympathies.” Moved to action by manly sentiment, the engineers enclosed the grave with a solid wall and replaced the deteriorating board with a wooden cross. Crofutt counseled readers to show a similar respect for the landmark grave, instructing them to “bare the head reverently in passing”—both for the maiden and for the men who remembered her.30

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In tales of the Maiden’s Grave whiteness mattered as much as patriarchy. Henry T. Williams’s guidebook told a tale like that in Crofutt’s but with an extra emphasis on race. In Williams’s version, railroad men marked the grave out of “respect for a true woman” but would not have done it “under similar circumstances, . . . [for] . . . a representative of the sterner sex.”31 Williams then declared that “no race under the heavens but ours” would have been moved to protect the Maiden’s Grave. When the railroad men protected the grave, they did so by enclosing it with a fence which they, lest its meaning be misconstrued, painted white. According to Williams, if the maiden had not been a “true woman” and if the engineers had not been appropriately masculine white men the Maiden’s Grave would have gone unrestored and unremembered. But because of their intervention, the grave became a seed for the burial ground of later Beowawe settlers. As described by Williams, the Maiden’s Grave is “near Beowawe, and the point is now used as a burial ground by the people living in the vicinity.” In connecting this recently established community to the emigrant past, the Maiden’s Grave elongated and stabilized white settlement in Nevada. Similarly, the patriarchal tales of maiden’s graves stabilized conservative gender roles in the region. Both Turner and railroad corporate history-­ makers of the Overland Trail couched westward migration as masculine and patriarchal. In Turner’s vision the West was a place of opportunity for white men. In accounts by railroad history-­makers, railroad engineers civilized the region by protecting and marking the graves of dead maidens. By the beginning of the twentieth century, many white Americans saw the West as a hypermasculine place where men could escape the effeminate urban environment for a manly rural one.32 But the West was not immune to challenges to patriarchal supremacy. While Turner was writing his frontier thesis and railroad companies were touting the hardy masculinity of emigrants and railroad engineers, women’s suffrage was expanding across the region. Partly in response to this movement, novelist Owen Wister penned a western tale of masculinity reasserted. In The Virginian (published in 1902) the titular character migrates west and becomes the most western of western men. This paragon of western masculinity then falls in love with Molly, an independent schoolteacher, and becomes her “worshipper.” Eventually the two marry, making the Virginian “her master, too.”33 One reviewer writing in The Nation described the Virginian as a “man . . . whom the most earnest female advocates of equality of the sexes could never convert.”34 Published in the wake of three statewide

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victories for women’s suffrage in the region, Wister’s novel asserted that the West was a place where men were still masters. Concurrent with this literary defense of western patriarchy, settlers began turning graves of emigrant women into physical symbols of male mastery. As suffrage activists crisscrossed the West by train and automobile—campaigning for women’s rights and demonstrating their physical aptitude for citizenship—local and state historical societies erected markers and narrated stories of dead female emigrants that cast women as physically frail and unsuited for western travel. Sarepta Gore Fly, Amanda Lamin, Rachel E. Pattison, and Susan Haile were all said to have succumbed to the trials and dangers of the Trail while their fiancés and husbands survived. Moreover, the romantic partnerships of these women and their paramours were said to have paralleled that of Molly and the Virginian. Settlers upheld Fly, Lamin, Pattison, and Haile as examples of “true women” who, after succumbing to death, were properly memorialized by their devoted “true men.”35 According to familial and settler stories, this devotion manifested in how surviving true men cared for their loved one’s graves. Rachel E. Pattison’s husband, Nathan, was said to have demonstrated his manhood by lingering behind the rest of his company to carve a stone marker to place on Rachel’s grave. He was also described as having never remarried, remaining true to his beloved until his death. According to the legend, it was because of Nathan’s care for Rachel’s grave that, in 1869, Robert Harvey, chairman of the committee on state historic sites for the Nebraska State Historical Society, unexpectedly stumbled upon Rachel’s grave, finding a “little upright white slab . . . still standing sentinel.”36 According to Adams County (also in Nebraska) settlers, Susan Haile’s husband (unnamed except for his surname) also took special care to preserve his wife’s grave before traveling on. Haile is said to have removed boards from their wagon to build his deceased wife a coffin. Then, sometime in the years that followed, Haile was supposed to have returned to his wife’s grave after procuring a marble headstone in the nearby city of Kearney. From Kearney he conveyed it to Susan’s grave. How Haile transported the marble headstone to his wife’s grave was not specified when this tale was first recorded in 1916, but the story conforms to what Trail historian Randy Brown has called “wheelbarrow stories.” The label “wheelbarrow stories” refers to the tool devoted lovers were said to use to carry headstones to remote burying places. By 1920, the story had attached to no fewer than four emigrant graves.37

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These tales were at best misleading and at worst purposefully false. For instance, Haile died not because Native peoples poisoned her drinking water but because she contracted cholera (most likely from another emigrant). An 1879 biography of her husband published in The History of Solano County confirms cholera as her cause of death. Moreover, despite Adams County settlers’ assertions to the contrary, Haile likely never returned to Susan’s grave. Brown has determined that members of Susan Haile’s family traveled overland the year after her death and that it is likely that they procured the marble headstone from Kearney. Furthermore, Haile’s husband did not live out his final days devoted to his dead spouse: he remarried a few years after arriving in California.38 In linking wheelbarrow stories with physical graves of emigrant women, settlers inscribed tales of female fragility and male chivalry along the landscape of the Trail. The when and where of this attachment were likely no accident. Expounded at the same time as state campaigns for women’s suffrage, “wheelbarrow stories” helped remind western women of their “proper” place. For white memory-­workers, marking death to mark the Trail also seemed the best way to assure the Trail’s proper prominence in American memory. By the early twentieth century, the conception of the Trail as an emigrant burial ground was well established. At the end of her mother Mary Parson’s recollections of her overland journey, Harriet E. Parsons Hoff penned an original ode to the Trail as the resting place of the dead: “Oh, beautiful stars a loving watch keep, O’er the immigrant trail where our loved ones sleep.”39 By 1904, schoolbooks, including James Schouler’s History of the United States, instructed children that emigrants suffered so much that the “plains were ere long strewn with the bleaching bones of men and beasts.”40 White Americans recognized the Trail as a burying ground, but memory-­ workers had yet to secure federal support to mark and preserve the historic route. In their quest for this funding, memory-­workers began likening the Trail to a battlefield. One of the memory-­workers who pushed this analogy was Ezra Meeker. As he would tell President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907, “the . . . pioneers, the winners of the Further West, had fought a strenuous battle”; the “Trail was a battlefield from one end to the other.” A former emigrant to Oregon, Meeker was also a professional booster who had spent much of his career promoting migration to Washington. At the beginning of the twentieth century Meeker emerged as the figurehead of the campaign mark the Trail.41 In 1906, he hitched two oxen to a Conestoga wagon and set off to retrace the route he had first followed west in 1852. Meeker matched his

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historic transportation with his physical persona, sporting a long white beard and snow-­white hair.42 When photographed alongside his oxen and wagon Meeker appeared like an emissary from the past, come to remind modern Americans of their patriotic duty to mark the historic Trail.43 In 1916, as the United States contemplated sending American soldiers overseas to fight in World War I, Meeker again declared that the emigrant dead were as historically significant as dead soldiers. His, and others’, efforts to mark the Trail, Meeker asserted, were animated by the same sentiment as “marking the Gettysburg battlefield.”44 With this comparison, Meeker linked the burial ground of the Overland Trail to Lincoln’s transformative Gettysburg Address. In this speech the president had described a new, public role for the dead in American life, one in which the dead, like the living, could lay claim “upon a government” that derived “its powers from the people.”45 And yet, despite the efforts of Meeker and others, the government would not recognize the claim of dead emigrants for decades to come. In the meantime, private and local funding supported efforts to mark graves and erect monuments along the Trail. One of the first of these monuments was located near the site of the Donner Party tragedy in the Sierra Nevada. The Donner site was a well-­established landmark of emigrant death, but its eventual location as the site of the first prominent pioneer monument was far from preordained. To begin, the Donners, of course, were not the only party that experienced extreme hardship and death. Memory-­workers and former emigrants encountered no paucity of support for their interpretation of the Trail as a migration marked by suffering and death. Of this widespread suffering, that of the Jayhawker and Donner parties emerged as the most prominent examples of the trials of the Trail. In 1849, the first year would-­be argonauts rushed across the Plains, a company of predominantly male adventurers, the Jayhawkers, took a shortcut in the hopes of saving time, only to lose their way in the Mojave Desert. In some ways, the Donners and the Jayhawkers provided the perfect continuum to narratives of emigrant suffering and sacrifice: the Donners starved and froze in winter snows, the Jayhawkers thirsted and fainted in the desert heat.46 The members of both parties who survived proved interested in and adept at capturing the public’s attention. They tapped into the language of trauma to make their past experiences vivid for audiences of the present. Jayhawker survivors sniffed desert sage as part of publicly reported reunions, evoking memories of past suffering. Donner Party survivors told historian Charles

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McGlashan that ordinary sights and sounds—such as “calf ’s foot jelly” that resembled the stewed hides emigrants consumed in hopes of staving off starvation, “a bright moonlight” that evoked the luster of snow reflecting the moon in the mountains, or the wind “sighing through” “pine timber”—were enough to trigger memories of their ordeal.47 These traumas were no doubt deeply felt. When, in 1876, Jayhawker John W. Brier returned to the desert where he and his party had been trapped, he was overwhelmed with emotion. As he wrote to fellow Jayhawker Charles B. Mecum, while at the spot he had “wept over the remembrance of our sufferings.”48 But depth of feeling did not automatically translate into public recognition of past emigrant trauma. It was in describing their trauma to audiences willing and, in many cases, eager to listen that survivors kept the memory of their sufferings on the Trail alive.49 For the public suffering attached more securely to the alpine Donner camp than it did to the Mojave Desert. When John Brier returned to the site of the Jayhawker’s “fearful winter of peril” in 1876 and wept at his remembrance of his party’s sufferings, he “had no difficulty in” finding the party’s old haunts, even locating an ox shoe that he “brought home as a memento” of their trial. Such scattered remnants were enough for survivors to recall their sufferings, but they could not compare with the dramatic visual of Donner Lake. The visibility of Donner Lake provided a focal point for survivors and the public. When William Green Murphy, who was just ten years old during the winter he spent trapped in the Sierra, stood to address an audience in February 1896, he did so on the shores of Donner Lake.50 Ultimately, the memorialization of the Donner Party elevated pioneer triumph over suffering. In June 1910 members of the Native Sons of the Golden West, a settler fraternal organization founded in California in 1875 to commemorate and preserve settler history, laid a cornerstone of what would become the Pioneer (rather than the Donner) Monument. Soon thereafter members of the Native Sons began soliciting designs for the monument that would stand near the cabins where the Donners had spent the tragic winter of 1846–47. San Francisco–based sculptor Douglas Tilden’s initial monument design emphasized emigrant suffering. His proposal called for placing a lone bronze pioneer figure on top of a stone and mortar pedestal surrounded by crouching, writhing figures. The effect, as Native Sons’ member and Truckee dentist Chester W. Chapman put it, was to surround the pioneer with figures who appeared to be in the throes of the agony of death.51 Chapman criticized

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Tilden’s design for focusing exclusively on suffering. Tilden, apparently eager to secure the commission, offered to discard his dark depiction in favor of one of triumph. To prove his commitment and ability to align the monument with Chapman’s vision Tilden described a statue he had recently completed. That monument depicted Father Junípero Serra, the friar settlers celebrated for founding Spanish missions in California, displaying an “eager, searching gaze and the unconquerable spirit.”52 The final monument at Donner Pass evoked a similar spirit, but it was not designed by Tilden. Evidently unconvinced by Tilden’s assurances, Chapman and the Native Sons broke ties with the sculptor in 1913 and chose a design by artist John McQuarrie.53 Completed in 1918, the Pioneer Monument depicts a male pioneer staring bravely ahead while his wife, cradling a baby against her chest, leans forward underneath his right arm and their young daughter looks out from behind his left leg. The one element that tied the design to the Donners was the pedestal composed of gravel and rock from around Donner Lake and erected to a height of twenty-­two feet to match the height of snow during that tragic winter. Chapman assured Eliza Donner Houghton that the plans recognized the suffering she and her party had endured. As he told her, the statue’s location constituted its “tribute to the party which was captained by Donner.”54 But even that location had been a point of contention. Several Native Sons had pushed to erect the memorial in San Francisco where, they argued, it would be seen by more people. As it happened, placing the monument in the Sierra solidified the pass’s status as a white American landmark. Positioned in view of the highway and the railroad tracks and illuminated at night by electric lighting, the towering statue drew the attention of Sierra Nevada travelers heading west and east.55 For these travelers, the final Pioneer Monument gathered multiple threads of the white remembrances of the emigrant dead together. To begin with, the monument periodized the history of the Sierra to Trail migration and the arrival of white families. Although the Donner Party, like most wagon trains, were composed of multiple nuclear and, in many cases, extended families, the monument celebrated a single nuclear family. In so doing, the monument emphasized individualism and entrepreneurial pluckiness as key ingredients of pioneer triumph. Moreover, the human figures at the top portray a patriarchal family structure: the brave, manly father who protects his wife and children. In gathering these threads together into a monument hewn from stone and bronze, the Native Sons presented white remembrances of the Trail

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as fixed and permanent. Seen in isolation, the monument portrays a narrow slice of Sierra Nevada history, one that excludes and silences the Washoe ­people who tried to help the stranded Donners.

Revival and Endurance And yet, descendants of those same Washoe people persisted in the Sierra Nevada and the Great Basin. By June 1918, the month the Native Sons dedicated the Pioneer Monument near Donner Lake, the expansion of resorts and recreation in the Tahoe Basin offered a path for the Washoe to return to their ancestral lake, Da ow ag (Tahoe). Washoe woman Belma Jones, born in 1912, recalled spending “every summer” on Tahoe’s south shore, near a place white Americans called “Bijou.” The shore had long been a Washoe summer site. Physical proof of Washoe activity persists in that place as evidenced by the many grinding stones that can be found in the vicinity. During those Tahoe summers Jones’s father tended cattle and her mother worked as a laundress. Other Washoe people found summer work supplying firewood to resorts or making baskets for the tourist market. The Pioneer Monument marked 1847 as the start of a new era in the Sierra Nevada, but, some seventy years later, the Washoe continued to live at their ancestral lake and occupy the Tahoe Basin.56 The Sierra Nevada region was still very much a Native place. In the late nineteenth century, a vibrant religious revival movement that ignited in the nearby Great Basin had shown whites the fallacy of believing that Native people would simply disappear. This religious revival became one of the most far-­reaching Indigenous revival movements of the turn of the twentieth century. The movement began with the Northern Paiute, the ­Washoe’s neighbors, and would ultimately spread across the continent through Native networks supported, in part, by the iron bands of the railroad.57 Northern Paiute prophet Wodziwob laid the groundwork for this vibrant religious revitalization. He promised world renewal for Native people and the return of their dead. In one vision Wodziwob declared that when the dead returned, they would come by train. His vision combated white descriptions of the westward expansion of the railroad as a simple narrative of technological progress, white possession, and Indigenous erasure. The railroad proved critical to the expanse of this religious revitalization, speeding the prophecies of Wodziwob and, later, those of Paiute prophet Wovoka along iron bands splayed across the West. Swiftly moving railroad cars also allowed American

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Indians to travel to visit Wovoka and allowed Wovoka to send Ghost Dance materials, including sacred red paint, to Indigenous communities across the continent. By the late 1870s, Native networks that appropriated the technology of the railroad to anticolonial purposes had helped make Wovoka and his prophecies known nationally.58 Ghost Dance theology offered adherents a variety of tools to meet the challenges of their presents. One critical component of the religion was how the Ghost Dance connected followers with their dead loved ones. Through dancing, Ghost Dancers were rewarded with visions of deceased kin. This promise of reunification inspired a Southern Cheyenne woman named Moki to participate in the Ghost Dance. Moki was a bereaved mother twice over. Her firstborn died when he was a baby; she and her husband then had a second child, another boy, who made it past his fourth birthday before he also fell ill and died. Moki was nearly inconsolable, but the Ghost Dance promised her a way to bridge the gap between heaven and earth. Her husband, skeptical of the new religion brought by rail, initially held back. But Moki, hearing that others, while in Ghost Dance–induced trances, had visited and conversed with their dead kin, entered the Ghost Dance circle. As she sang and danced, Moki was rewarded with a vision of her older son and, for the first time since he died, she played with him. Moki’s experience convinced her husband to dance. When he did so he had a vision of himself riding horseback with his dead son.59 The religion that gave Moki, her husband, and other grieving Native people solace inspired cupidity and fear in white Americans. White settlers reported Ghost Dancing on the Pine Ridge Reservation near their towns in the hopes it would bring the army to South Dakota. Troops camped nearby meant captive customers for settler beef and other farm products. Fear that Lakotas wearing Ghost Dance shirts and singing and dancing were preparing for war convinced President Benjamin Harrison to mobilize the army. Harrison wanted to deter war and to gain a political edge for the Republican Party in the upcoming elections. After weeks of the army camping nearby while Lakota continued their dances, Pine Ridge exploded into violence the morning of December 29, 1890. Who, precisely, fired the first shot has not been determined with absolute certainty, but the lead-­up to the violence— self-­serving settlers and the perception that Native peoples were violating U.S. cultural norms and, perhaps, preparing for violence—included the same ingredients that had stoked the long-­standing War Against Native America. Within ninety minutes of the first shot being fired, U.S. soldiers had massacred over two hundred men, women, and children.60

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Instead of taking responsibility for the massacre, the military proclaimed Wounded Knee a heroic victory. Almost as soon as the smoke cleared the military returned with photographers. Armed with camera and flash these men took photos of the dead. Their images attempted to turn beloved kin into illustrations for postcards sold and posted across the United States. The messages of military accounts of Wounded Knee and these photos was that the “Indian Wars” were finally over and Native people dead and vanished.61 As the photographers worked their visual violence, civilian contractors gathered the corpses of the victims, already frozen hard by the South Dakota winter, and buried them in a single rectangular grave. While the contractors labored, a special agent from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) counted the dead. Counting would make a bureaucratic record of what the military was calling a battle. It was, in some ways, the civilian counterpoint to the military violence enacted the previous day. The count was also done to determine the contractors’ pay. Each worker had been promised $2 for every body interred. But something did not add up. When the counting was done the contractors’ invoice came to $292, for 146 bodies buried. At the final tally, more than 50 Lakota victims appeared to be missing.62 In fact, they had been moved to their proper places. Wagon tracks in the snow provided evidence that someone, presumably the Lakota, had moved the dead.63 By evening of the day of the Wichakasotapi (massacre) Lakota survivors and relatives began returning to the massacre site with tools and wagons to bury and transport the victims of U.S. brutality. As time passed, the Lakota continued to visit the site of the massacre to remember their dead. Survivors from multiple Lakota agencies came to pay their respects to relatives who had been gunned down at Wounded Knee. They visited the mass grave and walked the field to “find the places where relatives had fallen.” As they did so they cried and wailed, expressing their grief and anguish. Others marked the sites of death with sticks. The markers were likely prayer sticks, which were covered with special markings to aid the dead on their journey to the spirit world.64 Lakota people also smeared the posts erected by the army around the rectangular grave—the one dug by civilian contractors—with the sacred red medicine paint of the Ghost Dance. When white anthropologist James Mooney visited the massacre site in 1891 (as part of his attempt to document and study the Ghost Dance), he saw a simple wood fence with wire in between four corner posts smeared with red paint roping off the sacred place. Inside the boundary line, stakes driven into the ground marked where the dancing Lakota had

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fallen from U.S. fire. Many survivors felt a special connection to the site. Joseph Horn Cloud, who lost his parents, brother, and a niece during the massacre, had what his grandson described as “a very strong bond” with the site. Horn Cloud camped there “and actually slept on the grave. . . . He looked at it as much as another home because that’s where the remains of his family were.”65 Horn Cloud, who was just a teenager when he survived Wounded Knee, spent much of his adult life working to ensure that whites would remember the Wichakasotapi for the massacre that it was. Almost immediately after December 29 the military began spinning narratives of brave soldiers defending themselves against “hostile savages.” In February 1891 a Lakota delegation to Washington called out the military for attempting to misremember history. The government’s invitation had purposely excluded members of Big Foot’s Band—to which most of the Lakota people killed on December 29 had belonged—from the delegation. In doing so officials hoped to sweep Wounded Knee under the rug. But the invited delegates spoke with survivors before traveling to the capital and, once there, they broadcast the message that Wounded Knee was a massacre through speeches and reports published in white American newspapers.66 The Lakota also began planning to memorialize the massacre at the site in a way that was legible to white American audiences. In 1897 a group of Lakotas that included Horn Cloud petitioned the BIA requesting that a permanent monument be erected at the site. Under the date December 29, 1890, was to be placed the Lakota inscription “Cankpi Opi Eltona Wicakte Picun He Cajepi Kin” (“These Are the Names of Those Killed at Wounded Knee”). Two additional sides of the monument were taken up by the names of the two hundred men, women, and children killed by U.S. soldiers that morning. To further drive the message of U.S. violence home, under the name of Joseph Horn Cloud’s father appeared the words, in English, “The peacemaker died here innocent.” The physical resemblance between the proposed monument to victims of U.S. brutality and monuments to U.S. soldiers—including the one to the soldiers of Wounded Knee erected in 1893 at Fort Riley, Kansas—confused white observers, some of whom initially interpreted plans for the monument as evidence of Lakota assimilation.67 This confusion was intentional. The proposed Wounded Knee monument design fit with a broader Native strategy of cultural survivance that cloaked traditional cultural practices with the appearance of U.S. customs and celebrations. Sometime in the 1880s Lakota people began using the Fourth of July as cover to continue their traditional sun dances. Dancers incorporated U.S.

Figure 9. Joseph Horn Cloud at Wounded Knee Monument, undated. In this photo Joseph Horn Cloud gazes directly at the camera. He holds his hat in his right hand and rests the four fingers of his left against the face of the monument he worked so hard to build. This photograph captures Horn Cloud’s feelings of pride and accomplishment for his role in erecting the memorial to his p ­ eople. Courtesy Red Cloud Indian School and Marquette University. Holy Rosary Mission—Red Cloud Indian School Records, ID MUA_HRM-­RCIS_00157.

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flags into their regalia and executed their moves in shade provided by U.S. flags extended by their corners on four poles. These practices amounted to what one historian has called “symbolic appropriation,” whereby Lakota peoples turned the symbol of the U.S. flag to Native ends. Turn-­of-­the-­century white observers responded to this appropriation with a consternation like that of overlanders who described American flags flying over Lakota graves in the 1850s. But it proved difficult for Indian agents to establish that Lakota patriotism was insincere, so the dances continued.68 The dedication ceremony for the Lakota monument to the Wichakasotapi similarly appropriated American symbols. On Memorial Day weekend in 1903 with an American flag flying, the Lakota dedicated their monument commemorating Wounded Knee as a massacre. By 1903, Memorial Day was recognized as a day to honor dead soldiers, but Lakota organizers used it instead to honor Native victims of the U.S. military. While the flag waved in the breeze, the five-­thousand-­strong crowd sang “America” and “My Country ’Tis of Thee” in Lakota.69 As the century progressed, Lakota people continued to insert their voices into white American memories of Wounded Knee. In 1913, a few Lakota men agreed to participate in western showman Buffalo Bill Cody’s film reenacting the “battle.” As cameras rolled, the hired reenactors proceeded to grieve rather than fight, crying and wailing over their massacred kin as survivors had done in the first dark days of the massacre’s aftermath. Academic interest in the history of the West and “Indians” also provided opportunities to broadcast the message that Wounded Knee was a Wichakasotapi. In 1914 white ethnographer Melvin R. Gilmore presented a paper at the annual meeting of the Nebraska State Historical Society in which he disseminated the Lakota’s message of massacre, a message he had learned from the Lakota themselves. White historical societies typically promoted histories of triumphal white settlers and vanishing Natives, but Gilmore’s address revealed the power of Indigenous voices to influence the historical perspectives of the few whites who were willing to listen.70

Trail Memory and Native History Beginning in the nineteenth century, white historical societies spread across the West in step with the creation of settlements. Settlers established these societies to assert white presence in new places and to justify and further

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Indigenous dispossession. Not surprisingly, the people who enrolled and participated in these societies were primarily, but not exclusively, white settlers. But these societies also provided limited opportunities for Native people to insert their voices into non-­Native memory-­making. Toward the end of her life Omaha writer and activist Susette La Flesche became involved with the Nebraska Historical Society. And, near the terminus of the Overland Trail in Oregon, Cayuse man Silas B. Smith joined the board of the Oregon Historical Society (OHS). In this capacity, Smith helped OHS members identify and mark historic sites across Oregon. Indigenous veterans also selectively participated in white commemorative organizations that, like historical societies, were historically minded. While Native peoples did not enroll in the Indian War Veterans Association, a number became active members of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR; the Union arm of Civil War memorialization).71 This participation and membership did not signal that Native people agreed with white people’s interpretation of the past. For instance, when the Buffalo Historical Society reburied Seneca leader and orator Red Jacket in 1884, Red Jacket’s relative Tonawanda Seneca and GAR member Ely S. Parker took the opportunity to give a speech condemning U.S. dispossession of the Seneca. The Buffalo Historical Society, officials of Forest Lawn Cemetery (where Red Jacket was reburied), and local settlers envisioned Red Jacket’s reburial ceremony as advancing white interpretations of Native people as people of the past. Instead, Parker and other members of the Six Nations (Iroquois) who participated in the ceremony used the reburial to proclaim their persistence and to renew community and political ties across the Six Nations.72 Across the continent, funeral and reburial ceremonies became a key medium through which Native people inserted their past and present experiences into white American memory. Some twenty years after Parker’s speech at Red Jacket’s reburial, the Nez Perce would use the reburial of Chief Joseph to proclaim their enduring claims to their homeland in the Wallowa Valley. The United States had taken the land near the terminus of the Oregon Trail under a fraudulent treaty, ultimately forcing the Nez Perce on an 1877 odyssey toward freedom in Canada. When U.S. forces caught up with the band, Chief Joseph had surrendered to prevent a massacre and with the understanding that he and his people would be able to return home. Instead, the Nez Perce were imprisoned and relocated to Indian Territory. But their leader never gave up the fight to return home. In 1897, the same year the Lakota submitted their petition for a monument at Wounded Knee, Chief Joseph traveled to New York to campaign

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for his people’s return to their Wallowa homeland. While there he participated in a dedication parade for Grant’s tomb. Twelve years earlier, Grant’s funeral parade had followed a similar course through New York. That first funeral parade had celebrated Grant for preserving the Union through compromising with former Confederate foes. In his push to return home, the Nez Perce leader projected a similar theme of reconciliation. While in New York, Joseph also attended Buffalo Bill’s Wild West performance in Madison Square Garden and publicly greeted Nelson Miles and Oliver Otis Howard, the military generals who had pursued his people to Bear’s Paw in 1877. At a private meeting with Miles Chief Joseph also petitioned for his people to return home.73 U.S. representatives denied Joseph’s request, but the media-­savvy campaigner attracted enough publicity that he was able to visit his homeland twice. On the second visit, conducted in 1890, he was accompanied by James McLaughlin, the Inspector General of the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA). McLaughlin ostensibly accompanied Chief Joseph to assess the public opinion among white settlers regarding the possibility of his and his people’s return home. But the OIA bureaucrat clearly considered such a return an impossibility. In his written report of the visit, McLaughlin claimed that white settlers had so completely and irrevocably transformed the valley from a desert of sagebrush to a country of orchards, towns, and villages that “Joseph knew not his old home.”74 The Nez Perce leader’s conduct revealed the fallacy of McLaughlin’s statement. During his visit Joseph went to the grave of his father on a private ranch. As McLaughlin and the rancher looked on, Tukekas’s son wept. McLaughlin attributed Joseph’s tears to happiness for how the rancher had cared for his father’s grave, including enclosing the plat and maintaining it well.75 The campaigner’s tears may also have been a sign of the bittersweetness of his return: happiness at being at his father’s grave, combined with the sadness of knowing he would have to leave again because whites had stolen his land and his father’s tomb. So too might Joseph’s tears have been a means to kindle sympathy in whites who read of his visit. For the rest of his life Joseph continued to leverage every available opportunity to restore his people to their homeland. One such opportunity manifested in the form of aspiring historian Edmond Meany. Meany was a graduate student at the University of Washington, working on his first big research project and hopeful that his work would bring him the academic success he craved. For an aspiring western historian there was perhaps no

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historical figure more compelling than “Chief Joseph,” the man who had nearly escaped to freedom in Canada and who had given one of the most famous speeches in U.S. history.76 Meany was interested in Chief Joseph as a figure of the past; Joseph was interested in how the budding historian might ensure a better future for himself and his people. In all the communications between the two men, including a series of face-­to-­face meetings and letters (that he wrote with the help of Indian agents), Joseph vociferously repeated his desire to return home. Now an older man, the campaigner turned his age to his advantage, describing his hoped-­for return as nothing more than a brief prelude to his imminent death and burial. At other times, Joseph told Meany that, at the very least, “when I die I want to be buried” at home.77 Meany tried to sidestep the topic of Joseph’s present and future, but the leader would not let him. At a meeting of the Washington State Historical Society after a 1903 University of Washington football game, where Joseph appeared (on Meany’s invitation) as a celebrity chief, the aging leader publicly communicated his desire to return home. As reported in the Seattle Intelligencer, Chief Joseph told the crowd that he hoped he would soon “be back in my old home in Wallowa Valley” where his father was buried. After Joseph spoke, Meany rose to shift the conversation from the present to the past. In his speech, he focused not on the Nez Perce campaigner’s message for the present but his history, a history that ended in his surrender to the U.S. military.78 But when Joseph died two years later, his people assured that their leader would have the last word. Initially the Nez Perce buried Joseph on their Idaho reservation. When, shortly thereafter, representatives of the Washington State Historical Society first asked the Nez Perce to consider reburying their chief and allowing the society to erect a marble monument over his grave the Nez Perce refused. But the historical society, led by Meany, pressed the issue. Eventually the Nez Perce acquiesced, and planning began for an elaborate reburial ceremony for June 1905. In preparation, the Washington State Historical Society designed and purchased a $200 monument crafted in marble in a style commonly used for white American tombs. On its surface the sculptor carved an image of “Chief Joseph’s” face and chiseled an inscription crediting the Washington State Historical Society.79 When Meany and the representatives of the society arrived with this monument in tow it might have seemed as if the ceremony would further cement white remembrances of “Chief Joseph.” Standing on a platform of planks and shaded by an American flag strung from four poles,

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Meany spoke to the crowd of assembled white settlers and Nez Perce. As the Seattle Post Intelligencer reported, Meany’s address reviewed “the life of Chief Joseph.” As he had in his speech after the 1903 football game, Meany’s address likely celebrated “Chief Joseph” as a significant figure of the past.80 But when Cuulim Maqsmaqs (commonly known as Yellow Bull), a Nez Perce headman who had been at Bear’s Paw when the Nez Perce surrendered to U.S. forces in 1877, followed Meany onto the stage he described Joseph as a figure of the present and the future. Throughout the day’s events Yellow Bull had vivified the man he now eulogized. Earlier he had ridden into the ceremony on Joseph’s favorite horse, wearing a red robe trimmed with ermine. And when he stood to eulogize the chief, he wore the deceased’s eagle headdress. In incorporating two of the dead man’s prized possessions into his funeral appearance, Yellow Bull evoked the leader’s presence rather than his passing.81 In his eulogy Yellow Bull celebrated Joseph’s past accomplishments and his enduring presence. The campaigner’s legacy was not, Yellow Bull declared, that he had fought and lost but that he had never given up fighting. In his short speech, delivered from the same flag-­shaded planks from which Meany had spoken of the past, Yellow Bull asserted that Joseph’s “words will live forever.” The headman’s phrasing upended the “no more forever” statement from Chief Joseph’s 1877 surrender speech. That phrase, so beloved by whites, was characterized by its finality. Yellow Bull used “forever” to evoke not the finality of defeat and surrender but the perpetuity of struggle. In Yellow Bull’s telling, Chief Joseph the man may have passed but his message—of Nez Perce right to their homeland and their unflagging desire to return—would live forever. As if to leave no doubt in the audience’s mind as to whose memorial site this was, Yellow Bull concluded his message of homeland and return by telling his audience: “Joseph’s words will stand as long as this monument.”82 The marble monument erected at Chief Joseph’s grave site may have been inscribed with the words of the settler-­colonial Washington State Historical Society, but as Yellow Bull spoke his words transformed the memorial into a symbol of the permanency of a Native message of homeland and the Nez Perce right to return. In using Chief Joseph’s reburial ceremony to immortalize his resistance, Yellow Bull signaled that the Nez Perce were forever committed to reversing their wrongful dispossession. Whites may have temporarily driven the people from their homeland near the terminus of the Trail, but they had every intention of returning. Around the same time the Nez Perce were digging into their message of wrongful dispossession and commitment to return, a Wyandot woman

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named Eliza “Lyda” Burton Conley planted herself in her people’s cemetery to protect it. Located in Kansas City, Missouri, the cemetery had been a long-­ standing burial place for the Wyandot people and contained the remains of many of Conley’s relatives. The cemetery was a testament to the horrific effects of removal: many of those buried there had died in the first years after the United States forced the Wyandot nation west in 1843.83 In the years following removal, Wyandot people established themselves in their new home west of the Mississippi River. Just as they were regaining their footing, a great rush of emigrants bound for the California gold fields passed through what would become, by the early twentieth century, the neighboring metropolises of Kansas City, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri. The Wyandot managed this invasion as best they could: trying to protect their livestock, farming and grazing lands, and profiting from ferrying emigrants across the rivers. A few members of the nation also decided to take the overland journey themselves. Most Wyandot, however, remained in the greater Kansas City area where they would navigate the pressures of the expanding metropolis.84 In 1897, for example, the city annexed Westport—one of the outfitting towns that had competed with St. Joseph and Independence for emigrant business during the cholera years of the Trail.85 As Kansas City grew, the Huron cemetery plot increased in value, prompting calls to sell it and move the remains of the Wyandots’ ancestors. Located just west of where the Kansas and Missouri Rivers split, and steps from the main branch of the Kansas City, Kansas, public library, the cemetery occupied a place of prominence in the growing city.86 Despite calls to move it, the Wyandot of Kansas were determined to protect their burial ground, and Conley quickly emerged as the cemetery’s most vociferous defender. In fact, in anticipation of calls to sell the cemetery, Conley had gone to law school and was admitted to the Missouri bar in 1902.87 Soon thereafter, the newly minted lawyer took her cause of protecting the cemetery to the courts of law and public opinion. First, Conley brought a lawsuit against the city and would-­be developers before the U.S. District Court at Topeka, Kansas. The court ruled in favor of those who wanted to develop the cemetery, but the resolute defender of the Wyandot cemetery was undeterred. Soon thereafter Conley began moving forward with an appeal that she planned to take to the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. The campaign to restore protected status to the cemetery, which it had lost in 1906, also gained support from several local citizens and organizations, including Kansas City–area women’s clubs. One local reporter framed the

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struggle of Conley and her white club women allies against would-­be developers and the district court as one between sentiment, on the side of Conley and her group, and commercialism and progress on the other.88 It was, in this reporter’s implicit estimation, both feminine and un-­American to prevent commerce and progress. No doubt aware of her opponents’ perceptions, Conley wrapped her campaign in patriotic symbols. While her lawsuit was pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, Conley and her sisters, Helena and Ida, moved into the cemetery to protect it. In June 1909 Lyda Conley was interviewed for the Kansas Magazine about this occupation. The interviewer asked the activist lawyer if she ever worried that the government might send troops to forcibly remove her and her sisters from the cemetery. Conley was characteristically unfazed, telling the interviewer that she would give her life before she let the troops disturb the dead. Pressed again on this question, the cemetery’s ardent defender answered that if troops did come, she and her sisters would wrap themselves in “two large Americans flags” they had procured in preparation for the troops’ arrival. And when the troops arrived they would have told “the boys in blue to shoot—for they would have to do that before they could disturb those graves.”89 Past experience had shown that U.S. troops were willing to shoot unarmed Native women, but in proposing to wrap themselves in the symbol of the United States Conley and her sisters would have made it so that shooting them was also a shot at the nation the troops served. When Conley appeared before the Supreme Court in 1910, she based her argument to preserve the cemetery on the twin pillars of U.S. federal law and the Christian Bible. In her argument to the Court, which she presented as a plaintiff rather than as counsel (because she had not been admitted to the D.C. bar), Conley opened with a quotation from Genesis. With this passage she reminded the Court that because Adam ate fruit from the Garden of Eden God had decreed that he and all people would eventually “return unto ground; for out of it wast thou taken.”90 After telling the Court that the stakes of defending her people’s cemetery were universal, the activist lawyer continued with the history of her people, including an explication of the standing treaty agreements and previous U.S. Supreme Court decisions that provided the legal basis for protecting the cemetery.91 As she concluded, Conley returned to a biblical argument; reminding the Court that Abraham had claimed a burial ground for his people. Years later, Abraham’s grandson Jacob fought to be buried in the cemetery his grandfather had established. Conley told the Court, “Like Jacob of old I too, when I

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shall be gathered unto my people, desire that they bury me with my fathers in Huron Cemetery, the most sacred and hallowed spot on earth to me.” In likening her desire to Jacob’s own, this Wyandot woman aligned her campaign with sacred Christian scripture.92 But Conley was not quite done. After comparing herself to Jacob, this Native woman likened her people to white Americans. In Conley’s argument the Wyandot’s reverence for their burial ground was the same as white American reverence for Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon. Disputing the charges of critics who belittled Wyandot reverence for their cemetery as “superstitious,” the activist lawyer told the Court, “I cannot believe that this is superstitious reverence any more than I can believe that the reverence every true American has for the grave of Washington at Mount Vernon is a superstitious reverence.” Conley’s argument persuasively and emphatically showed the preservation of the Huron Indian Cemetery to be in line with legal, religious, and cultural conventions of white America.93 Conley lost her case. She did not, however, give up her fight to protect her people’s graves. Along with her sister Helena, Lyda continued to live in the cemetery. In 1911 Kansas state senator Charles Curtis lent his support to their cause, introducing a bill to protect the burial ground. The bill passed two years later in 1913. But the cemetery’s greatest defender did not rest easy. Instead, she continued to occupy the graveyard—an occupation she continues to this day. Conley was buried there after her death on May 28, 1946.94 In fighting for the Huron cemetery, this Wyandot lawyer and activist assured that Native history would remain visible and secure in a place whites associated with the history of the Trail rather than that of the Wyandot nation. Native graves and burying places across the West demonstrated that the Trail was not solely a white American burial ground. In white memory-­workers’ hands, the Trail was almost exclusively the place of the white dead. This burial ground of the Trail was hopelessly disordered. As they traveled, disoriented emigrants tried their best to fix the graves of loved ones with geographic precision, but shifting Trail routes and environmental changes, such as floods, meant that many graves were completely lost. White Americans did not let these graves go quietly. During the years of Trail travel, many survivors returned to locate the graves of their loved ones and to pay their respects, cementing the sites in familial memory. Proxies—whether they were extended relatives, neighbors, or friends—also visited and in some cases were able to repair the graves.

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In the years that followed corporate and settler interests helped to assure that these graves would be remembered. Because of their efforts by the early twentieth century the disorder of the emigrant dead had become its central strength. Like water entering a crack, flowing through every available space, and seeping into a structure and transforming it from within, the Overland Trail as a boundless burial ground populated the West underground, purporting to transform it into American space. Overland Trail routes, graves, and other sites created a shared past for the Central and Northern Plains, the Pacific Northwest, and the Golden State. In linking themselves to local Trail graves, communities connected themselves and their places to the narrative arc of American history. Because of this, the dead became a pillar not only of Trail memory but also of western white settlement writ large. The state of the dead as everywhere and nowhere became central to calls for marking the entirety of the Trail and to describing the route as the foundational spine of settlement across the continent. But Native people, in erecting their own monuments and presenting their views of history to white audiences, reminded white settlers that they had been and would always be here. Those voices and perspectives would grow louder over the course of the twentieth century. In 1917, Indigenous births outstripped deaths for the first time in more than a hundred years. The Native population was on the rise, and a renewed campaign of resistance and redress would be too.95

CHAPTER 6

Legacies of the Overland Trail

As of the writing of this book in the third decade of the twenty-­first century, the Pioneer Monument at Donner Pass still stands high in the Sierra Nevada. In the spring and summer, warming sun heats the bronze figures at the top of the pedestal. With the snap of fall, chilly breezes begin to hint of imminent snowfall. Winter storms dust and shroud the pioneer family in snow, but rarely does the snowpack reach the top of its twenty-­two-­foot rock and stone pedestal. When the Native Sons sponsored the monument more than one hundred years ago, they envisioned it as a tribute to the triumph of stalwart emigrants who followed the suffering Donners to California. Today, the Pioneer Monument is a signal of how far we still must travel. As this book has shown, the westward migration of white emigrants was inextricably intertwined with the forced dispossession of Native peoples. Military force was often the immediate causal factor in U.S. efforts to dispossess Native Americans. Yet, military force alone could not lay claim to the continent. It was not enough to possess land; the United States had to establish itself on it. Physical markers of fields, fences, and iron railroad tracks were part of this effort. So too were the commemoration of sacrifices white Americans made to settle the continent. By the early twentieth century, crosses, headstones, and monuments strung across the two-­thousand-­mile Trail signaled that the entire route was sacred white American space. White memory of the emigrant dead artificially parsed the unexpected disaster of the Overland Trail from the purposeful violence of dispossession. As signaled by President Andrew Jackson’s reflection on the similarities and differences between removal and westward expansion, white Americans’ understandings of their individual journeys and the collective significance of dying on this transcontinental migration sprung from the struggle for and against U.S. expansion. Unbraiding the former from the latter helped white

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Americans sideline dispossession from the central narrative of nineteenth-­ century history. In the hundred-odd years since the Pioneer Monument was erected in 1918, that exclusive and, therefore, erroneous memory of the Trail has, for the large part, endured. But not completely. Native peoples have inserted their voices into U.S. history, and they have memorialized their dead to shift attention from pioneer suffering and triumph and toward Indigenous dispossession and endurance. In undermining the assumptions of peaceful expansion and “vanishing Indians” that constitute the heart of white memory of expansion, Native p ­ eople have destabilized the seemingly immutable legacy of the Overland Trail.

The Trail’s Second Century White memory-­workers spent much of the twentieth century amplifying their stilted interpretation of the Trail. As the Trail entered its second century in 1920, memory-­workers continued to tell tales of peaceful, suffering emigrants besieged by wilderness and “Indians.” The revolutionary medium of film dramatized these stories for a new generation. In 1923 Paramount Pictures released The Covered Wagon, based on Emerson Hough’s novel of the same name. The big-­budget production was a financial success for Paramount, which reaped record profits from ticket sales. The film’s popularity also signaled that the national significance of the Trail was on the rise. One of The Covered Wagon’s biggest fans was President Warren G. Harding. In a speech to thirty thousand attendees delivered from the Oregon Trail at Meacham, Oregon, Harding cele­ brated the pioneers portrayed in the film for having the “determination to do for themselves” rather than “asking the government to do.”1 With these words Harding enshrined the laudatory individualism of overland emigrants and encouraged Americans writ large to embrace the same philosophy. Harding was far from alone in seeing cinematic emigrants as the standard-­ bearers of white American identity. One critic endorsed The Covered Wagon on the basis that, while the “skeleton marked trail is gone,” watching the film would remind audiences “what our heritage cost, that we may understand it, appreciate it, defend it.” The critic believed that lesson to be so important that he suggested that watching the film should be required for every U.S. citizen. The reason? Watching The Covered Wagon makes you “a better American.”2 What audiences saw when they viewed the film was a catalogue of white emigrant suffering. As they travel the Trail the characters endure desert heat,

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mountain snow, and an “Indian attack.” Not surprisingly, the first victim of this attack is a maiden, who, while dressed in a white wedding gown as she is about to be married, is shot in the breast by an arrow.3 As the wounded Molly collapses, the camera pans out to show besieged emigrants returning volleys of arrows with gunfire. In the next scene what appears to be thousands of “Indians” stream toward the pioneers’ circled wagon train.4 Like D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, The Covered Wagon expounded white supremacist narratives of white womanhood under attack from dangerous men of color. But thankfully, white men are there to save the day. In The Covered Wagon, the guide, Steve Banion, returns to protect Molly. And by the end of the film Banion has won Molly’s heart.5 Following The Covered Wagon’s success, westerns rose in popularity and production after production made besieged emigrants and violent “Indians” central players in Overland Trail dramas.6 Memory-­workers attached similar narratives to tourist stops along the Trail route. At the Nut Tree rest stop in Vacaville, California, just east of the San Francisco Bay Area, auto tourists could buy fruit and sit under the shade of a black walnut tree all while feeling close to the sufferings of those who had traveled the Trail to settle California. The tree under which tourists rested was said to have grown from a walnut collected by an emigrant train traveling the southern route along the Gila River.7 According to stories still attached to the Nut Tree today, that walnut was carried to Vacaville by Sallie Fox. Fox, who was just twelve years old when Mojave peoples attacked her wagon train in the Southwest, was the tragic figure of a massacre story who, it was said, narrowly missed dying from an arrow that pierced her white apron. In 1995 writer Dorothy Kupcha Leland turned Fox’s story into a children’s book on the struggles of the Trail and the Vacaville Museum continues to host an annual “Sallie Fox Day.”8 In the 1920s automobile tourists such as those who rested at the Nut Tree began taking to the Trail with increasing frequency. The feeling of proximity to past emigrant suffering drew many auto tourists out onto the Trail. Railroad passenger car travel had removed tourists from the landscape (even as it had permitted them to access the past of the Overland Trail), and auto tourism restored travelers to the land. Tourists camped as they traveled the West, and they rode in open-­topped cars that companies and travelers alike colloquially referred to as stagecoaches or “wagons.”9 When Ezra Meeker traded his wagon pulled by Dandy and Dave for a Pathfinder automobile the car company tightened the analogy by fitting their new model with a covered wagon top. In one widely distributed photo of his Trail trip in the Pathfinder Meeker stands with

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one foot on the running board and one hand gripping the steering wheel.10 Meeker brought the pioneer era to life for a new generation. Automobile travel did too. Promoters and auto tourists alike proclaimed travelers sitting behind steering wheels to be “a new generation of ‘pioneers.’”11 Like the pioneers they admired, twentieth-­century tourists proved adept at documenting and disseminating their journeys across the Trail. Photography, made cheaper and more accessible by technological advances, became a favorite way for tourists to record their overland trips. Auto tourists took their cars and cameras out on the Trail with such frequency that today tens of thousands of Overland Trail photographs are housed in archives across the United States. While the sizes of the collections vary, the Charles Davis collection at the archives of Sutter’s Fort State Historic Park in Sacramento, California, holds more than one thousand photographs of graves and sites along the Trail.12 Davis’s documentation is the result of his intent to trace the route of the Donner Party and to identify and mark the graves of the members who lost their lives along the way. Davis’s interest—what some biographers have described as an obsession—in the Donner Party was extreme, but he was far from exceptional. In the 1970s writer Gabrielle Burton traveled with her family across the Trail to re-­create the Donner Party experience and search for the grave of Tamsen Donner who, famously, stayed behind in the mountains to care for her dying husband, George. Burton did not find the grave for which she searched but she nonetheless made a discovery along the way. After seeing the graves of Rachel Pattison, Susan Haile, and Rebecca Winters in Nebraska, Burton came to think of the Trail as a trail of death.13 When Davis started his journey, he already knew he was traveling across an American burial ground. Davis was a retired ship captain originally from Massachusetts who ultimately found his way to the artist’s community at the Salton Sea in eastern California. There he ran a bar, dabbled in painting, and, increasingly, thought of the Donner Party.14 Finally, in 1927 Davis and traveling partner Emile Cote headed east by automobile and into the Sierra. After cresting the Sierra, the duo descended into the high desert of the Truckee Meadows. Next, they continued east across what the Paiute called home and what emigrants had called the desert of death. Not long after, Davis and Cote reached their first destination: the small town of Beowawe, approximately two hundred miles east of the Truckee Meadows town of Reno. Beowawe, of course, was the town that had built their cemetery around the Trail landmark of the Maiden’s Grave. In his journal, Davis recorded how

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the community preserved the virginal appeal of the tomb. A local resident, identified only in Davis’s journal as a Mr. Fulkerson, explained that “every spring this cross is newly painted snow white.” According to Fulkerson, an essay contest was also part of these annual festivities. A recent winner was “a high school girl at Battle Mountain” who “wrote a very pretty piece of poetry for this very popular girl.” In the memory of Beowawe’s resident, the maiden had been given “a well-­marked” and thus “unusual burial” because she was popular, young, and beautiful.15 In this account the maiden was special and that she was located near his town made his community special too. But it was the less well-­marked graves that interested Davis the most. He wanted to find and mark the grave of John Snyder, who had been killed by James Reed somewhere in Nevada, either at Gravelly Ford or farther west near Battle Mountain.16 Davis was sure Reed’s grave was near Gravelly Ford and made it his mission to find the site so he could “substantiate historical events.”17 Davis’s trip to document the graves of Reed and other Donner Party members was physically arduous and inconclusive. In their search for the graves, Mr. Fulkerson drove Davis and Cote toward a spot described to them by local settlers and ranchers. With physical effort made more difficult by his age and health, Fulkerson exited the vehicle to search for the wooden crosses and mounds of stones the party had been told they would find marking the graves. Finding nothing, the three men spread out in different directions then walked slowly toward each other, “closing in circles where it was supposed to be.” Despite their care, the searchers found nothing but “two lots of scattered stones” and “one worm-­eaten” piece of wood.18 Davis, however, refused to admit defeat. Early the next morning he and Cote returned to the spot they had searched aboveground the day before. There Davis dug into the earth. He removed the stones that remained and revealed bones, then worked to restore the graves. After he was done investigating, Davis and his companion put them “in good shape, erected substantial crosses on each.” Finally, in anticipation of future visitors, they nailed notices in waterproof tin cans “describing everything inside.” When Davis and Cote were done a spot previously marked only by sagebrush and a ring of badger and rabbit holes stood as a memorial to the emigrant dead.19 Davis then further inscribed the location by posing for a photograph. Davis’s photograph continued a manly melancholic mourning for emigrant graves that had been established in the prior century. With one knee on the ground, his hat in hand and the other forearm resting on a bent knee, Davis looked down in sorrow between the two crosses he and Cote had erected

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to the unknown dead.20 Dressed in outdoor gear of the rugged auto traveler complete with knee-­high lace-­up boots, Davis embodied the hardy virility of the manly Trail amateur historian who endured desert heat and overcame frustratingly sparse evidence to mark and memorialize the emigrant dead. Lit with the sheen of romance and sentimentalism, markers to the emigrant dead appeared innocuous and true. But these monuments were plantings of white patriarchy and supremacy. By the 1920s, one of the most prolific monument organizations in the nation was the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). Founded in 1890, the DAR was dedicated to promoting white patriotic sentiment across the country. During the 1920s and 1930s, pioneer mother monuments became the most common form through which the DAR inscribed their vision of Americanness in city centers, rural areas, and auto highways across the nation. The monuments embodied the nativism of their sponsors, who, as Wyoming historian Grace Raymond Hebard described it, considered themselves “pioneer daughters of pioneer parents.”21 The DAR concept of the pioneer mother empowered women in ways that the Maiden’s Grave did not, portraying women as active participants in birthing and raising patriotic white American citizens.22 But the bronze, sunbonneted pioneer mothers erected in the post-­suffrage United States also projected an image of white womanhood as tied up with motherhood in a way that precluded their equal footing with men. On the surface, the West seemed to provide women such as Hebard with greater opportunities. Suffrage took root in the region first, and as institutions of higher learning sprung up across the West some of them initially provided opportunities for female academics that were largely unheard of in the East. In Wyoming, Grace Raymond Hebard became a University of Wyoming professor and the de facto state historian. In Nevada, Jeanne Wier joined the professoriate at the University of Nevada, Reno, and from California Stanford historian Mary Sheldon Barnes corresponded with Edmond Meany about issues relating to western history.23 Of these three women Hebard would make the greatest and longest-­lasting mark, both on historical writing and in the Wyoming landscape. Much of Hebard’s work was tied up with identifying and preserving the Trail and, especially, Trail graves. In late fall 1925 Hebard received a letter from rancher Clark P. Rice regarding his recent discovery of emigrant Mary Homsley’s grave. Out of concern that vandals might desecrate the 1852 sandstone marker if he left it out in the open, Rice had moved it to his cellar. But he wanted to return it to its original location on his property and contact

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Homsley’s descendants so they would know about the discovery.24 Rice wrote to Hebard asking for her help in preserving Homsley’s grave. Hebard was eager to assist. Although she failed to convince Homsley’s daughter, Laura Homsley Gibson, to travel to Wyoming for a ceremony, she did succeed in securing a statement from Gibson for the event. In it Gibson thanked Wyoming residents for caring for her mother’s grave and explained how her father’s reluctance to describe the trauma of losing and leaving her mother on the Plains had led to the grave being temporarily lost from family memory. Gibson’s words aligned with Hebard’s hopes of using the ceremony to spotlight emigrant suffering and patriotic remembrance.25 The ceremony Hebard organized for Memorial Day, 1926, extrapolated beyond Homsley’s family story to convey a history of the many Trail dead. During her planning Hebard considered using the phrase “the unknown pioneer mothers’ graves” to celebrate Homsley and the many other mothers presumed to have been buried on the Trail. Ultimately, Hebard decided that using the phrase would infringe on the contemporaneous movement of marking the graves of unknown soldiers that had begun to flourish after World War I. But she nonetheless instructed ceremony participants to strew flowers along the length of the Trail to mark the “hidden” graves of the tens of thousands of pioneer mothers and other emigrant dead that Trail memory-­ workers believed lay just below the surface. Hebard liked the idea of strewing flowers along the Trail in honor of deceased pioneers so much that in early June 1926 she wrote the state historian of Nebraska to ask him if he might consider encouraging Nebraskans to lay flowers along the Trail through their state on the next Memorial Day.26 Bringing these imagined dead to light furthered memory-­workers’ efforts to parse the history of Fort Laramie from the history of the Lakota people. Sixty years before Hebard orchestrated the flowered Trail for the dead, Spotted Tail had orchestrated a politically potent memorial ceremony for his daughter. Mni Akuwin’s funeral at Fort Laramie reminded the U.S. military of their long-­standing alliance with the Lakota and demanded redress for wrongs they had wrought on their allies. The ceremony at Mary Homsley’s grave site, less than two miles from Fort Laramie, marked an ongoing effort to associate the history of Wyoming and the West with white settlers who peacefully occupied empty landscapes. In 1915, the last post trader at Fort Laramie, John Hunton, had collaborated with the DAR and the state of Wyoming to erect a concrete obelisk affixed with a bronze plaque at the fort. That obelisk celebrated Laramie

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as a historic stopping point for emigrants. The Lakota and the U.S. military received nary a mention. Emphasizing emigrants over these other key historical actors aligned western history with peaceful, stalwart, and individualistic Americans moving west in search of a better life rather than a state-­sanctioned violent campaign to wrest land from Indigenous people. By the end of the 1920s, white memory-­workers had so effectively recast Fort Laramie as a white American landmark that members of the Ku Klux Klan chose it as the site for their 1927 Memorial Day rally.27 Deep-­ pocketed northeastern financiers with a passion for anticommunism and the history of the American West also played critical roles in supporting archival collecting of emigrant accounts and monument construction along the Trail. In the 1940s insurance tycoon William Robertson Coe single-­handedly financed the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. He also gifted his private collection of Trail diaries to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, transforming that institution into one of the nation’s richest repositories of emigrant accounts.28 In the 1920s New York banker Edmund Seymour was integral to financing the Oregon Trail Memorial Association (OTMA). Established over a Manhattan lunch attended by Seymour and Meeker, the association would become the most prominent organization dedicated to marking and commemorating the Trail.29 In part because of this eastern financial support and advocacy, the Trail finally achieved the national recognition and funding for which Meeker had long campaigned. As the Great Depression settled across the nation President Herbert Hoover designated 1930 the centennial year of the Trail. The announcement came two years after Meeker’s death, and so OTMA and Hoover also used the centennial occasion to commemorate the man himself, tying the conclusion of the centennial to Meeker’s birthday of December 29, 1830. In Meeker’s absence New York English professor and former Utahn Dr. Howard Driggs took the lead in organizing the centennial celebrations. Like Meeker, who never ceased to extol the “twenty-­thousand unmarked graves” lying along the route, Driggs saw the emigrant dead as the critical component of the Trail. He was convinced that compiling a list of every known remaining grave on the Trail was critical to bolstering popular interest in commemorating the iconic migration. Sounding remarkably like J. Goldsborough Bruff when he pitched his manuscript to Harper’s in 1853, Driggs told OTMA board members that publicizing emigrant graves would broaden the public appeal of Trail memorialization beyond those who lived

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along the Trail to “friends and relatives” of the deceased.30 In Driggs’s estimation, leveraging personal connection with the Trail dead bolstered OTMA’s “movement” to preserve the route and assure its national significance. This familial connection remains a key motivator for many memory-­ workers, but something else won over congressional representatives who eventually threw their support to declaring 1930 the Trail’s centennial year. Carl Hayden of Arizona’s speech advocating for a Trail centennial gives insight into lawmakers’ motivation to commemorate the migration. Hayden described how seeing Oscar Edmund Berninghaus’s Homeseekers hanging on his kitchen wall inspired him to want to tell “again the story of the home seekers crossing the plains and deserts, fording streams, scaling mountains, and fighting Indians.”31 The painting Hayden referenced positions the viewer almost parallel with the ground. When looking straight at the piece the viewer gazes toward a train of approaching wagons. This point of view emphasizes the packed ground and parched grasses over which the wagon master and bullwhacker are urging their horses forward, making the western landscape just as much of an actor as the people and white-­topped wagons traveling across it. But, notwithstanding Hayden’s casual reference to “fighting Indians” there is no “Indian” in sight.32 That Representative Hayden could look at Berninghaus’s painting of a wagon train proceeding unhindered through the western landscape and write “Indian attacks” into the story of the Trail evinced how deeply Trail memory intertwined with racist western mythology of violent “savages.” The Trail’s 1930 centennial celebration showcased this racist mythology. On July Fourth of that year, white Americans from across the country descended on Independence Rock. Attendees included former emigrants such as William Henry Jackson, who was also present as a member of OTMA. OTMA partnered with the Boy Scouts of America to execute the celebration. That partnership was a logical extension of OTMA’s aspirations to inspire the next generation to take up Trail commemoration and preservation. This hope aligned with the objectives of the Boy Scouts, a youth organization that aimed to instill patriotic pride in its members. One troop of Boy Scouts from New York was sent off by none other than New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. After the send-­off they rode west in Ezra Meeker’s Ox mobile. The scouts arrived in Wyoming just in time for the Fourth—just as many emigrants had while traveling the Trail by wagon. On their way to Independence Rock scout troops visited Trail graves to pay their respects to emigrants who had given their lives to settle the West.33

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The most dramatic element of the Independence Rock celebration was a staged “Indian attack.” As part of the scheduled ceremonies, Shoshone Boy Scouts from Fort Washakie on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming played “Indians.” At the behest of the organizers, the boys “attacked” a circled wagon train before they were beaten off by a contingent of mounted, uniformed white Boy Scouts.34 Less cinematic but more realistic would have been the dramatic spectacle of wagon trains afflicted with cholera, and scouts working around the clock to rub cramped limbs and clean the soiled linens of the sick. Instead, with national attention trained toward Independence Rock, OTMA delivered the expected spectacle of Trail violence. And they did so by enlisting children to advance racist interpretations of the Trail. At least one OTMA member pushed back against this interpretation. Emil Kopac was of Czech heritage. He and his five brothers were raised in Dakota, but by his early adulthood Kopac had relocated to Nebraska where he ran a farm near the Trail in Oshkosh. This proximity inspired him to learn more about the great migration and he became an active member of OTMA. Emil Kopac and his brother Ed Kopac also took to touring the Trail across the West. Together the two brothers created a photographic archive of more than eight hundred images documenting their tourism across the Trail and the West. The brothers’ images, many of which they printed as picture postcards to sell to tourists who stopped at their auto repair shop, often identify emigrant “graves” that can barely be discerned amid the sagebrush and granite rocks that cover much of the Plains. Like OTMA’s messaging, the common theme of Kopac’s captions, handwritten on the back of photographs and picture postcards, is that the entire West is a land of “unmarked graves.” Kopac’s verso histories also confirmed OTMA’s conviction that cholera had killed the most emigrants on the Trail. In multiple penciled notes Kopac described how the disease, not “Indian” attacks, had posed the greatest danger to emigrants. He did not deny that “Indian” attacks sometimes occurred, but he saw them as the result of fallible emigrants and systemic government failure. Emigrants, he wrote, directly and indirectly injured Native peoples of the West by attacking their “sustenance” while the federal government committed numerous “injustices” by failing to make good on their promises and legal obligations.35 Kopac’s notes reveal cracks in the memory of the Trail as a history of peaceful emigrants under constant attack. Despite such recognition, the overarching interpretation of the Trail as a triumph of suffering emigrants and white civilization would march steadily on. World War II cemented American power and ideas of American

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greatness, key themes of the legacy of the Overland Trail. So too did the war’s heavy casualties render afresh the culture of suffering and death on which Trail memory thrived. The mortal losses of World War II indelibly shaped postwar culture. From 1945 to 1949 the U.S. government spent more than $164 million to return the remains of more than 110,000 U.S. soldiers killed in conflict. This repatriation program was demanded by a U.S. public that was willing to do whatever it took to have loved ones returned home.36 In the years after World War II the Trail continued to play a prominent role in popular memory. For instance, in 1956 Rachel Laurgaard’s Patty Reed’s Doll personified Patty’s famous doll, first described to the public in McGlashan’s History of the Donner Party in 1891, to tell the story of white suffering and American nation-­building to a new generation of American children.37 The 1950s and 1960s were also peak decades of the popularity of westerns. Children slept in cowboy pajamas, and they played cowboys and “Indians” during the day, the cowboys the good guys and the “Indians” the bad. On screens large and small heroic, manly cowboys fought “Indians” to protect their womenfolk and tame the “Wild West.” John Wayne, Gene Autry, and other celebrity cowboys captured media headlines and American hearts. One of these shows, Wagon Train, aired on NBC from 1957 to 1962. The series, which would reach the number one spot in the Nielsen ratings in its fifth season, was inspired by a John Ford film. The western chronicled a wagon train’s overland journey from St. Joseph, Missouri, to California. In two not-­so-­subtle nods to the Donner Party, one episode featured a survivor of a “lost” wagon train that had been snowed in the previous year and who, it is implied, practiced cannibalism to survive. In another episode from the same season the plot centered on a couple abandoned in a blizzard. Like most westerns of its era, Wagon Train also included scenes of wagons circling against “Indian” attacks.38 During the Cold War era many white Americans saw themselves as circling their own proverbial wagons. In the years following the Allied victory in World War II the threat of communism came to dominate the international and domestic stage. For many Americans fearful of communist ideology, the memory of the Overland Trail as a migration of plucky, entrepreneurial individuals provided the perfect countermeasure to the dangers of communalism. Anticommunism animated the commemorative work of Union Pacific passenger agent and Trail historian W. W. (William Wayne) Morrison. Morrison spent decades pursuing his “hobby” of discovering, restoring, and marking emigrant graves. The patriarchal white American family was key to Morrison’s “hobby” and to his interpretation of Trail history. His photographs of

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his family’s automobile trips frequently feature his wife and his young daughter, Wanda Mae, posing in front of emigrant graves. Of the two women, it is Wanda Mae who figures most prominently in his photographs of Trail graves. Often dressed in white and bowing in reverence over the graves, she appears as a figure of innocent purity, patriotically honoring the dead who helped pave the way for her life in Wyoming.39 In 1969, Morrison and a handful of spectators traveled to the grave of Mary Homsley, where Hebard had extolled pioneer mothers in 1926. Hebard’s address had been rooted in the nativism of the 1920s; Morrison’s was rooted in the anticommunism of the Cold War era. When Morrison stood to address the crowd, he, like Hebard, delivered an ode to the pioneers. But then he pivoted to warn his audience that communists wanted to take over their country. Protecting America required protecting its history and particularly its history of individualistic emigrants who had suffered to expand their nation. Communists, he told the assembled crowd, want “to confuse, undermine and destroy our true history. . . . Don’t you let them do it.”40 Morrison urged his audience to set up defenses against external ideological threats much as he believed emigrants had constantly circled wagons to defend themselves from “Indians.” What Trail memory-­workers believed or wanted to believe about the sites in their communities was important to perpetuating the romanticized history of the Trail. Such was the case for the Maiden’s Grave in Amador County, California. As early as 1935, local leaders and historians learned that this site was, in fact, not the grave of a maiden at all. That year William Bliss notified the California State Chamber of Commerce that the inhabitant of the sepulcher was in fact a young man named Allen Melton. An Amador County native, Bliss had become familiar with the graves of Allen Melton and that of an unknown maiden during the late 1880s. While working as a shepherd for his father, Bliss had often camped near the two sites and, as he told the State Chamber of Commerce in 1935, he was certain that the tomb closer to the state highway, marked as the “Maiden’s Grave,” was in fact that of the male emigrant named Allen. In his letter to the Chamber, Bliss denounced the current mislabeling as an “impropriety.” The tone of his letter is confident; he seems certain that the members of the Chamber would quickly correct the error.41 His confidence proved misplaced. After some discussion, local Amador County leaders declined to act on Bliss’s revelation. The members agreed that remarking the Maiden’s Grave as the grave of a male emigrant would undercut the appeal of the emigrant tomb. Amador County is in the heart of California gold country in the Sierra Nevada, where tourism is essential

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Figure 10. Grave of Rachael Melton. The erroneously marked grave continued to attract tourists. In 1965, a photographer for the Sacramento Bee snapped Mill Valley resident Bill Nakano, age thirty-­one, paying his respects at the Maiden’s Grave near the end of a two-­hundred-­mile bicycle trip. Center for Sacramento History, Sacramento Bee, 1983/001/SBPM00246.

to economic survival. Having a maiden’s grave visible by the roadside was, simply put, a better tourist attraction than a man’s grave.42 As it turned out, the Maiden’s Grave near Beowawe, Nevada, was also not the final resting place of an actual maiden. In the 1960s historians published a series in the Nevada Historical Society Quarterly identifying the occupant as Lucinda Duncan (correctly identified by railroad guidebook author Henry T. Williams as the inhabitant of the grave). Duncan was not a maiden but a grandmother. At the time of her death in 1863, Duncan and members of her family were traveling west from their home in Ray County, Missouri, to seek the rewards of the territory’s gold and silver mining boom and to escape the turmoil of the Civil War. One of her sons remained in the East, fighting for

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the Confederate Army. Railroad guidebook narratives had romanticized Duncan’s death as one caused by the rigors of her journey, but she likely died from age-­related causes, disease, or some combination of the two.43 After Duncan died her company conducted a funeral service, buried her body, and placed a wooden headboard etched with her name to mark her tomb. As a final measure, they laid boulders over the grave to “keep the wolves from scratching in.” The wolves may never have come, but railroad promoters did. By the time railroad history-­makers had had their way with Duncan’s grave she had been restyled a young, virginal maiden. That message would endure at her grave until 1997 when the Oregon-­California Trails Association placed a marker at the site identifying Duncan as a grandmother. Even so, the white cross towering overhead continues to bear the words “Maiden’s Grave.”44 Visible for a vast distance, the cross, and its message of vulnerable virginal whiteness, still dominates the landscape.

Bending the Arc Toward Justice And yet, Native people have not let the dominance of white Trail memory persist unchallenged. Over the last century they have worked to insert their stories into U.S. history and into Trail memory. Through tireless persistence Indigenous people continue to push white Americans to acknowledge two critical historical principles: their role in historical causation and the traumas of U.S. colonialism. Through drawing attention to their struggles and providing their perspectives, American Indians have begun to bend the arc of Trail memory—and U.S. history—toward justice. Indeed, their ongoing efforts raise questions about how much longer pioneer memory will persist as the dominant interpretation of history of the U.S. West and the Overland Trail. It is largely because of Indigenous determination and achievements that the legacy of the Overland Trail is as much in the process of formation in the twenty-­first century as it was in the nineteenth. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, white racist ideas of Indigenous peoples’ inevitable obsolescence resulted in the near total exclusion of Native people from the narrative arc of U.S. history. When Native Americans did appear in white historical scholarship or textbooks they did so primarily as two-­dimensional characters who played little role in causal change. Native people pushed back against this exclusion. In 1928 the Grand Council Fire of American Indians (GCFAI) began staging programs

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at schools across Chicago to educate students about Native culture and history. The GFCAI also secured a spot for Menominee attorney William Kershaw’s poem “The Indian’s Salute to His Country” in the public schools’ annual Indian Day celebrations. The poem articulated Native patriotism and described American Indians as part of the modern nation. Through these accomplishments the GCFAI successfully pushed Native history into the curriculum, broadening Chicago students’ understanding of U.S. history beyond the stalwart pioneers who populated the pages of most U.S. textbooks.45 Material remembrances also accomplished the goal of reminding U.S. audiences of the wrongs of the past and their effect on the present. When First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt attended a graduation ceremony at Roanoke College, a Catawba delegation gifted her a bracelet of brown beads that also included a single white bead. The brown beads represented the lands the United States had forcibly taken; the white bead was the remnant of their homeland.46 Beginning in 1935, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) offered another path for Native people to share their history with white audiences. Across the nation, Indigenous people told WPA workers a different history than the one that flowed from the pens and typewriters of Overland Trail memoirists. Sitting at the heart of these stories were removal narratives: the Native corollary to white westward tales of the Overland Trail.47 White memoirists in the same period shared sentimental tales of emigrants who suffered and died on voluntary westward treks. In 1930, emigrant Angelina Scott recounted the emotionally brutal tale of a father who, incapacitated by sickness, urges his family and the rest of their train to travel on without him. All he asks is that, before they depart, they leave him a cup of water placed so he can reach it.48 Scott’s reminiscence captured the traumas of death on the Trail that strained familial connections and isolated the dying from their loved ones. Speaking to WPA interviewers, Native people also recalled the traumas of dying on trails of removal. Paiute woman Jennie Cashbaugh detailed her grandmother’s death during her people’s forced march from Independence (in Owens Valley, California) to the Tejon Indian Reservation. The ever-­present threat of violence defined this forced march. At Indian Wells the soldiers lined the Paiutes up to kill them, but a government official rode up on horseback to stay the execution. Jennie Cashbaugh’s grandmother was not so fortunate. Later in the march, the tired and thirsty elderly woman sat to rest and,

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she hoped, have some water. Instead, a soldier seeing her sitting stabbed her “through her heart, dead.” Cashbaugh’s grandmother was not the only elderly Paiute woman to be murdered on the march. When another thirsty elderly Paiute woman took one step outside the caravan toward a small spring of water a soldier guard shot her in the back. Then he “left [her] there for the coyotes and buzzards.”49 Thirst and death threaded through Scott’s and Cashbaugh’s memories. In Scott’s tale, a self-­sacrificing dying father tells his family to travel on so as not to risk the window of weather closing before they can safely reach Oregon. In Cashbaugh’s memories, a burst of state violence kills thirsty elderly Paiute women. The father headed to Oregon died with a cup of water by his side; Paiute women died for wanting the same. In sharing their stories of suffering during removal, Native peoples such as the Paiute reminded whites that removal was the stark, dark corollary to westward expansion. Other Native narratives collected by the WPA provided a counterweight to whitewashed memories of Overland Trail demographics. Cherokee man Cunnie Martin told a WPA interviewer in 1938 that no fewer than three of his male relatives had participated in the rush to California. First his grandfather Nelson Harlan traveled with his brother across the Plains in 1849. Not long after, Martin’s father also “made the trip” to California. In a 1937 interview with the WPA, Cherokee man William Onan recounted his mother’s oral history of his uncle Henry Mattox who, at the age of fourteen, had “in 1849, during the gold rush” driven oxen from Missouri to California. For Onan, the history of his uncle Henry made him decide “to travel like my relatives when I grew to be a man.” Cherokee interviewees remembered the Trail as one of adventurous travel. In this memory, their accounts resembled those of white emigrants. But in drawing attention to their participation in this migration, Cherokee interviewees also undercut the dominant memory of the Trail as one of white American expansion and nationalism.50 With words and actions, Native people also reminded white Americans that the land their country had taken was a Native place. On August 4, 1930, Nez Perce people gathered again at the monument to Chief Joseph. Joseph had already been reburied there in 1905, with the participation of white memory-­workers. At that ceremony, Yellow Bull had told his audience that Joseph’s campaign to return home to Wallowa would endure. In the 1930 ceremony, Chief Peo-­peo Tholikt, followed by Yellow Wolf, repeated Joseph’s desire to “be taken back to his own country, the Wallowa, and buried by the

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side of his father. He did not want his bones left in a strange land.”51 Death, as prophesied in 1905, did not silence Joseph. Instead, the Nez Perce continued to give voice to his, and their, desire to return home. The marker at Joseph’s grave site provided a place from which to proclaim this message. Monuments and markers were also a tool in Indigenous efforts to remind white Americans of their suffering and the violence of American expansion. In 1932, the descendants of Big Foot’s band met at the Wounded Knee Massacre Site to memorialize those killed in 1890.52 In 1970, Standing Rock Sioux intellectual and activist Vine Deloria Jr. described visiting Wounded Knee in the 1930s and early 1940s as “the most memorable event of my early childhood.” The visits impressed on him both the violence of U.S. colonialism and the vividness of the memories of “older reservation people” of the massacre.53 One of the most famous and attention-­grabbing events at Wounded Knee was the occupation organized by the American Indian Movement (AIM) in February 1973. AIM traveled to Wounded Knee at the behest of members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe who asked for their protection against tribal chairperson Richard Wilson and his goon squad. As Ojibwe author David Treuer writes, “They held a ceremony at the gravesite of the victims of the 1890 massacre” then occupied the village. For seventy-­one days the AIM occupation of Wounded Knee shined a spotlight on reservation corruption and broadcast AIM’s case for redress.54 Visual culture was another medium through which Native peoples shared their memories of the horrors of December 29. In the 1930s, James Pipe-­on-­ Head pursued justice for the Lakota people through diplomatic negotiations and through paintings he created with his brother. In the words of historian David Grua, these paintings depict “Wounded Knee as a Killing Field.”55 Roughly thirty years later, Dakota artist Oscar Howe painted Wounded Knee as a brutal massacre. The painting positions firing cavalry above the viewer and their Lakota victims who are portrayed falling back under the hail of the cavalry’s bullets. The background of the painting seems to extend endlessly, detailing a massacre field complete with a cavalry officer knifing an infant and another shooting a kneeling woman begging for her life. Howe’s familial history informed his painting: he learned of Wounded Knee from his grandmother, who had a scar on her hand from where officers had shot her that morning.56 The work of Pipe-­on-­head and Howe visually defined Wounded Knee as a massacre, commanding all who looked on their work to see the Wichakasotapi for what it was.

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Figure 11. A general view of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on March 27, 1973, during negotiations between members of the American Indian Movement and federal agents. This photograph shows Wounded Knee occupiers paying their respects at the 1903 monument to the massacre’s victims. In the foreground, an unidentified Native woman wrapped in an American flag pauses to lay her hand on the monument. As she stands her shadow appears on the marble, humanizing the stone memorial to the dead. AP Photo.

Indigenous artists also took up the subject of the trauma of removal. In 1957 Pawnee World War II veteran Brummett Echohawk painted Trail of Tears depicting a roadside burial during Pawnee deportation from Nebraska to Indian Territory. The painting combines a long-­shot view of a line of Pawnee people making their way west with a close-­up of a woman and a man laying a shrouded corpse in a roadside grave. A leaning tree obscures the deceased from the shoulders up, permitting viewers, some of whom may have lost relatives on the Trail, to assign their identity of choice to the deceased.57 Little by little Native remembrances such as these shifted white interpretations of the history of the U.S. West. Then, in 1970, librarian and writer Dorris “Dee” Brown published Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.58 The blockbuster book placed the blame for Native suffering squarely on the shoulders of U.S. colonialism. The history was a success with white audiences, many of whom grappled with a darker vision of westward expansion for the first time. The book’s popularity rested

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in part on the timing of its release. Bury My Heart came out at the same time that white Americans were seeing Native activists on TV. But Brown’s narrative focused almost exclusively on Native oppression rather their activism. As Treuer, who first read Bury My Heart in college, has revealed, Brown’s description of Native people’s lives emphasized poverty and hopelessness over persistence and survivance.59 The limits of the incorporation of Native perspectives into white cultural production can also be seen in fictional accounts of the 1970s. In 1974 James A. Michener published the novel Centennial, which included a chapter called “The Massacre” based loosely on the Sand Creek massacre of 1864. The book became a television miniseries where it reached an even larger audience.60 As evidenced by the success of Brown’s book and Michener’s series white audiences seemed eager to condemn massacres of the past but less eager to grapple with Native issues of the present. There was, for example, little popular support for returning land to Native people. As they had in the nineteenth century, some strains of white culture also appropriated the Native dead to their own purposes. In the 1970s, fiction took up the theme of Native haunting of white suburbia. In Stephen King’s Pet Sematary an ancient “Indian Burial Ground” in a small Maine town is cast as the cause of horrors the dead visit on the living. As one critic has argued, this book should be seen in the context of the Maliseet, Penobscot, and Passamaquoddy bands of the Wabanaki Confederacy’s fight for their territory to be returned. In many ways, King’s horror novel reflected this contest over ownership.61 But in King’s hands, the concern was not restoring land to Native people. Rather Pet Sematary is an example of white settlers transforming Native dispossession and trauma into their own horror. King’s novel and related fictional stories of haunted settlers’ suburbs had parallels with John Beeson’s nineteenth-­century description of a vampiric U.S. nation built on the dead. But in Beeson’s case that horrific description was intended to reveal the rot at the center of U.S. expansion and to generate corrective activism among white settlers. In contrast, King’s novel appropriated the figurative Native dead for non-­Native purposes, much as European and then U.S. settlers had been doing since the North American invasion began. White appropriation of the Indigenous dead was also, horrifically, literal and material. Since the inception of the republic colonists had sought out Native remains and collected goods from their graves to satisfy scientific curiosity and to demonstrate their mark of ownership over the landscape. As we have seen, this desecration inspired a fervent Indigenous defense of

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the dead and their homelands. The 1970s marked renewed activism by Native people to protect their dead and their land. While not new, the widespread activist ferment of the decade combined with the growth of national awareness of American Indian issues to create conditions favorable to this activism’s success.62 For instance, in 1970, after forty-­six years of campaigning, the grandson of Little Crow—one of the Dakota men whom the U.S. military hanged in 1862—finally succeeded in having his grandfather’s scalp and skull returned to his family.63 Despite such gains, there was also ongoing opposition to protecting Native burial grounds and repatriating Indigenous remains and cultural objects. This opposition took two principal forms. The first questioned the validity of Native connection to their dead and their homeland. As an example, in 1973 the Chumash began a campaign to protect their burial ground near the Santa Barbara coast in response to a development company’s interest in building private housing on the site. Intense disagreement meant that the issue was still unresolved in the 1980s. Reporters for the local press split on the issue, with some newspaper articles questioning Chumash connection with the site and the burials there and others supporting the Chumash campaign.64 The second charge opponents of protection and repatriation leveled against Native activists was that the concerns of science and, in some cases, history outweighed Native demands for repatriation. In Nebraska, members of the Board of Directors of the State Historical Society were vociferous in their opposition to the state repatriation bill proposed by the Pawnee of Nebraska and Oklahoma. However, with the assistance of attorneys from the Native American Rights Fund, Pawnee activists successfully pushed the Nebraska state legislature to pass Bill 340 in 1989, stipulating that “dead bodies and grave offerings must be returned to the tribes to which they belong” and “that unmarked burials throughout Nebraska will be protected in the future.” Because of this legislation the Pawnee nation reclaimed thousands of artifacts and the remains of more than four hundred of their ancestors. The day to bring the remains home from the Nebraska State Historical Society was set for September 10, 1990. That morning, members of the nation arrived with a wooden coffin for each ancestor. After carefully placing the remains in the coffins, they then transported them ninety-­five miles northwest to Genoa for reburial.65 Today a stone marker at the east end of the Genoa Cemetery honors their memory.66 A month after members of the Pawnee nation reburied their ancestors, the U.S. Senate passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation

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Act (NAGPRA). In November President George H. W. Bush signed the landmark legislation into law. Similar in intent to Nebraska Bill 340, NAGPRA was designed to protect Native burials and to facilitate repatriation of Native American human remains as well as objects. The intent of the law was to promote treating Native human remains with “dignity and respect.”67 NAGPRA was the product of decades of work of Indigenous activists across the country, including Pawnee brothers Walter R. and Roger C. Echo-­Hawk, who had helped pass the landmark state legislation in Nebraska. NAGPRA codified the message of Native activists that unequal treatment of Native and non-­ Native dead was a violation of their human rights. As Walter C. Echo-­Hawk put it, “If you desecrate a white grave, you wind up sitting in prison. But desecrate an Indian grave, you get a Ph.D.” A Northern Cheyenne man celebrated the passage of NAGPRA by asking white audiences, “How would you feel if your grandmother’s grave were opened, and the contents were shipped back east to be boxed and warehoused with 31,000 others and itinerant pothunters were allowed to ransack her house in search of ‘artifacts’ with the blessing of the U.S. government? Then he concluded, “It is sick behavior. It is unChristian. It is [now] punishable by law.”68 All Native peoples were asking for, as Cheyenne and Muskogee activist Suzan Shown Harjo put it in 1995, was the “human right to get buried.”69 Even as legislation supported repatriation and protection of Native graves and as more non-­Natives began to understand what was at stake, obstacles remained. Opposition to repatriation in the name of research or in the form of requirements for Indigenous people to prove their connection, or “cultural affiliation,” to remains and objects have slowed and, in some cases, halted the repatriation process. The process of repatriation has also uncovered painful truths. In 1998, staff at the University of Nebraska-­Lincoln (UNL) revealed that in the 1960s researchers had incinerated Native remains they deemed no longer valuable for research. The revelation reignited Indigenous activism around NAGPRA. Because of this activism UNL accelerated its repatriation process and funded a memorial on the east side of campus. The text of the memorial plaque honors the dead who were improperly incinerated in the 1960s in an act of “cultural injustice” and declares this to be a lesson that everyone should treat “all persons with honor and respect.”70 But many white Americans remain blind to these injustices. In 2015, a group of Trail enthusiasts held a reburial ceremony for two emigrants who had been temporarily removed from their graves near Box Elder Springs, Wyoming. Trail historians participated in the planning and execution of the

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reburial ceremony alongside members of the Wyoming Historical Society, including Patsy “Bixby” Parkin, a former schoolteacher, who believes she is a “reincarnated pioneer.”71 On May 3, 2015, dressed in pioneer attire, Parkin led the reburial of emigrant Ann Roelofson Scott on a ranch just outside Glendo, Wyoming. The ceremony blurred past and present nearly as seamlessly as Parkin believes she does herself. Local high school students built wooden coffins for the remains in shop class, community women sewed quilts to cover them, and two men used ropes to lower the coffins into hand-­dug graves.72 Organizers, participants, and reporters framed the Scott reburial as a story of a wrong corrected. In their logic, her remains should never have been moved. Instead, they should remain near Box Elder Springs at the spot where her family had buried her. This logic frames nearly every discussion of the return and preservation of emigrant remains on the Trail. From the perspective of Trail memory-­workers, the remains should stay where they are, where their families had originally buried them. This logic defies the many accounts from emigrants that detail their wrenching pain of leaving loved ones behind. Ann Scott’s family expressed a similar emotional trauma at leaving her remains in Wyoming. In her journal of the overland trip, the then teenage Abigail Scott Duniway described the pain of leaving her mother so far from home. Knowing she had to leave her mother behind, Duniway could only hope that the rise on which they had buried her would make her grave visible to later passersby. What emigrants had hoped to avoid at all costs—being forced to bury their loved ones far from home and family—became, for later settlers and Trail memory-­workers, the goal.73 This shift in logic of proper burial place furthered settler goals of marking Native places with white history and presence. Absent Ann Scott’s remains, the place near Box Elder Springs was simply a ranch. With Scott’s remains (and those of an unidentified male emigrant who had been buried next to her) the site became a marker of long-­standing white presence and the sacrifices emigrants made to settle the West. During the reburial ceremony what went unsaid was as important as what was said. By 2015, when Parkin organized the reburial of Ann Scott’s remains, NAGPRA had been a federal law for twenty-­five years. In that time, Native people had had to continue to fight for the return of their dead. Many remained, and remain still, in institutions. Institutional and individual opposition has delayed repatriation. At the University of Wyoming, anthropologist George Gill became a prominent anti-­repatriation activist. He refused

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to return Native remains and even spoke out against NAGPRA. Gill also returned Scott’s remains.74 Trail memory-­workers who advocated for this return left this larger context out of the reburial. In pushing for reburying emigrants but in neglecting to connect emigrant reburial experience with that of Indigenous remains, Trail memory-­workers continued an exclusionary Trail history. Even when Trail commemorators aspired to be inclusive, they often failed to acknowledge the violence of the iconic migration and of U.S. colonialism writ large. In the 1990s, the passage of NAGPRA also led to a new chapter in Native and white memory of Spotted Tail’s daughter, Mni Akuwin. In 1994, in accordance with NAGPRA legislation, staff at the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming contacted the president of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe to inform him that they believed there was an ankle bone belonging to Mni Akuwin in their collection. According to Lakota historian Victor Douville, the ankle bone likely came to the center through the Clemens Oskamp Collection, which was donated by Susan Oskamp in 1964. Upon receiving the letter from the Heritage Center, the president of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe forwarded it to NAGPRA representatives at the American Indian Center at Sinte Gleska University. Those representatives then worked to identify Mni Akuwin’s descendants so that her relatives could make recommendations for how to transfer the bone to them and, ultimately, decide what should be done with it. Sometime during this process, descendants of Colonel Maynadier, the commander of Fort Laramie at the time of Mni Akuwin’s burial, were also contacted.75 Eventually, in 2005, Mni Akuwin’s and Maynadier’s descendants would gather at Fort Laramie to rebury her remains. Like Mni Akuwin’s original funeral, the reburial ceremony held different meanings for the distinct constituencies who participated in the event on June 25, 2005. A description of the reburial event posted on the Fort Laramie page of the website of the National Park Service (NPS) emphasized the shared goals of Spotted Tail and Colonel Maynadier. The men were described as “men of courage and vision who dreamed of peaceful co-­existence between nations, both red and white.” The article also praised Maynadier’s sympathy for the Lakota people. According to the NPS page, after Mni Akuwin’s funeral Maynadier wrote a letter to his wife in which he told her the ceremony had strengthened his resolve to help Lakota people who had been “swindled, ill-­ treated, and abused.”76 In the history told by NPS, the significance of Mni Akuwin’s funeral was in how it inspired well-­meaning whites to treat Native peoples better.

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While the NPS version acknowledged U.S. abuses, descendants of Maynadier and Spotted Tail saw the ceremony somewhat differently. Many of Maynadier’s descendants focused on the reburial ceremony as a history of two great men: Maynadier and Spotted Tail. Charles Stehle, a direct descendant of Maynadier, believed the funeral was historically significant because of the “relationship” it established between the two leaders. Lakota historian Victor Douville saw the reburial ceremony as part of a much broader tapestry of the past. According to Douville, Mni Akuwin’s funeral was significant for being “one of the moments” in the history of U.S.-­Native relations that “had great impacts.”77 Overall, historic accounts that emanated from this 2005 reburial ceremony largely omitted U.S. military aggression and treaty violations. For instance, there was no mention of the United States building forts on the Bozeman Trail in violation of their treaty agreement. Moreover, an article published on June 24 and apparently based on the NPS web history quoted Spotted Tail’s words describing his yearning for peace but failed to include his calls for redress for U.S. wrongs.78 The text of the marker that the NPS erected at the site of Mni Akuwin’s scaffold also withheld judgment of U.S. actions while reiterating a message of peace and reconciliation.79 But the Lakota shared their own messages at this site. In 2011 Mary Jane Spotted Tail, a direct descendant of Mni Akuwin who had been instrumental in planning her reburial ceremony, returned to Fort Laramie with her daughter, Gayla Gabriel. They were there to honor their ancestors, including Mni Akuwin. As they paid their respects, Mary Jane Spotted Tail and Gabriel were approached by a reporter for the Casper Star-­Tribune who asked them about the Black Hills. The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie had promised the sacred Black Hills to the Lakota in perpetuity. But the United States wrongly seized them after the discovery of gold in the Hills. In June 2011 the Lakota were still fighting for their return. When the reporter asked Spotted Tail about the U.S. government’s refusal to return the Black Hills, she responded that the Black Hills “have always been and always will be ours . . . I don’t care what the government says.” When asked a similar question, Gabriel issued a direct command: “It is ours . . . Give it back.” Standing near NPS’s marker celebrating cross-­cultural collaboration, Spotted Tail and Gabriel made it clear that U.S.-­Lakota history was also one of U.S. duplicity. When Mary Jane died in 2015 staffers at Fort Laramie National historic site flew the flag at half-­mast in her honor. The government has not returned the Black Hills.80 Native people, however, have been reclaiming land for themselves. In the summer of 2021, the Nez Perce returned to their Wallowa Valley homeland.

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After trying to return home for more than 144 years, the tribe succeeded by buying some of their land from a white rancher. After the sale was complete tribal members traveled to their restored land to conduct a land blessing ceremony at Am’sáaxpa or “the place of boulders,” in Joseph, Oregon.81 In September 2022 the Oglala Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux jointly purchased forty acres of land around the Wounded Knee site. Their intention is to ensure that their tribes can maintain the site as a sacred location. Manny Iron Hawk, a member of the Wounded Knee Survivors Association, described the acquisition as connected to the Ghost Dance. As he told reporters, “Today we are the new Ghost Dancers, and we carry on a duty that came to us to do what we can for our relatives there at Wounded Knee.”82 Change is also afoot in the Sierra Nevada. In September 2021 the Washoe succeeded in renaming a ski resort near their lake from the derogatory Sq— Valley to Palisades Tahoe. Two months later Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland formally declared sq— to be a derogatory term and convened a task force to select suitable replacement names for all sites on federal lands that had the term in their names. In October 2022, a Name Change Anniversary Panel convened at Palisades Tahoe, approximately ten miles south of the Pioneer Monument.83 And for the first time since the Trail gained federal funding in the mid-­ twentieth century, historic sites and museums along the Trail have slowly begun to move the needle away from total exclusion of Native perspectives and toward inclusion. In recent years the NPS and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the two major federal entities that are also principally responsible for presenting Trail history to the public, have moved away from telling exclusively white histories of the Trail. For example, the NPS website for the historic trails now contains multiple short articles that include Native perspectives.84 Moreover, the California Trail Interpretive Center, a cooperative project between the BLM and the Southern Nevada Conservancy, includes an exhibit and information page devoted to the Western Shoshone people.85 Nonetheless, as intellectuals such as Jodi Byrd have pointed out, and as Mni Akuwin’s reburial ceremony illustrated, the focus on inclusion can stifle histories that center U.S. violence and the entirety of Native experiences.86 This challenge also attends what is perhaps the biggest watershed event in recent efforts to correct twenty-­first-­century memory of the Overland Trail: the release of a new version of the popular Oregon Trail game. The original game was developed in 1970 in a Minnesota basement and was designed to interest students in history by allowing them to live the experience of the

Oatman Massacre Site

Mountain Meadows Massacre Site

California Trail Center

City of Rocks National Reserve

Great Salt Lake

National Historic Trails Center

Independence Rock State Historic Site

National Oregon-California Trail Center

Ash Hollow State Historical Park

er

0

St. Mary’s Mission and Oregon Trail Nature Park

Fort Kearny State Historical Park

Fort Laramie National Historic Site Scotts Bluff National Monument Pl a tt e R iv

100 mi

Shawnee Indian Mission State Historic Site

National Frontier Trails Museum

Old Spanish National Historic Trail

Santa Fe National Historic Trail

Mormon National Historic Trail

California National Historic Trail

Figure 12. Select Overland Trail Historic Sites and Museums, 2022. This map shows the routes of the National Historic Trails administered by the National Park Service as of November 2022. This map does not include all the trails that have been mapped by Trail enthusiasts. Map by Erin Greb Cartography.

PACIFIC OCEAN

Sutter’s Fort State Historic Park

Whitman Mission National Historic Site

National Historic Oregon Trail Center

Tamástslikt Cultural Institute

Columbia River

Donner Memorial Park

End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center

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migration. Shortly thereafter it became a phenomenon. The original game correctly identified the possibility of death as a determinative factor in the migration, transforming “Died of Dysentery” into an instantly recognizable cultural shorthand and a shared reference point for decades of schoolchildren, many of whom now have their own children.87 As historian Katrina M. Phillips (one of the consultants on the game’s 2021 remake) has pointed out, the new version will give the next generation the opportunity to play a game that more closely resembles Trail history than whitewashed Trail memory. The revised game aspires to portray the Trail as the invasion it was. Yet, as historian and consultant William J. Bauer Jr. acknowledges, while the new version improves on the original it retains the framework of westward expansion: players still start from the edge of the United States, with the goal of surviving the westward journey to California and Oregon.88 In the gaming world and in our own, the legacy of the Trail as a triumphal story of white westward expansion continues to dominate popular understandings of this migration. As of today, the triumphal Pioneer Monument remains standing at Donner Pass as it has since 1918. But while the monument at Donner Pass endures, others do not. In 2020 the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement (first founded in 2013) ignited a national reckoning with historical monuments. BLM reentered the national spotlight when activists began protesting the Minnesota police killing of George Floyd. The forty-­six year old Black man died with an officer’s knee on his neck and the word “mom” on his tongue. Following Floyd’s killing, BLM members took to the streets to protest police violence and monuments to white supremacy. As of the fall of 2022, monuments have been removed from town squares, college campuses, and pioneer cemeteries. BLM initially targeted monuments celebrating slavery, which helped galvanize activists to target pioneer monuments as well. In 2022 the Marcus Whitman statue in Walla Walla was replaced with one of tribal rights activist Billy Frank Jr., The Pioneer statue on the University of Oregon campus was taken down by unknown activists, and the Early Days statue that was part of the Pioneer Monument in San Francisco was removed.89 Three years ago, as monuments began to be moved across the United States, I started asking my undergraduate students to consider the future of the Pioneer (Donner) Monument. Out of nearly one hundred essays I have received, nearly all suggested some sort of revision. Their responses and the productive turmoil that is attending historical monuments and sites across the United States suggest that Trail history is also on the cusp of being revised

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and revitalized. For now, the Pioneer Monument remains standing as it has since 1918. But it is uncertain how much longer it will continue to do so. Like the resistance to mythologies of the Lost Cause that spurred the recent toppling of Confederate monuments, activism against U.S. colonialism has a long history, a small portion of which has been covered in this book. In covering this history, I have endeavored to show that resistance to the white mythology of westward expansion played a formative role in the history of the Overland Trail. Native resistance to removal helped shape white Americans’ understanding of westward migration and the experience of their death and suffering. The nature of that death and suffering came in the unexpected form of cholera, a disease that was not supposed to follow emigrants out onto the Plains. For twenty-­first-­century audiences still living under the shadow of Covid, the cholera epidemics seem, perhaps, closer in time than the nearly one hundred seventy-­five years that separate us from 1849. So too do accounts of heartbroken emigrants burying loved ones on the Trail inspire feelings of connection. After all, death and loss are universal components of the human condition. Loss and death, however, are not experienced equally by people across time and place. Some peoples have, as Native activists pointed out at the turn of the twentieth century, suffered more. This suffering was not inevitable. Rather, it resulted from decisions driven by the desire to keep the Overland Trail open. Keeping the road open kept emigrants heading west and smoothed the United States’ path to expanding territorial control. Throughout most of the twentieth century remembering the Overland Trail as an emigrant burial ground furthered this goal of solidifying U.S. possession. But there are other ways to remember, ways that bring us closer to the past while also drawing the Trail into the present and future.

NOTES

Introduction 1.  For a discussion of “If I live” and related phrases, see Lewis O. Saum, “Death in the Popular Mind of Pre-­Civil War America,” in “Death in America,” ed. David E. Stannard, special issue, American Quarterly 26, no. 5 (December 1974): 484. 2.  Anna Eliza Kemp Gowdy, “Crossing the Plains: Personal Recollections of the Journey to Oregon in 1852,” p. 14, Rosenstock Collection, Autry Library Collection, Autry National Center, Los Angeles. 3.  For analyses of covered wagons as symbols of U.S. expansion, see Dawn Glanz, How the West Was Drawn: American Art and the Settling of the Frontier (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982), 60–61; and Angela Firkus, “Nineteenth-­Century Overland Travelers Returning East,” Journal of the West 46 (Summer 2007): 50–55. For equations of westward expansion and the Overland Trail with a string of covered wagons, see Sidney Warren, Farthest Frontier: The Pacific Northwest (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 52; Richard Dunlop, Wheels West, 1590–1900 (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1977); and Keith Heyer Meldahl, Hard Road West: History and Geology Along the Gold Rush Trail (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), cover image. This covered wagon symbolism is not unique to the United States. See Michael Adas, “From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon: Integrating the Exceptionalist Narrative of the American Experience into World History,” American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (2001): 1692–1720; and James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-­World, 1783–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 4.  Donald William Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, Volume 2: Continental America, 1800–1867 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 3. 5.  Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 354. 6.  Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 128. 7.  Richard Rieck, “Trail Deaths, Trail Graves, and Cenotaphs: Here? There? Where?” Overland Journal 37, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 16–28. 8.  How many people died, like how many people traveled, is nonetheless impossible to definitively determine. Unruh, who based his estimates on emigrant accounts of deaths and graves, was careful to note that his conclusion regarding mortality rates was debatable. His numbers, for instance, do not account for the disproportionate numbers of young ­people on the Trail and thus the possibility that the Trail in fact increased mortality risk for this demographic. See John D. Unruh Jr., The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-­Mississippi West, 1840–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 74–75, 408–13, 526nn74–75.

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9.  Multiple historians have located the rise of the covered wagon symbol to before migration across the Overland Trail. For examples, see Glanz, How the West Was Drawn, 60–61; and Laurence M. Hauptman, “Mythologizing Westward Expansion: Schoolbooks and the Image of the American Frontier Before Turner,” Western Historical Quarterly 8, no. 3 (July 1977): 271–72. 10.  For accounts of wagon boxes, beds, and boards becoming coffins, see William Warner, “Overland in 1853: William Warner’s Letter to His Mother,” California Historical Society Quarterly 5, no. 3 (September 1926): 289; John Clinton Couper Diary, July 30, 1852, p. 17, MSS 1508, Overland Journeys to the Pacific Collection, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland; G. W. Thissell, Crossing the Plains in ’49 (Oakland, Calif.: G. W. Thissell, 1903), 28–29; James Akin Jr. to Lafayette Richey and Hannah Richey, June 19, 1852, W. W. Morrison Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, quoted in Andrea Mary Binder, “‘Deep Is the Grave, and Silent’: Death and Mourning on the Oregon-­California Trails” (MA thesis, University of Wyoming, 2011), 46; Harriet A. L. Smith, “Recollections, My Trip Across the Plains in 1849,” California State Library, Sacramento, Digital Transcription by Kay Threlkeld, p. 6; Susan (Thompson) Lewis Parrish, “Westward in 1850: (Account of overland trip from Muscatine, Ia., to California by way of Santa Fe and Spanish Trails),” HM 16760, p. 2, The Huntington Library, San Marino; and Charles E. Haas and John B. Haas, “John B Haas . . . Pioneer: Autobiography,” Pony Express Courier: Stories of Pioneers and Old Trails 5 (August 1938): 10. For editorial comments on the widespread use of wagon boxes as coffins, see Weldon Willis Rau, Surviving the Oregon Trail, 1852 (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2001), 54, 69. 11.  Rieck, “Trail Deaths, Trail Graves, and Cenotaphs,” 21; J. Goldsborough Bruff, Overland Journal, p. 40, July 8, 1849, Journal and Drawings of J. Goldsborough Bruff, 1849–1853, HM 8044, The Huntington Library, San Marino; Thissell, Crossing the Plains in ’49, 135; Carlisle S. Abbott, Recollections of a California Pioneer (New York: Neale Publishing, 1917), 29; James Wilkins, “Journey,” HM 27511, p. 41, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 12.  Thomas Dorsey Journal, August 14, 1854, Thomas Dorsey Papers, 1818–1883, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; Clinton S. Martin, Boy Scouts and the Oregon Trail, 1830–1930: The Story of the Scout Pilgrimage to Independence Rock, Wyoming, to Hold Rendezvous in Honor of the Pioneers Who Won and Held the West (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1930), 22. Geographer Richard Rieck has documented six cases of emigrant graves marked with wagon tires. Rieck, “Trail Deaths, Trail Graves, and Cenotaphs,” 17. 13.  Gowdy, “Crossing the Plains,” 14. 14.  Abigail Scott Duniway, Overland Journal, p. 19, May 25, 1852, MSS 432, Abigail Scott Duniway Papers, 1852–1915, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland; William Parker Tell, “Notes by the Way,” July 20, 1849, The Huntington Library, San Marino. Tell hoped that later travelers would see the corpse and succeed in burying him. Emigrants often buried exposed corpses they found on the road, so it is possible that this anonymous corpse found permanent shelter underground. For examples of emigrants burying exposed corpses, see Chapter 3. For failure to bury and its meaning, see Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799–1883 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 67–68. 15.  Louise Smith Clappe used the pen name Dame Shirley. Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe, The Shirley Letters: From the California Mines, 1851–1852, ed. Marlene Smith-­Baranzini (Berkeley, Calif.: Heyday Books, 2001), 164. 16.  Robert W. Johannsen, “The Meaning of Manifest Destiny,” in Manifest Destiny and Empire: American Antebellum Expansionism, ed. Sam W. Haynes and Christopher Morris (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008), 10–14; John Higham, From Boundlessness to

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Consolidation: The Transformation of American Culture, 1848–1860 (Ann Arbor, MI: William L. Clements Library, 1969), 12–13. 17.  Elliott West, “A Longer, Grimmer, but More Interesting Story,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 40, no. 3 (Summer 1990): 72–76. The most famous, and most critiqued, of these interpretations is Frederick Jackson Turner’s essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Frederick J. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Historical Archives, American Historical Association, https://​www​.historians​.org​/about​ -aha​-and​-membership​/aha​-history​-and​-archives​/historical​-archives​/the​-significance​-of​-the ​-frontier​-in​-american​-history​-(​ 1893). For overviews of critiques and interpretations of the frontier thesis, see John Mack Faragher, “The Frontier Trail: Rethinking Turner and Reimagining the American West,” American Historical Review 98, no. 1 (February 1993): 106–17; and Kerwin Lee Klein, “Reclaiming the ‘F’ Word, or Being and Becoming Postwestern,” Pacific Historical Review 65, no. 2 (May 1996): 179–215. 18.  Jay Monaghan, The Overland Trail (Indianapolis: Bobbs-­Merrill Company, 1947), 8. For an additional study from this era that asserts the symbolic prominence of the Overland Trail, see George R. Stewart, The California Trail: An Epic with Many Heroes (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1962), 319. 19.  Oregon-­California Trails Association, “Emigrant Trails Hall of Fame, John D. Unruh, Jr.,” https://​www​.octa​-Trails​.org​/wp​-content​/uploads​/2018​/08​/Unruh​-6​-4​-18​-revised​.pdf. 20.  Unruh was not the first to make this claim. See, for example, John W. Caughey, “Transit of the 49ers,” in Essays in Western History in Honor of Professor TA Larson, ed. Roger Daniels (Laramie: University of Wyoming Publications 37, 1971), 25. But Plains Across has become the enduring source for this interpretation. For a reference to Unruh’s death statistics, see Meldahl, Hard Road West, 14, 75. 21.  John Mack Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979). Faragher was joined by a long list of female historians working on similar topics related to the trails including Glenda Riley, Lillian Schlissel, and Julie Roy Jeffrey. Some of these scholars agreed with his depiction of suffering women, but others, including Sandra Myres, questioned it. Sandra Myres, “Westward Ho! Women on the Overland Trails,” in Westering Women and the Frontier Experience, 1800–1915 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), 133. Interest in questions of gender in Trail scholarship has persisted. See Melody M. Miyamoto, “No Home for Domesticity?: Gender and Society on the Overland Trails” (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2006). For an overview of the coming of age of (white) women’s history in the West, see Sue Armitage, “Western Women: Beginning to Come into Focus,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 32, no. 3 (Summer 1982): 2–9. 22.  On this opportunity, see Allan G. Bogue, “Emigrants West: Male and Female,” Reviews in American History 8, no. 2 (June 1980): 221–27. 23.  Richard White, “Trashing the Trails,” in Trails: Toward a New Western History, ed. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner, and Charles E. Rankin (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), 38–39. New Western historians recognized the insights of Unruh and Faragher even as they asserted a need to move beyond the study of the Overland Trail: Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 38, 40, 52–53; Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 203–8. For a more recent assertion that overland sources have been well plumbed, see David M. Wrobel, Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West (Lawrence:

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University Press of Kansas, 2002), ix. For arguments that historians have overstated the Trail’s importance, particularly given other massive migrations to the U.S. West, see Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 96; and Jared Farmer, On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 292. 24.  Books that reinterpreted classic topics include Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); Wrobel, Promised Lands; Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-­Mexican War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008); and Cynthia Culver Prescott, Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019). 25.  For works that analyze African Americans and Native peoples as emigrants, see Shirley Anne Moore, Sweet Freedom’s Plains: African Americans on the Overland Trails, 1841–1869 (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 2016); Jack E. Fletcher, Patricia K. A. Fletcher, and Lee Whiteley, Cherokee Trail Diaries, 3 vols., (Sequim, Wash.: Fletcher Family Foundation, 1999– 2001); and Andrew Shaler, “Mariposa and the Invasion of Ahwahnee: Indigenous Histories of Resistance, Resilience, and Migration in Gold Rush California” (PhD diss., University of California, Riverside, 2019). For an attempt to integrate Native history with the Trail, see Michael L. Tate, Indians and Emigrants: Encounters on the Overland Trails (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006). 26.  Two studies have positioned Native peoples, rather than white emigrants, at the center of historical analysis. One of these is an edited collection that analyzes the Trail experience as a subset of Shoshone history; the other shows how the Pima and Maricopa responded to white emigrants by dramatically expanding their crop production in response to new demand and, then, transitioning to a cash-­based trading system based on the gold standard. Dale L. Morgan, Shoshonean Peoples and the Overland Trails: Frontiers of the Utah Superintendency of Indian Affairs, 1849–1869, ed. Richard L. Saunders (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2007); David H. DeJong, “‘Good Samaritans of the Desert’: The Pima-­Maricopa Villages as Described in California Emigrant Journals, 1846–1852,” Journal of the Southwest 47, no. 3 (Autumn 2005): 457–96. 27.  For a recent, incisive discussion of these terms, see Brook Bauer and Elizabeth Ellis, “Indigenous, Native American, or American Indian? The Limitations of Broad Terms,” in “What’s in a Name?,” ed. Nora Slonimsky, Jessica Choppin Roney, and Andrew Shankman, forum, Journal of the Early Republic 43, no. 1, (Spring 2023): 61–74. 28.  Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010), xiv, 105–6. 29.  The literature on cartography is large and growing. Particularly useful studies are Martin Brückner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Susan Schulten, Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-­Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); and Jimmy L. Bryan, “Unquestionable Geographies: The Empirical and the Romantic in U.S. Expansionist Cartography, 1810–1848,” Pacific Historical Review 87, no. 4 (Fall 2018): 593–637. 30.  On settler colonialism and conquest, see Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (June 2001): 866–905; Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Global History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); and Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest. For struggles over claiming place in what became

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the United States, see Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Christine M. DeLucia, Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2019); Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998); Martha A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002); and Coll Thrush, Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-­Over Place (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007). 31.  For scholarship that focuses on the importance of the dead to claiming places, see Patricia E. Rubertone, “Remembering the Dead,” in Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 165–87; Craig Thompson Friend, “Mutilated Bodies, Living Specters: Scalpings and Beheadings in the Early South,” in Death and the American South, ed. Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 16; and Matthew Dennis, “Patriotic Remains: Bones of Contention in the Early Republic,” in Mortal Remains: Death in Early America, ed. Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 148. Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2008), 11, 120–33, 247–49, 231–32. For the importance of graves and memorials to establishing settler sovereignty in other colonial contexts, see Elizabeth Buettner, “Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia in Postcolonial Britain and India,” History & Memory 18, no. 1 (2006): 5–42; and Rebecca M. Brown, “Inscribing Colonial Monumentality: A Case Study of the 1763 Patna Massacre Memorial,” Journal of Asian Studies 65, no. 1 (February 2006): 91–113. 32.  Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 98. 33. Laderman, Sacred Remains, 67. 34. Hester Blum, “American Graves, Pacific Plots,” in American Literary Geographies: Spatial Practice and Cultural Production, 1500–1900, ed. Martin Brückner and Hsuan L. Hsu (Wilmington: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 163–68. 35. Donald McKay Frost, Notes on General Ashley, the Overland Trail and South Pass (Barre, Mass.: Barre Gazette, 1960), 138. 36. Oregon-­ California Trails Association, “First Emigrants on the Oregon Trail,” https://​octa​-trails​.org​/articles​/first​-emigrants​-on​-the​-oregon​-trail/. 37.  Elliott West, The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 19; Unruh, Plains Across, 84–85; Merrill J. Mattes, Platte River Road Narratives: A Descriptive Bibliography of Travel over the Great Central Overland Route to Oregon, California, Utah, Colorado, Montana, and Other Western States and Territories, 1812– 1866 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 2–5. It is possible, as Walter Nugent suggests, that the departure point of Missouri and Iowa has overrepresented the proportion of departing emigrants from those states. Emigrants may have been recorded as leaving from Missouri and Iowa when they had, in fact, started from points further east. It is possible that the Trail was even more diverse. Walter Nugent, Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansionism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 185. 38.  Martha Ann Freeman, “Reminiscences of an 1854 Trip,” 1905, p. 1, Martha Ann Freeman Papers, Society of California Pioneers, San Francisco. For similar assertions, see Howard Lamar, “Rites of Passage: Young Men and Their Families in the Overland Trails Experience,

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1843–1869,” in “Soul-­Butter and Hog Wash” and Other Essays on the American West, ed. Thomas G. Alexander (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1978), 49. 39.  “Finding Aid,” Martha Ann Freeman Papers, Society of California Pioneers, San Francisco, https://​oac​.cdlib​.org​/findaid​/ark:​/13030​/c8s75j2g​/entire​_text/; Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 152–53; Brian Roberts, American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-­Class Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 3–7, 31–32, 75–76. 40.  Johnson, Roaring Camp; Aims McGuinness, Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008); Mae Ngai, The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes, Chinese Migration, and Global Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2022). 41.  Joseph Middleton, “The Diary and Letters of Dr. Joseph Middleton: Embracing his Trip Across the Plains via the Lassen or ‘Death Route’ Cutoff through the Desert and over the Sierra Nevada to California in 1849 with observations on the Route, Outfit & Method of Travel,” June 13, 1849, p. 11, Joseph Middleton Papers, MSS S-­39, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, transcribed by Richard Rieck, p. 5 of transcription; Kanesville Frontier Guardian and Sentinel, April 8, May 13, May 28, 1852, quoted in Walker D. Wyman, “Council Bluffs and the Westward Movement,” Iowa Journal of History 47, no. 2 (April 1949): 107–8; Cist’s Weekly Advertiser, May 23, 1849, California Epistle Head Quarters G.O.C., St Joseph, Mo., April 22, 1849, Box 16, “NYC-­North Carolina-­Ohio,” and Gus Blair to Dr. Sir, July 13, 1849, Fort Des Moines Star, November 2, 1849, 2/2, Ralph P. Bieber Collection, The Huntington Library, San Marino, transcribed by Will Bagley. 42.  For articulations of this fear, see Amelia Hadley, “Journal of Travails to Oregon,” in Best of Covered Wagon Women: Diaries and Letters from the Western Trails, ed. Kenneth L. Holmes (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark Company, 2008), 133; The Diaries of Asa Cyrus Call: March 28th, 1850–December 26th, 1853, ed. John Call and Vanessa Call (Salt Lake City, Utah: Family History Library, 1998), 21; and Charles Ben Darwin, Journal, vol. 1, May 28, 1849, p. 82, HM 16770, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 43.  As late as the early twentieth century, fewer than 15 percent of Americans died away from home. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 9. 44.  Charles R. Parke, Diary, June 11, 1849, The Huntington Library, San Marino; “The Wedding in the Gate of the Rocky Mountains,” The United States Magazine, and Democratic Review 24, no. 128 (February 1849): 124, HathiTrust; Margaret White Chambers, “Reminiscences, 1851,” p. 10, MSS 1508, Overland Journeys to the Pacific Collection, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland. I have used an accepted version of the title of The United States Magazine, and Democratic Review in the text. 45.  Sylvia D. Hoffert, “‘A Very Peculiar Sorrow’: Attitudes Toward Infant Death in the Urban Northeast, 1800–1860,” American Quarterly 39, no. 4 (January 1987): 601–2. 46.  On the importance of a home-­based death, see Faust, Republic of Suffering, 6–17. 47. Laderman, Sacred Remains, 27–38. 48.  Erik R. Seeman, Speaking with the Dead in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 215–28. Gary Laderman has also noted the increasing Protestant focus on corpses and grave sites (Sacred Remains, 76). 49.  Charlotte L. Whipple, Diary, May 17, 1847, Charlotte Lambert Whipple Diary and Family Correspondence, 1847–1888, Manuscripts and Archives, New York Public Library; Franklin Y. Fitch, The Life, Travels and Adventures of an American Wanderer: A Truthful Narrative of

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Events in the Life of Alonzo P. DeMilt (New York: John W. Lovell Company, 1883), 17; Silas Newcomb, Journal, May 17, 1850, FAC 4, The Huntington Library, San Marino; Agur Pixley to Son, April 2, 1849, Agur Pixley Texas Correspondence, 1849 March–July, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 50. Faust, Republic of Suffering, 24; Nicholas Marshall, “The Great Exaggeration: Death and the Civil War,” Journal of the Civil War Era 4, no. 1 (March 2014): 21. 51.  Mark S. Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008), 18–20; Faust, Republic of Suffering; Ann Fabian, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010) 5, 165–67. For additional examples that interpret the Civil War as the pivot of nineteenth-­century death practices, see Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 97–99; Susan-­Mary Grant, “Patriot Graves: American National Identity and the Civil War Dead,” American Nineteenth Century History 5, no. 3 (2014): 74–100; and Ashley Mays, “‘If Heart Speaks Not to Heart’: Condolence Letters and Confederate Widows’ Grief,” Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 3 (September 2017): 377–400. 52.  Cultural historian Thomas Laqueur has challenged Faust’s description of Civil War transformation by tracing a persistent belief in familial responsibility for dead soldiers well into World War I. Thomas Walter Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015), 416–18, 448, 487. As early as 2007, Martina Will de Chaparro called for U.S. historians to expand their studies of death beyond the Northeast. But as late as 2019 noted historian of death Erik Seeman lamented that the historiographic axis continued to skew toward white actors and tilt to the Northeast. Martina Will de Chaparro, Death and Dying in New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007), xviii; Erik R. Seeman, “Death in early America,” History Compass 17, no. 7 (July 2019). The frequent repetition of “America” in the titles of the literature on death and dying in the nineteenth century masks their nearly exclusive focus on the Northeast. Examples include James J. Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830–1920 (Philadelphia: ­Temple University Press, 1980); Laderman, Sacred Remains; and David Charles Sloane, The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). 53. Faust, Republic of Suffering, 11–13. 54.  A variety of Trail bibliographies identify the location of these sources. The most comprehensive are Mattes, Platte River Road Narratives; and Will Bagley, “Across the Plains, Mountains, and Deserts: A Bibliography of the Oregon-­California Trail, 1812–1912” (2014), https://​ www​.nps​.gov​/cali​/learn​/historyculture​/upload​/Across​_the​_Plains​-Mountains​-​_and​_Deserts​ -508​.pdf. For an example of an overland account embedded in a pension claim, see Cordelia Bartholomew (Widow of E. F. Bartholomew), Certificate Number 336397, Box 38884, The Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Dependents of the Army and Navy Who Served Mainly in the Civil War and the War with Spain, Record Group 15, Department of Veterans Affairs, National Archives, Washington, D.C. 55.  Dale L. Morgan, “The Significance and Value of the Overland Journal,” in Probing the American West: Papers from the Santa Fe Conference, ed. K. Ross Toole (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1962), 28, 33–34. 56. Lydia Allen Rudd, Diary, May 19, 1852, HM 27519, The Huntington Library, San Marino; Middleton, “The Diary and Letters of Dr. Joseph Middleton,” p. 11, p. 5 of Rieck

210

Notes to Pages 16–17

transcription. For additional context on the hard work of keeping records, see Margaret F. Walker, “Written Under Very Adverse Circumstances: The Awful Hard Work of Chronicling the Westward Journey,” Overland Journal 15, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 4–12. 57.  Mother to Henry Patrick Harding, September 22, 1850, Letters Written at the Time Henry Harding Patrick Left His Mother’s Home, MSS S-­2463, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 58.  E. S. Owen to G. W. Owen, “Journal of an Overland Journey from Kanesville, Iowa, to the Feather River in California, 1852,” September 24, 1853, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, transcribed by Richard L. Rieck, p. 3 of transcription. 59.  On emigrants publishing in newspapers, see Michael L. Tate, ed., The Great Medicine Road: Narratives of the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails, Part 2: 1849 (Norman, Okla.: Arthur H. Clark Company, 2015), 181; and on the public nature of emigrant writings, see Lamar, “Rites of Passage,” 34. 60.  On the blurring of the line between personal narrative and guidebook, see Theresa Strouth Gaul, “‘Some Is Writing Some Is Reading’: Emigrants on the Overland Trail,” in Moving Stories: Migration and the American West, 1850–2000 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2001), 5; and Helen B. Kroll, “The Books That Enlightened the Emigrants,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 45, no. 2 (June 1944): 106. For the importance of letters from the Trail and in California to informing the public, see Richard T. Stillson, “The Gold Rush in 1850: Private Communication and Public Information,” in Richard T. Stillson, Spreading the Word: A History of Information in the California Gold Rush (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 153–81. 61.  Charles Edward Pancoast, A Quaker Forty-­Niner: The Adventures of Charles Edward Pancoast on the American Frontier, ed. Anna Paschall Hannum (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930), xiii. 62.  For a sampling of studies that try to parse imagined and actual experience, see Richard L. Rieck, “A Geography of Death on the Oregon and California Trails, 1840–1860,” Overland Journal 9, no. 1 (1991): 13–21; and Thomas Richards Jr., “‘Farewell to America’: The Expatriation Politics of Overland Migration, 1841–1846,” Pacific Historical Review 86, no. 1 (February 2017): 114–52. Literary scholars, however, have approached overland accounts as narratives. For examples of this scholarship, see Carey R. Voeller, “‘I Have Not Told Half We Suffered’: Overland Trail Women’s Narratives and the Genre of Suppressed Textual Mourning,” Legacy 23, no. 2 (2006): 148–62; Stephen Fender, Plotting the Golden West: American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 4–13; Kathleen A. Boardman, “Paper Trail: Diaries, Letters and Reminiscences of the Overland Journey West,” in Updating the Literary West (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1997), 177–203; and Ann Fabian, The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-­Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 5. Yet the cultural turn has largely passed the Trail by. For an early call to approach emigrant sources as narratives, see Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Making the Most of Words: Verbal Activity and Western America,” in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, ed. William Cronon and George A. Miles (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 167–84. On the blurring between event and narrative, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006). For key works in U.S. historiography that take a similar approach to my own, see Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage Books, 1999); and Peter Silver, Our

Notes to Pages 17–24

211

Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008). For a study that uses a similar approach to related materials, see Roberts, American Alchemy.

Chapter 1 1.  Catherine Beecher, “Circular Addressed to benevolent Ladies of the U. States,” Christian Advocate and Journal and Zion’s Herald, December 25, 1829, pp. 4, 17. On the likely influence of Cherokee women’s anti-­removal activism on Beecher, see Tiya Miles, “‘Circular Reasoning’: Recentering Cherokee Women in the Antiremoval Campaigns,” American Quarterly 61, no. 2 (June 2009): 235–36. For discussion of the Cherokee strategy of opposing removal by describing their connection to the “graves of their fathers,” see Chapter 1. 2.  Eliza Jane Ross to John Ross, June 28, 1842, Cherokee Heritage Center, Tahlequah, OK, quoted in Naomi Greyser, On Sympathetic Grounds: Race, Gender, and Affective Geographies in Nineteenth-­Century North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 45. On the early twentieth-­century origins of the term “Trail of Tears,” see Theda Perdue, “The Legacy of Indian Removal,” Journal of Southern History 78, no. 1 (February 2012): 23. 3.  Christina Snyder, Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers & Slaves in the Age of Jackson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 17. For examples of a textbook and a historical synthesis that separate Removal and the Overland Trail, see David Henkin and Rebecca McLennan, Becoming America: A History for the 21st Century (New York: McGraw-­Hill Education, 2015), 231–40, 331–33; and Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The U.S. and Its World in the Age of Civil Wars, 1830–1910 (New York: Penguin Random House, 2016), 30–40. For examples that bring them together, see Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, Frontiers: A Short History of the American West (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 152; and Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 367. 4.  Elliott West, The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 19. 5.  Other historians have noted this widespread discussion of graves. For an example, see Grant Foreman, The Last Trek of the Indians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), 226. 6.  John P. Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), 7–9, 52; Jeffrey Ostler, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2019), 5–6; Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020), xii–xiv. 7. Renée L. Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2000), 1–3. 8.  Joyce Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-­American Frontier, 1500–1676 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), esp. chap. 5, “Death and the Birth of Race,” 157–98; David S. Jones, “Expecting Providence,” in Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality Since 1600 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 41–45. 9.  Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1982), 10–11. 10.  John Elliott, February 25, 1825, Register of Debates in Congress, 18th Cong., 2nd Sess., 9:640, quoted in Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans

212

Notes to Pages 24–28

and the Road to Indian Territory (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020), 15; Nicholas Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the U.S., 1607–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 197–202. 11.  Kerry A. Trask, Black Hawk: The Battle for the Heart of America (New York: Holt, 2006), 299; Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 193, 224. 12.  C. A. Goodrich, The Child’s History of the United States (Boston, 1836), 148–50, quoted in Laurence M. Hauptman, “Mythologizing Westward Expansion: Schoolbooks and the Image of the American Frontier Before Turner,” Western Historical Quarterly 8, no. 3 (July 1977): 274– 75; Lucy Maddox, Removals: Nineteenth-­Century American Literature and the Politics of Indian Affairs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 31. 13.  Alexis de Tocqueville, Journey to America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962), 200–201, quoted in Louis Masur, 1831: Year of the Eclipse (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 188. 14.  Jeffrey Ostler, “‘To Extirpate the Indians’: An Indigenous Consciousness of Genocide in the Ohio Valley and Lower Great Lakes, 1750s–1810,” William and Mary Quarterly 72, no. 4 (October 2015): 587–622; Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 50; Andrew Denson, Demanding the Cherokee Nation: Indian Autonomy and American Culture, 1830–1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 41. 15.  William Apess, Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts. . . . (Boston: Press of J. Howe, 1835), 13; Theresa Strouth Gaul, “Dialogue and Public Discourse in William Apess’s Indian Nullification,” American Transcendental Quarterly 15, no. 4 (December 2001): 283–85; Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 163–65. 16.  Cole Cheek, “David Folsom,” Mississippi Encyclopedia, https://​mississippiencyclopedia ​.org​/entries​/david​-folsom/. 17.  Theda Perdue, “‘Both White and Red’: Biracial People in Indian Society,” in “Mixed Blood” Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 33. 18.  “The Late Treaty,” Georgia Journal, November 8, 1825, p. 2, Georgia Historic Newspapers, https://​gahistoricnewspapers​.galileo​.usg​.edu​/lccn​/sn82014251​/1825​-11​-08​/ed​-1​/seq​-2/. 19.  For a discussion of this attachment and cosmology regarding the Choctaw specifically, see Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 250. 20.  For examples of these three points, see Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians, 192, 201–20; Pontitocock Creek Treaty (March 24, 1832), in The American Indian and the U.S.: A Documentary History, vol. 4, ed. Welcome E. Washburn (New York: Random House, 1973), 2449; and John T. Sprague, The Origin, Progress, and Conclusion of the Florida War (New York, 1848), chap.  6, https://​library​.si​.edu​/digital​-library​/book​/originprogress00spra, quoted in Native American Voices: A History and Anthology, 2nd ed., ed. Steven Mintz (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000), 129. 21.  Memorial of the Ottawa delegation by A. Hamlin, Jr., December 5, 1836, National Archives, Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, Michigan Superintendency, RG 75, M-­234, Roll 421, frames 722–25, quoted in Theodore J. Karamanski, Blackbird’s Song: Andrew J. Blackbird and the Odawa People (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012), 74; Sarah Purcell, Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 19–20, 32. On Hamlin’s biography and his political role,

Notes to Pages 28–33

213

see James M. McClurken, “Augustin Hamlin, Jr.: Ottawa Identity and the Politics of Persistence,” in Being and Becoming Indian, ed. James M. Clifton (Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1989), 82–111. 22. Trask, Black Hawk, 42–43, 74. 23. Saunt, Unworthy Republic, 160. 24.  Mary Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolition: The Struggle Against Indian Removal in the 1830s,” Journal of American History 86, no. 1 (June 1999): 18. 25.  John Forsyth, Register of Debates in Congress (Washington, D.C., 1830), vol. 6, I:326, 329, 336, quoted in Saunt, Unworthy Republic, 71; James McDonald, to Peter P. Pitchlynn, May 20, 1827, folder 44, 4026.328, Peter Pitchlynn Papers, quoted in Dawn Peterson, Indians in the Family: Adoption and the Politics of Antebellum Expansion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017), 294. 26.  Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women,” 18; Peterson, Indians in the Family, 294. 27.  Theda Perdue and Michael Green, The Cherokee Nation and Trail of Tears (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 5–6. 28.  Return J. Meigs to Henry Dearborn, June 3, 1808, quoted in William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018), 136. 29.  John Ross to Joseph Gales and William Stearn, April 20, 1824, Papers of Chief John Ross, vol. 1, ed. Gary E. Moulton (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 78–79. Here Ross took a trope from the language of the “vanishing Indian” (that Indians would die, and their bones fertilize the soil for white settlement). For examples of this idea, see Thomas J. Farnham, Travels in the Great Western Prairies, the Anahuac and Rocky Mountains, and in the Oregon Territory (Poughkeepsie, N.Y.: Killey and Lossing, Printers, 1841), 55. For a discussion of the political prominence of the National Intelligencer, see William E. Ames, “The National Intelligencer: Washington’s Leading Political Newspaper,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C. 66/68, no. 46 (1966/1968): 71–83. 30.  David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, The Rise of Andrew Jackson: Myth, Manipulation, and the Making of Modern Politics (New York: Hatchette Book Group, 2018), 67–69, 140, 281. 31.  Thomas L. M’Kenney, Memoirs, Official and Personal: With Sketches of Travels Among the Northern and Southern Indians; Embracing a War Excursion, and Descriptions of Scenes Along the Western Borders, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (New York: Paine and Burgess, 1846), 246–47. 32.  Andrew Jackson, First Annual Message, December 8, 1829, in A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1817–1897, vol. 2, ed. James D. Richardson (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1896–99), 458–59. 33.  Andrew Jackson, Second Annual Message, December 6, 1830, in A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1817–1897, vol. 3, ed. James D. Richardson (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1899), 1082–85. 34.  Andrew Jackson, “Transcript of President Andrew Jackson’s Message to Congress on Indian Removal (1830),” Milestone Documents, National Archives, http://​www​.ourdocuments​ .gov​/doc​.php​?doc​=​25​&​page​=​transcript. 35.  Natchez, February 13, 1830, quoted in James Taylor Carson, Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 114. 36.  Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women,” 37. 37.  Dennis Zotigh, “The Treaty That Forced the Cherokee People from Their Homelands Goes on View,” Smithsonian Magazine, April 24, 2019, https://​www​.smithsonianmag​.com​/blogs​ /national​-museum​-american​-indian​/2019​/04​/24​/treaty​-new​-echota/.

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Notes to Pages 33–39

38.  John Ross to Senate, March 8, 1836, Papers of Chief John Ross, 1:413. 39. Saunt, Unworthy Republic, 263, 275; M. Guyatt, “The Wedgwood Slave Medallion,” Journal of Design History 13, no. 2 (2000): 93–105, “Antislavery Medallion,” Smithsonian National Museum of American History, http://​americanhistory​.si​.edu​/collections​/search​/object​/nmah​_596365. 40.  Blanche Linden-­Ward, Silent City on a Hill: Landscapes of Memory and Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016), 132–34; James R. Cothran and Erica Danylchak, Grave Landscapes: The Nineteenth-­Century Rural Cemetery Movement (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018), 173; Faye Joanne Baker, “Toward Memory and Mourning: A Study of Changing Attitudes Toward Death Between 1750 and 1850 as Revealed by Gravestones of the New Hampshire Merrimack Valley, Mourning Pictures, and Representative Writings” (PhD diss., George Washington University, 1977), 24, 111–12; “The Evolution of Funerary Symbolism (or “What’s With All the Willow Trees?”), Virginia Department of Historic Resources, https://​www​.dhr​.virginia​.gov​/cemetery​-newsletter​-content​/the​ -evolution​-of​-funerary​-symbolism​-or​-whats​-with​-all​-the​-willow​-trees/. 41.  Erik R. Seeman, Speaking with the Dead in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 7–8. 42.  John F. Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 108; Seeman, Speaking with the Dead, 220–23. 43.  Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–20, reprint, New York: Dutton, 1963), 166, quoted in Linden-­Ward, Silent City on a Hill, 144. 44.  Daniel Appleton White, An Address, Delivered at the Consecration of the Harmony Grove Cemetery in Salem, June 14, 1840 (Salem: Gazette Press, 1840), 11. 45.  Joseph Story, An address delivered on the dedication of the cemetery at Mount Auburn, Sept. 24, 1831 [. . .] (Boston: Joseph T. & Edwin Buckingham, 1831), 10–11; Aaron Sachs, Arcadian America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013), 46–47. For more on settler efforts to cast Natives as vanished, see Jean O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 46.  U.S. Supreme Court, “The Cherokee Nation v. The State of Georgia” (1831), Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, https://​www​.law​.cornell​.edu​/supremecourt​/text​/30​/1; Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 264–65. 47. Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 245–49, 347; Saunt, Unworthy Republic, xiii–xix; Jane Dinwoodie, “Evading Indian Removal in the American South,” Journal of American History 108, no. 1 (June 2021): 34. 48.  George W. Harkins, “To The American People,” Niles Weekly Register, February 25, 1832. 49. Opothle Yoholo et al. to Lewis Cass, September 4, 1835, “Documents Relating to Frauds, &c., in the sale of Indian Reservations of Land,” 24th Cong., 1st Sess., S.Doc. 425, serial 445, p. 318, quoted in Saunt, Unworthy Republic, 202; Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-­Century America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 4–5. 50. Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 296. 51.  Randall L. Buchman, A Sorrowful Journey (Defiance, Ohio: Defiance College Press, 2007), 12. 52.  Forest Olds, ethnographic interview by Peggy Dycus, May 17, 1969, Miami Tribal Library, Miami, OK, quoted in Melissa Rinehart, “Miami Resistance and Resilience During the Removal Era,” in Contested Territories: Native Americans and Non-­Natives in the Lower Great

Notes to Pages 39–45

215

Lakes, 1700–1850, ed. Charles Beatty-­Medina and Melissa Rinehart (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012), 152. 53. Snyder, Great Crossings, 150. 54. Buchman, A Sorrowful Journey, 12, 15, 17. 55. Saunt, Unworthy Republic, 155. 56.  The rate of Indigenous mortality during deportation varied widely. Estimates of death for the Eastern Cherokee, for example, stand at 20–25 percent including 1,000 en route and 3,000 during roundups and stockades. Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996), 94. Death tolls for the Iroquois, in contrast, were likely closer to 40 percent. Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 325. 57.  Daniel S. Butrick, The Journal of Rev. Daniel S. Butrick, May 19, 1838–April 1, 1839 (Park Hill: Trail of Tears Association, Oklahoma Chapter, 1998), 11. 58. Butrick, Journal of Rev. Daniel S. Butrick, 21, 32. 59. Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 270. 60.  Grant Foreman, Indian Removal: The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1932), 257. 61.  Julie Reed, Serving the Nation: Cherokee Sovereignty and Social Welfare, 1800–1907 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), 76. 62. Saunt, Unworthy Republic, 225. 63.  “Journal of Jefferson Van Horne—Choctaw Removal, November 1832,” The Trail of Tears Through Arkansas,  https://​ualrexhibits​.org​/trailoftears​/eyewitness​-accounts​/journal​-of​ -jefferson​-van​-horne​-choctaw​-removal​-november​-1832; Foreman, Indian Removal, 82–84. 64. Saunt, Unworthy Republic, 119–20, 284; Arkansas Gazette, November 28, 1832, quoted in Foreman, Indian Removal, 93. 65. Foreman, Indian Removal, 93. 66. Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 312–13; Shirley Willard and Susan Campbell, eds., Potawatomi Trail of Death: 1838 Removal from Indiana to Kansas (Rochester, Ind.: Fulton County Historical Society, 2003). 67.  Benjamin Marie Petit, The Trail of Death: Letters of Benjamin Marie Petit, ed. Irving McKee, vol. 14 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1944), 100, 99. 68. Butrick, Journal of Rev. Daniel S. Butrick, 34. 69. Butrick, Journal of Rev. Daniel S. Butrick, 23. 70. Petit, The Trail of Death, 100, 99. 71.  Christopher D. Haveman, Rivers of Sand: Creek Indian Emigration, Relocation, and Ethnic Cleansing in the American South (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 223, quoted in Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 261. 72.  Letter from Little Rock, December 25, 1836, in New York Observer, February 11, 1837, p. 4, quoted in Foreman, Indian Removal, 177. For an additional account of the Indigenous dead being left to the ravages of wolves and wilderness, see Frederick Gerstaecker, Wild Sports in the Far West (London: Geo. Routledge & Co., 1855), 194–99. 73.  Records of the Accounting Officers of the Department of the Treasury, Settled Indian accounts, RG 217, entry 525, National Archives, Washington, D.C., quoted in Saunt, Unworthy Republic, 124. 74. Butrick, Journal of Rev. Daniel S. Butrick, 48. 75. Buchman, A Sorrowful Journey, 40, 45. 76. Buchman, A Sorrowful Journey, 48–50.

216

Notes to Pages 45–49

77.  Letter from Little Rock, December 25, 1836, in New York Observer, February 11, 1837, p. 4, quoted in Foreman, Indian Removal, 177. 78. Eliza Jane Ross to John Ross, June 28, 1842, quoted in Greyser, On Sympathetic Grounds, 45. 79.  Edwin Bryant, What I Saw in California (Philadelphia: G. S. Appleton, 1849), 150–51; Theodore Talbot, Diaries, Exploration of Oregon Territory, 1843–44, vol. 1, p. 130, Theodore Talbot Papers, 1837–1867, Manuscripts and Archives, Library of Congress; D. Graham Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 12–16. 80.  John D. Unruh Jr., The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-­Mississippi West, 1840–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 44; Brendan C. Lindsay, Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846–1873 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 84–85. On the size of the rock, see Bryant, What I Saw in California, 125. 81.  Susan Juster, “Planting the ‘Great Cross’: The Life, and Death, of Crosses in English America,” William and Mary Quarterly 74, no. 2 (April 2017): 259–60. 82.  John Charles Frémont, The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains (New York: Miller, Orton, and Mulligan, 1856), 106–8. 83. Will Bagley, “Independence Rock,” Encyclopedia of Wyoming History, https://​www ​.wyohistory​.org​/encyclopedia​/independence​-rock; James Brooks, Col. Fremont’s Romanism (New York: J. & E. Brooks, 1856), 5–13; Col. Fremont’s Religious History. The Authentic Account. Papist or Protestant, Which? (N.p., 1856), 5–11; Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 224–26. 84.  Jo Ann Nevers and Penny Rucks, “‘Under Watchful Eyes’: Washoe Narratives of the Donner Party,” in An Archaeology of Desperation: Exploring the Donner Party’s Alder Creek Camp, ed. Kelly J. Dixon, Julie M. Schablitsky, and Shannon A. Novak (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011), 272–76. 85.  Alexander J. Rodgers to sister Isabel Ireland Rodgers, April 9, 1847, Box 1, Rodgers Family Papers, 1773–1925, Newberry Library, Chicago; Will Bagley and Kristin Johnson, “‘All Remember the Fate of the Donner Party’: History and the Disaster at Cannibal Camp,” in An Archaeology of Desperation: Exploring the Donner Party’s Alder Creek Camp, ed. Kelly J. Dixon, Julie M. Schablitsky, and Shannon A. Novak (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011), 295–99. 86.  Bagley and Johnson, “‘All Remember,’” 299; Mary Ann Graves, “Letter from California,” Illinois Gazette, September 25, 1847, p. 2. 87.  Nashville Whig, September 4, 1847, quoted in Walter T. Durham, Volunteer Forty-­Niners: Tennesseans and the California Gold Rush (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997), 243. 88.  Kristin Johnson, “The Aftermath of Tragedy: The Donner Camps in Later Years,” in Archaeology of Desperation, et al., 66. 89.  Charles Ben Darwin, Journal, vol. 2, pp. 78–79, HM 16770, The Huntington Library, San Marino. This act of taking souvenirs from famous graves occurred across America. In the 1850s, the local community of Fort Edward, New York, had to move the grave of Jane McCrea because visitors were destroying the tombstone. Jeremy Engels and Greg Goodale, “‘Our Battle Cry Will Be: Remember Jenny McCrea!’: A Précis on the Rhetoric of Revenge,” American Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2009): 95–96. 90.  Matthew R. Costello, The Property of the Nation: George Washington’s Tomb, Mount Vernon, and the Memory of the First President (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019), 145.

Notes to Pages 49–54

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91.  Charles Ross Parke, Dreams to Dust: A Diary of the California Gold Rush, 1849–1850, ed. James E. Davis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 78. 92.  John Steele, Across the Plains in 1850, ed. Joseph Schafer (Chicago: Caxton Club, 1930), 212. 93. Thomas J. Van Dorn, “Diary of T. J. Van Dorn On Departure from Woodburn Macoupin Co Ill for California, April 10, 1849,” September 3, 1849, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; Augustus Ripley Burbank, Diary, 1849–80, pp. 120–22, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. 94.  Nevers and Rucks, “‘Under Watchful Eyes,’” 276–79. 95. Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 264. 96.  For an example of the Donners as a warning to emigrants to speed up, see George Prickett to Julia McKee, May 8, 1849, George Prickett Collection, Chicago Historical Society.

Chapter 2 1.  George E. Hyde, Life of George Bent: Written from His Letters (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), 96–97; Regina Bailey, “Bacteria Shapes,” Thought Co., August 20, 2019, thoughtco​.com​/bacteria​-shapes​-373278. 2.  Ramon Powers and James N. Leiker, “Cholera Among the Plains Indians: Perceptions, Causes, Consequences,” Western Historical Quarterly 29, no. 3 (Autumn 1998): 317–24, 325–27, 332–35. 3.  Mitchel Philip Roth, “The Western Cholera Trail: Studies in the Urban Response to Epidemic Disease in the Trans-­Mississippi West, 1848–1850” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1993), 232. 4.  On cholera’s distinctive and exceptional terror, see Owen Whooley, Knowledge in the Time of Cholera: The Struggle over American Medicine in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 24, 32; Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 78; Robert V. Wells, Facing the “King of Terrors”: Death and Society in an American Community, 1750–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 45, 280; and Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 2–3. 5.  Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 173. The plethora of terms used to describe cholera is indicative of the terror it caused. Along with “blue terror” it was also known as the “dreaded scourge” and the “demon malady.” Amariah Brigham, M.D., A Treatise on Epidemic Cholera, quoted in Sarah Schuetze, “Mapping a Demon Malady: Cholera Maps and Affect in 1832,” Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life 17, no. 1 (Fall 2016), http://commonplace.online/article/mapping-­a-­demon-­malady/; Rosenberg, Cholera Years, 4; Roth, “Western Cholera Trail,” 25–32. 6.  John B. Wyeth, Oregon; Or a Short History of a Long Journey from the Atlantic Ocean to the Region of the Pacific, By Land; . . . (Cambridge, Mass.: Printed for John B. Wyeth, 1833), 73–75. 7.  James Z. Schwartz, “‘A Melancholy and Trying Season’: Cholera and the Conflict over Cultural Boundaries in Early Michigan,” Journal of the Early Republic 26, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 99, 111; Adam Jortner, “Cholera, Christ, and Jackson: The Epidemic of 1832, and the Origins of Christian Politics in Antebellum America,” Journal of the Early Republic 27, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 229.

218

Notes to Pages 54–58

8.  Schwartz, “‘A Melancholy and Trying Season,’” 99, 111; Willard H. Rollings, The Osage: An Ethnohistorical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-­Plains (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), 279. 9. Jackson, Transylvania Journal of Medicine, 5, 433, quoted in J. S. Chambers, The Conquest of Cholera: America’s Greatest Scourge (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 60. On the scapegoating of immigrants during epidemics, see Jeff Strickland, “Nativists and Strangers: Yellow Fever and Immigrant Mortality in Antebellum Charleston, South Carolina,” in Death and the American South, ed. Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 131–52; and Jane Weiss, “‘This Pestilence Which Walketh in Darkness’: Reconceptualizing the 1832 New York Cholera Epidemic,” in Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History, ed. G. S. Rousseau, Miranda Gill, and David Boyd Haycock (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 92–110. 10.  Frances M. Clarke, War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 9; Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799–1883 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 24–25; Daniel E. Sutherland, The Expansion of Everyday Life, 1860–1876 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000), 127. 11.  Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815– 1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 469–73. 12.  Mitchel Roth, “Cholera, Community, and Public Health in Gold Rush Sacramento and San Francisco,” Pacific Historical Review 66, no. 4 (November 1997): 528–29. 13.  Roger P. Blair, “‘The Doctor Gets Some Practice’: Cholera and Medicine on the Overland Trails,” Journal of the West 36 (January 1997): 55–56. 14.  Ramon Powers and Gene Younger, “Cholera on the Overland Trails, 1832–1869,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 5 (Spring 1973): 33; Whooley, Knowledge in the Time of Cholera, 74. 15.  Roth, “Western Cholera Trail,” 187–88. 16.  Roth, “Western Cholera Trail,” 189–92, v–vii; Valencius, Health of the Country, 4–6, 25. 17.  Rob Wilson, “The Disease of Fear and the Fear of Disease: Cholera and Yellow Fever in the Mississippi Valley” (PhD diss., St. Louis University, 2007), 69; Roth, “Western Cholera Trail,” 274. 18.  “The Death of James K. Polk,” The Polk Home Blog, https://​jameskpolk​.com​/history ​/the​-death​-of​-james​-k​-polk/. 19.  George W. Nichols to Sarah Ann Taylor Nichols, April 21, 1849, HM 48250–48298, Samuel Nichols Papers, 1753–1897, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 20.  Patricia Rushton, “Cholera and Its Impact on Nineteenth-­Century Mormon Migration,” BYU Studies 44, no. 2 (2005): 134. 21.  John D. Unruh Jr., The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-­Mississippi West, 1840–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 119–20. 22.  George Murrell to Mary Ann Murrell, April 17, 1849, HM 36363, George McKinley Murrell Correspondence, 1849–1854, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 23. Unruh, Plains Across, 68–73; Roth, “Western Cholera Trail,” 267. 24.  Charles R. Parke, Dreams to Dust: A Diary of the California Gold Rush, 1849–1850, ed. James Edward Davis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 8–9. 25.  “Autobiography and Reminiscence of Alvin Aaron Coffey, Mills Seminary P.O., 1901,” TS, “The Society of California Pioneers Collection of Autobiographies and Reminiscences of

Notes to Pages 58–60

219

Early Pioneers,” Sullivan Library, Society of California Pioneers, Online Archive of California, https://​oac​.cdlib​.org​/ark:​/13030​/kt0c6018fg​/​?order​=​8​&​brand​=​oac4. 26.  Roth, “Western Cholera Trail,” 266–67; Walker D. Wyman, “Council Bluffs and the Westward Movement,” Iowa Journal of History 47, no. 2 (April 1949): 18, 20; Mary Ann Waterman to Lucretia Carter Sibley, August 27, 1849, Folder 4, Lucretia Carter Sibley Correspondence, 1841–1876, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.; George McKinley Murrell to Elizabeth R. Murrell, April 5 and May 10, 1849, George McKinley Murrell Correspondence, 1849–1854, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 27.  Francis Parkman, Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life; or, The California and Oregon Trail (New York: George P. Putnam, 1852); Sheila M. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 19–23, 31–32, 52–53. 28.  Native peoples of the Plains were, in fact, generally healthier than white Americans. Richard H. Steckel, “Stature and the Standard of Living,” Journal of Economic Literature 33, no. 4 (December 1995): 1906–7; Kenneth L. Sokoloff and Georgia C. Villaflor, “The Early Achievement of Modern Stature in America,” Social Science History 6, no. 4 (Autumn 1982): 453–81; Richard H. Steckel and Joseph M. Prince, “Tallest in the World: Native Americans of the Great Plains in the Nineteenth Century,” American Economic Review 91, no. 1 (March 2001): 287–94. In contrast to their perceptions of Native peoples of the Plains, white American settlers declared that the diet and lifestyle of Comanches made them less healthy than white Americans. Mark Allen Goldberg, Conquering Sickness: Race, Health, and Colonization in the Texas Borderlands (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 99–100. 29.  David S. Jones, Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality Since 1600 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 77–78; James Taylor to Father, June 18, 1845, MS 1006, James Taylor Papers, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland. 30. Wellman Packard, Early Emigration to California, 1849–1850 (Bloomington, Ill.: M. Custer, 1928), 3. 31. Kanesville, Frontier Guardian and Sentinel, April 8, May 13, May 28, 1852, quoted in Wyman, “Council Bluffs and the Westward Movement,” 107–8. 32.  Stephen Warren, The Shawnees and Their Neighbors, 1795–1870 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 121; Powers and Leiker, “Cholera Among the Plains Indians,” 328–29. 33.  Louise Barry, The Beginning of the West: Annals of the Kansas Gateway to the American West, 1540–1854 (Topeka: Kansas State Historical Society, 1972), 863. On Indigenous people fleeing emigrants, see also William Bagley, With Golden Visions Bright Before Them: Trails to the Mining West, 1849–1852, Overland West Series 2 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), 71. 34. George McKinley Murrell to Samuel Murrell, May 21, 1849, HM 36383, George McKinley Murrell Correspondence, 1849–1854, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 35. Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020), 143; Richard L. Rieck, “A Geography of Death on the Oregon and California Trails, 1840–1860,” Overland Journal 9, no. 1 (1991): 13–21; Blair, “‘The Doctor Gets Some Practice,’” 54–66; Will Bagley, “Pioneers Not Exempt from Nature’s Call,” Salt Lake City Tribune, February 25, 2001; Pamela K. Gilbert, Cholera and Nation: Doctoring the Social Body in Victorian England (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 2.

220

Notes to Pages 61–66

36.  Elizabeth Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 9, 275–77; David J. Wishart, An Unspeakable Sadness: The Dispossession of the Nebraska Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 80; Christina Snyder, Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers & Slaves in the Age of Jackson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 157n25; Andrew C. Isenberg, “An Empire of Remedy: Vaccination, Natives, and Narratives in the North American West,” Pacific Historical Review 86, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 84–113; Pekka Hämäläinen, Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2019), 175. 37.  Kingsley M. Bray, Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), 19, 24. 38. Hyde, Life of George Bent, 94–96; John H. Moore, The Cheyenne Nation: A Social and Demographic History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 195–96. 39.  James Mooney, Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1898), 173, 289. 40.  Powers and Leiker, “Cholera Among the Plains Indians,” 333. 41. Wishart, Unspeakable Sadness, 93. 42. Saunt, Unworthy Republic, 108. 43.  Judith A. Boughter, Betraying the Omaha Nation, 1790–1916 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 48. 44. Bray, Crazy Horse, 19. 45.  Catherine Price, The Oglala People, 1841–1879: A Political History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 30; Powers and Leiker, “Cholera Among the Plains Indians,” 329. 46.  John T. Williams, “Journal of John T. Williams, 1850,” Indiana Magazine of History 32, no. 4 (December 1, 1936): 399. 47.  Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 33–38. 48. Hämäläinen, Lakota America, 224. 49. Hämäläinen, Lakota America, 215–20. 50.  On fears of “Indian” attacks, see Glenda Riley, “The Specter of a Savage: Rumors and Alarmism on the Overland Trail,” Western Historical Quarterly 15, no. 4 (1984): 427–44; Unruh, Plains Across, 408–13; Michael L. Tate, Indians and Emigrants: Encounters on the Overland Trails (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), xiv, xi, 3–4, 156–57. 51.  John Evans Brown, Memoirs of a Forty-­Niner, ed. Katie E. Blood (New Haven, Conn.: Associated Publishers of American Records, 1907), 13. 52.  Mrs. L. A. Bozarth, “Recollections, ca. 1905,” p. 2, Overland Journeys to the Pacific Collection, MSS 1508, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland; Billington Crum Whiting to Susan Whiting, May 6, 1849, Billington Crum Whiting Papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino; George Nelson Wheeler, Diary, June 24, 1850, The Huntington Library, San Marino; Franklin Langworthy, Scenery of the Plains, Mountains and Mines: Or, A Diary Kept Upon the Overland Route to California, By Way of the Great Salt Lake: Travels in the Cities, Mines, and Agricultural Districts—Embracing the Return by the Pacific Ocean and Central America, in the Years 1850, ’51, ’52, and ’53 (Ogdensburgh, 1855), esp. 59, 73. 53.  Shirley Anne Moore, Sweet Freedom’s Plains: African Americans on the Overland Trails, 1841–1869 (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 2016), 147; Theodore Edgar Potter, The Autobiography of Theodore Edgar Potter (Concord, N.H.: Rumford Press, 1913), 46; John Clark, “The California Guide,” Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Library; Ebenezer Emery

Notes to Pages 66–68

221

Gore, “Autobiography,” p. 7, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah; Henry O. Ferguson, “Reminiscences of Overland Journey from Iowa to California in 1849,” Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, quoted in The Great Medicine Road: Narratives of the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails, Part 2: 1849, ed. Michael L. Tate (Norman, Okla.: Arthur H. Clark Company, 2015), 122–23. 54.  Gore, “Autobiography,” p. 8; Edwin E. Cox, ed., “Diary of the Overland Trail, 1849, and Letters, 1849–50, of Captain David De Wolf,” Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society for the Year . . . 32 (1925): 188. 55.  Lewis Kilbourn, Journal, p. 14, MSS 1508, Overland Journeys to the Pacific Collection, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland. 56.  John Cumming, ed., The Gold Rush: Letters from the Wolverine Rangers to the Marshall, Michigan, Statesman, 1849–1851 (Mount Pleasant, MI: Cumming Press, 1974), 34. 57.  Charles Ross Parke, Dreams to Dust: A Diary of the California Gold Rush, 1849–1850, ed. James E. Davis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 19–21. 58.  Reuben Miller, Diary, 1849, June–September, p. 14, Mormon File, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 59.  “The Health of the Indians,” Arkansas State Democrat (Little Rock), September 14, 1849, “Alabama to Arkansas,” Ralph P. Bieber Collection, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 60.  Merrill J. Mattes, Platte River Road Narratives: A Descriptive Bibliography of Travel over the Great Central Overland Route to Oregon, California, Utah, Colorado, Montana, and Other Western States and Territories, 1812–1866 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 138. 61.  Warren Foote, “Autobiography and Journals, 1837–1903, vol. 1, 110–26,” Mormon Pioneer Overland Travel, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-­Day Saints, July 18, 1850, https://​ history​.lds​.org​/overlandtravels​/sources​/5128​/foote​-warren​-autobiography​-and​-journals​-1837 –1903-­vol-­1-­110-­26. 62.  J. S. Holliday, The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 102; Mary Burrell, Mary Burrell’s Book, July 18, 1854, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; Henry O. Ferguson, “Reminiscences of Overland Journey from Iowa to California in 1849,” quoted in Tate, Indians and Emigrants, 123. 63.  “Tuberculosis in Europe and North America, 1800–1922,” Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics, Harvard University Library Open Collections Program, http://​ocp ​.hul​.harvard​.edu​/contagion​/tuberculosis​.html; Christopher Hamlin, Cholera: The Biography (New York, 2009), 2–3; David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-­Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), especially chap. 4 “Cholera: Disease as Disorder.” 64. Chambers, Conquest of Cholera, 241. 65. Mattes, Platte River Road Narratives, 301. 66. Wells, Facing the “King of Terrors,” 45. 67.  George Benson Kuykendall, “Crossing the Plains,” in History of the Kuykendall Family Since Its Settlement in Dutch New York in 1646, with Genealogy as Found in Early Dutch Church Records, State and Government Documents, Together with Sketches of Colonial Times, Old Log Cabin Days, Indian Wars, Pioneer Hardships, Social Customs, Dress and Mode of Living of the Early Forefathers (Portland, Ore., 1919), 370. 68.  Transactions of the Fortieth Annual Reunion of the Oregon Pioneer Association Portland, June 20, 1912 Containing the Proceedings of the Twenty-­Seventh Grand Encampment of Indian

222

Notes to Pages 68–72

War Veterans of the North Pacific Coast and Other Matters of Historic Interest (Portland, Ore.: Chausse-­Prudhomme Co., 1915), 590–91. 69.  Mary Jane Long, “Narrative of Mary Jane Long, crossing the plains in 1852,” p. 2, quoted in Robert L. Munkres, “Wives, Mothers, Daughters: Women’s Life on the Road West,” Annals of Wyoming 42 (October 1970): 194. 70.  John McAllister, “Autobiography and Diary, 1851–1906,” August 18, 1851, pp. 25–26, vol. 1, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. 71.  John Pratt Welsh, Diary, vol. 1, May 25–26, 1851, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 72.  Welsh diary, vol. 1, May 25–26, 1851. 73.  Addison M. Crane, “Journal of a Trip from Lafayette, Indiana, 1852,” August 5, 1852, HM 19333, The Huntington Library, San Marino, quoted in Peter D. Olch, “Treading the Elephant’s Tail: Medical Problems on the Overland Trails,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 59, no. 2 (1985): 200. 74.  William Holmes Walker, Memoir, p. 24, Box 1, Folder 3, Papers of William Holmes Walker, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. 75.  James C. Riggin to Rebecca Jane Riggin and Friends, September 3, 1850, HM 63296, Riggin/Pettyjohn Family Papers, 1841–74, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 76. “Remarks of Mr. Wentworth, of Illinois. In the House of Representatives, January 27, 1845—On the Oregon bill,” Cong. Globe, 28th Cong., 2nd Sess. 14  (1845), 136, https://​digital​.library​.unt​.edu​/ark:​/67531​/metapth2366/. 77.  J. E. Clayton, Diary, February 20, 1850, p. 8, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery. I would like to thank Malcolm J. Rohrbough for bringing my attention to this quote in Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 75. 78.  Pardon Dexter Tiffany, Diary and Letters, May 16, 17, and June 21, 1849, Missouri Historical Society, Columbia, quoted in William Bagley, With Golden Visions Bright Before Them: Trails to the Mining West, 1849–1852, Overland West Series 2 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), 65. 79. Joseph Wood, “Notes from Diary of ’49,” May 15, 1849, vol. 1, The Huntington Library, San Marino. For a general comment on these contracts, see Mattes, Platte River Road Narratives, 34. 80.  Octavius T. Howe, Argonauts of ’49: History and Adventures of the Emigrant Companies from Massachusetts, 1849–1850 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1923), 215. 81.  Holmes D. Van Schaick, Journal March 13, 1852–August 5, 1854, Edward E. Ayer Manuscript Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago. 82.  Carlisle S. Abbott, Recollections of a California Pioneer (New York: Neale Publishing, 1917), 58. For additional examples of contracts that specify care for men in sickness and in health, see Brian Roberts, American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-­Class Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 75–77. 83.  Bernard J. Reid, Overland to California with the Pioneer Line: The Gold Rush Diary of Bernard J. Reid, ed. Mary McDougall Gordon (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1983), 102; Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-­Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), 17–20; Roberts, American Alchemy, 13–15; Charles Ben Darwin, Journal, vol. 1, May 23, 1849, p. 68, HM 16770, The Huntington Library, San Marino.

Notes to Pages 73–76

223

84.  David Jackson Staples and Harold F. Taggart, “The Journal of David Jackson Staples,” California Historical Society Quarterly 22, no. 2 (June 1943): 124–25, 127. 85.  Rebecca Ketcham, “From Ithaca to Clatsop Plains: Miss Ketcham’s Journal of Travel, Part II,” ed. Leo M. Kaiser and Priscilla Knuth, Oregon Historical Quarterly 62, no. 4 (December 1, 1961): 338. 86.  Harlow C. Thompson, Across the Continent on Foot in 1859: A Record of Personal Experiences (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Albert G. Rogers, 1902), 46. 87.  Mountain Charley, or the Adventures of Mrs. E. J. Guerin, Who Was Thirteen Years in Male Attire, An Autobiography Comprising a Period of Thirteen Years of Life in the States, California, and Pike’s Peak, ed. Fred W. Mazzulla and William Kosktka (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), 37–38. 88.  See also John Mack Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), 125–26, on women’s role in nursing the sick in settled communities. 89.  For an example of a company that traveled with their own doctor, see Mary Stuart Bailey, “A Journal of the Overland Trip from Ohio to California,” Box 22, HM 2018–2019, California File, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 90.  P. F. Castleman, “Overland Journey to California,” June 11–14, 1849, pp. 40–44, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 91.  Jack Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790–1840 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 93–94, 260; Karen V. Hansen, A Very Social Time: Crafting Community in Antebellum New England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 68–70, 99–101; Nancy Grey Osterud, Bonds of Community: The Lives of Farm Women in Nineteenth-­Century New York (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 247–48. 92.  “Diary of Lorenzo Dow Young,” Utah Historical Quarterly 14, nos. 1, 2, 3, 4 (January– October 1946): 144, https://​issuu​.com​/utah10​/docs​/volume​_14​_1946. 93.  Ami Plufgard-­Jasich, Brothers of a Vow: Secret Fraternal Orders and the Transformation of White Male Culture in Antebellum Virginia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 57–59; E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 143–45. 94.  George Neil Emery and John Charles Herbert Emery, A Young Man’s Benefit: The Independent Order of Odd Fellows and Sickness Insurance in the United States and Canada, 1860–1929 (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 1999), 11–16; Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), especially chap. 2, “The Craftsman as Hero”; Wells, Facing the “King of Terrors,” 52. 95.  Augustus F. Unger to Sylvia A. Unger, June 9, 1850, Box 2, Augustus F. Unger Papers, Western Americana Collection, Clements Library, University of Michigan; John Thompson Kinkade to James Kinkade, September 6, 1850, Box 1, John Thompson Kinkade Letters, 1829– 1855, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 96.  Van Schaick, “Journal 1852,” May 29, 1852. 97.  Samuel Nichols to Sarah Nichols, May 21, 1849, Samuel Nichols Papers, 1753–1897, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 98.  Harvey Chapman to Caroline Chapman, April 19, 1850, Letters, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, quoted in Rohrbough, Days of Gold, 77. 99. Holliday, World Rushed In, 130. 100.  Clayton, Diary, March 9, 1850, p. 10, Alabama Department of Archives and History.

224

Notes to Pages 77–82

101.  On emigrant flexibility and adaptation, see Melody M. Miyamoto, “No Home for Domesticity?: Gender and Society on the Overland Trails” (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2006), 148–51. 102.  Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–3, 8–17, 201–2. For a similar reading of a continuum of masculinity in male emigrants to Pike’s Peak, see Stephanie McGuire, “Contradictions of Western American Manhood as Seen Through 1858–1866 Immigration to Pike’s Peak” (MA thesis, University of Colorado at Boulder, 2016), 5–6. 103. Clarke, War Stories, 105–7. 104.  Emily K. Abel, Hearts of Wisdom: American Women Caring for Kin, 1850–1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 53–60. 105.  Charles Glass Gray, Off at Sunrise: The Overland Journal of Charles Glass Gray, ed. Thomas D. Clark (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1976), 82–83.

Chapter 3 1.  Keith Heyer Meldahl, Hard Road West: History and Geology Along the Gold Rush Trail (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 44; William Earnshaw, “Narrative of William Earnshaw as Printed in the Waterford (Wis.) Post from June 5 to September 4, 1897,” p. 54, Newberry Library, Chicago; Esther Belle Hanna, Journal, p. 24, MSS 1508, Overland Journeys to the Pacific Collection, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland; Diana L. Ahmad, Success Depends on the Animals: Emigrants, Livestock, and Wild Animals on the Overland Trails, 1840–1869 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2016), 47–50, 52–53; Hugh Brown Heiskell, A Forty-­Niner from Tennessee: The Diary of Hugh Brown Heiskell (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998), 46; Vincent Hoover, Diary, vol. 5, December 16, 1849, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 2.  Inter-­Tribal Council of Nevada, Newe: A Western Shoshone History (Reno: Inter-­Tribal Council of Nevada, 1976), 20; U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service, “Basin Wildrye,” https://​plants​.usda​.gov​/plantguide​/pdf​/pg​_leci4​.pdf; John Steele, Across the Plains in 1850, ed. Joseph Schafer (Chicago: Caxton Club, 1930), 85, 199. 3.  P. F. Castleman, “Original Diary,” p. 141, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; Howard A. Cutting, “Journal of a Trip by Overland Route,” May 11, 1863, The Huntington Library, San Marino; Dr. Mendall Jewett, “Journal to and from California of Dr. Mendall Jewett,” July 9, 1850, The Huntington Library, San Marino; John Rollin Ridge, “Humboldt River,” The Poems of John Rollin Ridge: A Reproduction of the 1868 Publication Plus Fugitive Poems and Notes, ed. James W. Parins and Jeff Ward, American Native Press Archives and Sequoyah Research Center, https://​ualrexhibits​.org​/tribalwriters​/artifacts​/Poems​ -of​-John​-Rollin​-Ridge​.html​#HumboldtRiver. 4.  J. G. W., “El Dorado: Adventures in the Path of Empire,” National Era 4, no. 27 (July 4, 1850): 27. 5.  Martha C. Knack, Boundaries Between: The Southern Paiutes, 1775–1995 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 40–44. 6.  J. S. Holliday, The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981), 196. 7.  Letter from Louis Warner, “Through and Well!” Sacramento City, September 15, 1849, Signal (Warsaw, Ill.), Box 5, Ralph P. Bieber Collection, The Huntington Library, San Marino.

Notes to Pages 82–85

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8.  D. T. McCollum to J. H. Lund, June 27, 1849, quoted in John Phillip Reid, Policing the Elephant: Crime, Punishment, and Social Behavior on the Overland Trail (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library Press, 1996), 17. 9.  William Barrow to Philip Barrow, May 18, 1850, Charles Barrow Correspondence, Misc. MSS, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe, The Shirley Letters: From the California Mines, 1851–1852, ed. Marlene Smith-­Baranzini (Berkeley, Calif.: Heyday Books, 2014), 162. 10.  William A. Blair, Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 111. 11. Charlotte L. Whipple, Diary, June 6, 1852, Charlotte Lambert Whipple Diary and Family Correspondence, 1847–1888, Manuscripts and Archives, New York Public Library; Caroline L. Richardson, 1852 Journal and Commonplace Book, June 16, 1852, p. 67, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Elliott West, Growing Up with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 37–38. 12. Steele, Across the Plains in 1850, 74; Charles Ben Darwin, Journal, vol. 1, June 18, 1849, p. 109, HM 16770, The Huntington Library, San Marino. Edwin E. Cox, ed., “David DeWolf; Diary of the Overland Trail, 1849, and Letters, 1849–50, of Captain David De Wolf,” Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society for the Year . . . 32 (1925): 188. 13.  George Banning, “A Journal of the Emigration Company of Council Point, Pottawatomie County, Iowa, From the Time of Their Organization Until Their Arrival Into the Salt Lake Valley in the Summer of 1852, 1851–1852,” pp. 31–32, MSS FAC508, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 14.  Georgia Willis Read and Ruth Gaines, eds., Gold Rush: The Journals, Drawings, and Other Papers of J. Goldsborough Bruff, April 2, 1849–July 20, 1851 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 464, quoted in Mitchel Roth, “Cholera, Community, and Public Health in Gold Rush Sacramento and San Francisco,” Pacific Historical Review 66, no. 4 (November 1997): 549–50. 15.  Anne F. Hyde, An American Vision: Far Western Landscape and National Culture, 1820–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 9–10; P. S. Heaton, “The Old Lone Tree,” Nebraska History 31 (1950): 147–52, history​.nebraska​.gov​/files​/docpublications​/NH1950 LoneTree​.pdf. 16.  Silas Newcomb, “Overland to California,” Journal, June 8, 1850, FAC 4, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 17. Marie L. McLaughlin, Myths and Legends of the Sioux (Bismarck, N.D.: Bismarck Tribune Company, 1916), 145; Theodore Talbot, July 15, 1843, p. 50, Diaries, Exploration of Oregon Territory, 1843–44, vol. 1, 1843, April 29–October 14, Box 1, Theodore Talbot Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; George Bird Grinnell, The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Ways of Life, vol. 2 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972), 163; David I. Bushnell Jr., “Burials of the Algonquian, Siouan, and Caddoan Tribes West of the Mississippi,” Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 83 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1927), 23–24. 18.  Mark S. Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008), 154; Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020), 301–2. 19.  James Wilkins, An Artist on the Overland Trail: The 1849 Diary and Sketches of James F. Wilkins, ed. John Francis McDermott (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library), 1968), 43–45.

226

Notes to Pages 85–86

20.  Howard D. Williams, “A Diary Kept by Howard D. Williams Containing a Record of the Events of a Journey Across the Plains, Made by Himself and Clark D. Williams . . . ,” May 28, 1859, p. 17, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah; Catherine Haun, “A Woman’s Trip Across the Plains in 1849,” Reminiscence, p. 26, HM 538 (FAC), The Huntington Library, San Marino. 21. Wilkins, An Artist, 45; Israel F. Hale, “Diary of a Trip to California in 1849,” Quarterly of the Society of California Pioneers 11 (June 1925): 61; W. J. Pleasants, Twice Across the Plains: 1849 . . . 1856 (San Francisco: Press of Walter N. Brunt Co., 1906), 65. 22.  A. Wislizenus, Memoir of a Tour to Northern Mexico, Connected with Col. Doniphan’s Expedition, in 1846 and 1847 (Washington, D.C.: Tippin & Streeper, Printers, 1848), 4, 7. 23.  William B. Lorton, “W. B. Lorton A.D. 1849 California Journal,” vol. 1, p. 82, William B. Lorton Diaries and Papers, 1848 September–1850 January, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 24.  Wakeman Bryarly and Vincent Geiger, Trail to California: The Overland Journal of Vincent Geiger and Wakeman Bryarly, ed. David Morris Potter (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962), 143. Shoshone peoples had likely learned of these burial practices through their trading partners the Nez Perce. The Nez Perce had adapted the practice from Catholic missionaries in the Northwest. Gregory E. Smoak, Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and American Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 67–69. 25.  J. Quinn Thornton, Oregon and California in 1848, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1864), 115. Such adaptations occurred across the Plains. For an earlier example in the Dakota village of Kaposia (present-­day Minnesota), see William Keating, Narrative of an Expedition to the Source of St. Peter’s River, Lake Winnepeek, Lake of the Woods &c. Performed in the Year 1823, By order of the Hon. J. C. Calhoun, Secretary of War, Under the Command of Stephen H. Long, UST.E. compiled from the Notes of Major Long, Messrs. Say, Keating & Colhoum, vol. 1 (London: Printed for Geo. B. Whittaker, Ave-­Maria-­Lane, 1825), 299. 26.  Edwin R. Bird, Journal, June 8, 1852, Edwin R. Bird Journal and Letters, 1854–1855, Edward E. Ayer Manuscript Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago; Jeremy W. Pye, “‘Making a Box Worthy of a Sleeping Beauty’: Burial Container Surface Treatments in the US During the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” in Death Across Oceans: Archaeology of Coffins and Vaults in Britain, America, and Australia, ed. Harold Mytum and Laurie E. Burgess (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2018), 177–78, 189–98. For an example of a similar syncretic adoption among enslaved African Americans in Jamaica, see Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 245. 27.  Bernard J. Reid, Diary, June 19, 1849, Box 22, Bernard J. Reid Collection, Archives, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California. 28.  William Denton Dibb, Diaries of Dr. William Denton Dibb on Captain Fisk’s Expeditions of 1862, 1863, and 1864 Across the Plains, n.d., section 3, p. 6, Newberry Library, Chicago. In the 1860s the Lakota would come to see the American flag as a sign of U.S. oppression, but in the 1850s they adopted it as a symbol of their political alliance. Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 54–55; Pekka Hämäläinen, Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2019), 216. This adoption of the flag was not limited to the Lakota. Other Native peoples, including Sauk leader Black Hawk and Chippewa leader Hole-­in-­the-­day, incorporated American flags into their burials. Adam John Waterman, “The

Notes to Pages 86–89

227

Anatomy of a Haunting: Black Hawk’s Body and the Fabric of History,” in Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture and History, ed. Colleen E. Boyd and Coll-­Peter Thrush (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 99. 29. Samuel Rutherford Dundass, “Journal,” in The Great Medicine Road: Narratives of the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails, Part 2: 1849, ed. Michael L. Tate (Norman, Okla.: Arthur H. Clark Company, 2015), 216. 30. James Bennett, Overland Journey to California (New Harmony, Ind.: Times Print, 1906), 19. 31.  Edwin Bryant, What I Saw in California (Philadelphia: G. S. Appleton, 1849), 68. 32.  Jon Coleman, Vicious: Wolves and Men in America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), 52–53, 59–61, 164–65. 33.  Helen McCowen Carpenter, “A Trip Across the Plains to California in 1857,” June 22, 1857, The Huntington Library, San Marino; Howard R. Egan, Pioneering the West, 1846 to 1878: Major Howard Egan’s Diary Also Thrilling Experiences . . . (Salt Lake City: Skelton Publishing, 1917), 62–63; William Lewis Manly, Death Valley in ’49: Important Chapter of California Pioneer History (San Jose, Calif.: Pacific Tree and Vine, 1894), 67. For additional comments on the advantage of protection from wolves, see William H. Woodhams, “The Diary of William H. Woodhams, 1852–1854: The Great Deserts or Around and Across,” ed. Charles W. Martin, Nebraska History 61, no. 1 (1980): 64; and Richard Thomas Ackley, “Across the Plains in 1858,” Utah Historical Quarterly 9, nos. 1, 2 (January, April 1941): 203, https://​issuu​.com​/utah10​/docs​/volume​_9​_1941. 34.  Laura Preston, A Boy’s Trip Across the Plains (New York: A. Roman & Company, 1868), 89. 35.  Juliette Brier, “Our Christmas amid the Terrors of Death Valley,” San Francisco Call, December 25, 1898, T. S. Palmer Papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino; Henry Bigler, Autobiography of H. W. Bigler, Book A, September 11, 1847, p. 118, Box 2, Diaries of Henry William Bigler, Mormon File, c. 1805–1995, The Huntington Library, San Marino; Edwin  E. Cox, ed., “David DeWolf; Diary of the Overland Trail, 1849, and Letters, 1849–50, of Captain David De Wolf,” Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society for the Year . . . 32 (1925): 196, 215; Holliday, World Rushed In, 146. 36.  The Journal of Madison Berryman Moorman, 1850–1851, ed. Irene D. Paden (San Francisco: California Historical Society, 1948), 22. 37.  E. H. N. Patterson, “The Platte River Route,” ed. LeRoy Hafen, To the Pike’s Peak Gold Fields, 1859 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 137. For descriptions of Cheyenne peoples planting cactus on graves to keep the wolves from digging up the dead, see George Grinnell, “Diary 351,” 22, Autry Research Library, Autry National Center, Los Angeles; Origen Thomson, Crossing the Plains: Narrative of the Scenes, Incidents and Adventures Attending the Overland Journey of the Decatur and Rush County Emigrants to the “Far-­off ” Oregon in 1852 (Greensburg, Ind.: Orville Thomson, 1896), 46; Richardson, 1852 Journal and Commonplace Book, June 9, 1852, pp. 54–55. 38.  Robert L. Munkres, “Wives, Mothers, Daughters: Women’s Life on the Road West,” Annals of Wyoming 42 (October 1970): 197–98. 39. Coleman, Vicious, 169–71. 40.  Margaret Coffin, Death in Early America: The History and Folklore of Customs and Superstitions of Early Medicine, Funerals, Burials, and Mourning (Nashville: Nelson, 1976), 151– 53; Coleman, Vicious, 170; Andrea Binder, “‘Deep Is the Grave, and Silent’: Death and Mourning on the Oregon-­California Trails” (MA thesis, University of Wyoming, 2011), 48.

228

Notes to Pages 89–92

41.  Lydia Milner Waters, “Account of a Trip Across the Plains in 1855,” Quarterly of the Society of California Pioneers 6 (1929): 63; Mrs. L. A. Bozarth, “Recollections, ca. 1905,” p. 3, Overland Journeys to the Pacific Collection, MSS 1508, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland. 42.  James M. Davidson, “They Laid Planks ‘Crost the Coffins’: The African Origins of Grave Vaulting in the United States,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 16, no. 1 (March 2012): 86–134. 43. Coffin, Death in Early America, esp. chap. 5; Harlow C. Thompson, Across the Continent on Foot in 1859: A Record of Personal Experiences (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Albert G. Rogers, 1902), 3; Mary Collins Parson, p. 2, Overland Journeys to the Pacific Collection, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland. 44.  Harlow Chittenden Thompson, “Across the Continent on Foot in 1859: A Record of Personal Experiences,” pp. 33–34, Edward E. Ayer Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago. 45. Bryant, What I Saw in California, 64. 46.  John Phillip Reid, Law for the Elephant: Property and Social Behavior on the Overland Trail (San Marino, Calif.: The Huntington Library, 1997), 28; Susan Thompson Lewis Parrish and Virginia V. Root, Following the Pot of Gold at the Rainbow’s End in the Days of 1850, ed. Leonore Rowland (Downey, Calif.: E. Quinn, 1960), 3. 47.  James H. Harty to Father, Brothers and Sisters, June 29, 1847, MSS 1508, Overland Journeys to the Pacific Collection, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland. 48.  Kurt D. Senn, “An Annotated Transcription of Daniel H. Budd’s Overland Trail Journal” (MA thesis, Central Missouri State University, 1998), 24. 49.  Adam S. Wiewel, “Geophysical and Bioarchaeological Investigations at the Box Elder Springs Site” (MA thesis, University of Wyoming, 2008), 63–65; Harriet A. L. Smith, “Recollections, My Trip Across the Plains in 1849,” California State Library, Sacramento, Digital Transcription by Kay Threlkeld, p. 6; Benjamin F. Adams to Sir, December 13, 1849, Benjamin F. Adams Papers, 1849–1850, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 50.  Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799–1883 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 29. 51.  Haun, “A Woman’s Trip Across the Plains in 1849,” p. 37; John Kirk Townsend, Narrative of a Journey Across the Rocky Mountains, to the Columbia River, and a Visit to the Sandwich Islands, Chili, &c. with a Scientific Appendix (Philadelphia; Boston: H. Perkins; Perkins & Marvin, 1839), 236; Ann Fabian, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 81, 103–7, 110–11, 121. 52.  Samuel Chadwick, Diary, 1849, p. 80, Manuscripts and Archives, New York Public Library. 53.  Wiewel, “Geophysical and Bioarchaeological Investigations at the Box Elder Springs Site,” 79. 54.  Virginia Reed, “Across the Plains in the Donner Party (1846): A Personal Narrative of the Overland Trip to California,” Century Illustrated Magazine 42, no. 3 (July 1891): 409, 412; Glenda Riley, “The Specter of a Savage: Rumors and Alarmism on the Overland Trail,” Western Historical Quarterly 15, no. 4 (1984): 427–44; Michael L. Tate, Indians and Emigrants: Encounters on the Overland Trails (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), 153–54. 55.  Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815– 1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 2–3, 691–97.

Notes to Pages 92–95

229

56.  John D. Unruh Jr., The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-­Mississippi West, 1840–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 131–32. 57.  Milt Otto, “Deaths and Graves on the Applegate-­Lassen Trail,” Trail Talk: The Newsletter of the California/Nevada Chapter, no. 53 (October 2001): 10. 58. James William Evans, Journal, p. 24, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 59.  Lodisa Frizzell, Across the Plains to California in 1852; Journal of Mrs. Lodisa Frizzell, ed. Victor Hugo Paltsits (New York: New York Public Library, 1915), 17. 60.  Abigail Scott Duniway, Overland Journal, p. 19, May 25, 1852, MSS 432, Abigail Scott Duniway Papers, 1852–1915, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland. 61.  Charles Edward Pancoast, A Quaker Forty-­Niner: The Adventures of Charles Edward Pancoast on the American Frontier, ed. Anna Paschall Hannum (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930), 253. 62.  Roxana Cheney Foster, “The Foster Family: California Pioneers of 1849, 1889,” p. 28, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 63.  J. Goldsborough Bruff, Overland Journal, p. 151, October 6, 1849, Journal and Drawings of J. Goldsborough Bruff, 1849–1853, HM 8044, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 64.  September 7, 1849, New York Daily Sun, Box 15, New York, Ralph P. Bieber Collection, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 65.  Calvin Taylor, “Overland to California in 1850: The Journal of Calvin Taylor,” ed. Burton J. Williams, Utah Historical Quarterly 38, no. 4 (Fall 1970): 337. 66.  William Renfro Rothwell, Diary, pp. 121–22, William Renfro Rothwell Papers, Yale Collection of Western Americana Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 67. Fabian, Skull Collectors, 16, 24–25; John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 275, 298, 301. 68.  Charles Ben Darwin, Journal, vol. 2, August 31, 1849, p. 102, HM 16770, The Huntington Library, San Marino; W. S. McBride, “Journal of an Overland Trip from Gashen, Ind. to Salt Lake City,” May 16, 1852, p. 23, The Huntington Library, San Marino; and Israel F. Hale, “Diary of a Trip to California in 1849,” Quarterly of the Society of California Pioneers 11 (June 1925): 71. 69.  Stillman Churchill, Diary, April 22, 1849, p. 9, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; Joseph Wood, “Notes from Diary of ’49,” June 14, 1849, vol. 1, The Huntington Library, San Marino; Brendan C. Lindsay, Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846–1873 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 110; William B. Lorton, Diary, p. 89, William B. Lorton Diaries and Papers, September 1848–January 1850, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Raymond W. Settle, ed., The March of the Mounted Riflemen  .  .  . Journals of Major Osborne Cross  .  .  . (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 264, quoted in Wendi  A. Lindquist, “Stealing from the Dead: Scientists, Settlers, and Indian Burial Sites in Early-­Nineteenth-­Century Oregon,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 115, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 340. 70. Fabian, Skull Collectors, 64–67. 71. Steele, Across the Plains in 1850, 38. 72.  “Overland from St. Louis to the California Gold Field in 1849: The Diary of Joseph Waring Berrien,” ed. Ted and Caryl Hinckley, Indiana Magazine of History 56, 4, (December 1960): 309; Laura Brewster Boquist, “Autobiography,” p. 6, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah; Tate, Indians and Emigrants, 137–39.

230

Notes to Pages 95–100

73. Abraham Henry Garrison, “Reminiscences of A. H. Garrison, His Early Life, and Across the Plains and of Oregon from 1846 to 1903,” Recollections and Correspondence, 1893– 1908, MSS 874, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland. 74.  Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 104. 75.  J. Goldsborough Bruff, “Introduction: Chapter Written Later for Overland Journal,” pp. 5–6, Journal and Drawings of J. Goldsborough Bruff, 1849–1853, with HM 8044, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 76.  Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Towards Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 72–73. 77. Laderman, Sacred Remains, 74–75. 78.  Catherine Sager Pringle, “Account of Overland Journey to Oregon in 1844; Life at the Whitman Mission at Waiilaptu; The Whitman Massacre,” October 27, 1908, p. 8, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 79.  Sarah Nichols to Samuel and George W. Nichols, April 7, 1849, and Samuel to Sarah, undated, 1849, Samuel Nichols Collection, 1753–1897, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 80.  Samuel Nichols to Sarah Nichols, undated, 1849. 81.  Samuel Nichols to Sarah Nichols, undated, 1849; Samuel Nichols to Sarah Nichols, October 26, 1849. 82.  “Keturah Penton Belknap,” in Women of the West, ed. Cathy Luchetti and Carol Orwell (St. George, Utah: Antelope Island Press, 1982), 145–46; J. W. Cheney, “The Story of an Emigrant Train,” Annals of Iowa 13, no. 2 (July 1915): 95; Mrs. B. G. Ferris, The Mormons at Home: With Some Incidents of Travel from Missouri to California, 1852–3. In a Series of Letters (New York: Dix & Edwards, 1856), 55–56. 83.  Abigail Scott Duniway, Overland Journal, p. 36; Vincent Hoover, Diary, vol. 1, May 18, 1849, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 84. Elizabeth Elliott to her parents, in Covered Wagon Women, vol. 8, ed. Kenneth L. Holmes (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1989), 111–13; Darwin, Journal, vol. 2, August 4, 1849, p. 27. 85.  J. Goldsborough Bruff, Diary, HM 8044, p. 166, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 86.  Elizabeth J. Ellison Goltra, “Journal Kept By Mrs. E. J. Goltra of Her Travels Across the Plains in the Year 1853,” p. 4, FAC 1406, The Huntington Library, San Marino; E. C. Springer Day Book, June 28, 1849, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. For another example, see Samuel Rutherford Dundass, The Journals of Samuel Rutherford Dundass & George Keller: Crossing the Plains to California in 1849–1850 (Fairfield, Wash.: Ye Galleon Press, 1983), 15. 87.  F. E. W. Patten, Diary, p. 18, Box 4, John S. Gray Research Papers, 1942–1991, Newberry Library, Chicago. 88.  Arkansas State Gazette, November 22, 1849, “Alabama to Arkansas,” Ralph P. Bieber Collection, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 89.  David Charles Sloane, The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 25, 83. 90.  John Pratt Welsh, Diary, vol. 1, August 3, 1851, The Huntington Library, San Marino; Journal of R. Beeching, July 28, 1849, HM 17430, The Huntington Library, San Marino; Brown, Reaper’s Garden, 246, 257; Robert V. Wells, Facing the “King of Terrors”: Death and Society in an American Community, 1750–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 121.

Notes to Pages 101–104

231

91.  Thomas White, To Oregon in 1852, Letter of Dr. Thomas White, La Grange County, Indiana, Emigrant, ed. Samuel Porter Williams (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1964), 10. 92.  Welsh, Diary, vol. 1, May 26, 1851. 93. Augustus Ripley Burbank, Diary, 1849–80, p. 23, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. 94.  S. Mathews to C. D. Adams, December 13, 1849, Benjamin F. Adams Papers, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; Bird, Journal, July 4, 1854. 95.  Gregory to Adams, May 30, 1850; Bird, Journal, July 4, 1854. 96.  On the evolution of services and the search for resources along the Trail see Unruh, Plains Across, esp. chaps. 7 and 8. 97.  J. A. Wilkinson, “Journal: Across the Plains in 1859,” August 29, 1849, 1 v., MS 981, Edward E. Ayer Manuscript Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago; and James Wikins Journey, March 8, June 10, 18, 1859, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 98.  Joseph Pownall, Journal and Letterbook, p. 2, Joseph Pownall Collection, 1849–1854, The Huntington Library, San Marino; Charles R. Parke, Journal, July 18, 1849, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 99.  Bird, Journal, July 4, 1854. 100. Pleasants, Twice Across the Plains, 124; William Hoffman, July 21, 1853, Journal of William Hoffman, April 13, 1853 to August 1, 1853, MSS 537, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland. 101.  Elisha C. Mayhew, “Diary of Elisha C. Mayhew, Shelbyville, Indiana to Oregon in 1854; ‘Sketches of a Trip Across the Plains,’” Mattes Library Collection, National Frontier Trails Center, Independence, Missouri. 102.  Lucia Loraine Williams, Diary, in Covered Wagon Women, vol. 3, ed. Kenneth L. Holmes (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1984), 132. 103.  Susan Isabel Drew, Recollections, 1925, p. 5, MSS 1508, Overland Journeys to the Pacific Collection, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland. 104.  Elisha C. Mayhew, “Diary of Elisha C. Mayhew, Shelbyville, Indiana to Oregon in 1854; ‘Sketches of a Trip Across the Plains,’” Mattes Library Collection, National Frontier Trails Center, Independence, Missouri; H. Gregory to C. D. Adams, May 30, 1850, Benjamin F. Adams Papers, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 105.  Elizabeth Fitzgerald B. Knowlton, Memoir, vol. 1, pp. 64–65, Elizabeth Fitzgerald B. Knowlton Memoirs and Diary, California Historical Society, San Francisco. 106.  Thomas D. Richards Jr., Breakaway Americas: The Unmanifest Future of the Jacksonian United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020), esp. chaps. 5 and 6. 107. “Remarks of Mr. Wentworth, of Illinois. In the House of Representatives, January 27, 1845—On the Oregon bill,” Cong. Globe, 28th Cong., 2nd Sess. 14 (1845), 136, https://​digital​.library​.unt​.edu​/ark:​/67531​/metapth2366/. 108.  “Distress Among the Emigrants. — Citizens, Shall Relief Go Hence?” and “The Suffering Immigration,” Alta California, August 21 and September 27, 1850, California Digital Newspaper Collection, cdnc​.ucr​.edu. 109.  Stephen W. Kearny, “Report of a Summer Campaign to the Rocky Mountains, &c.,” in 1845, House Exec. Doc. 2 (29:1), Serial 480, 212.

232

Notes to Pages 105–107

110.  “The Suffering Immigration,” Alta California, September 27, 1850, California Digital Newspaper Collection, cdnc​.ucr​.edu; Benjamin Butler Harris, “Journal of B. B. Harris, Crumbs of ’49, (1890),” p. 13, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 111.  Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 45–46; Andrew Shaler, “The Cherokee and Wyandot Companies on the Overland Trails to California: Histories of Indigenous Migration,” Journal of the Civil War Era 11, no. 1 (March 2021): 9–35. 112.  “The Journal of John Lowery Brown, of the Cherokee Nation en Route to California in 1850,” ed. Muriel H. Wright, in Chronicles of Oklahoma 12, no. 2 (1934): 205, 197–98. 113.  Matthew R. Costello, The Property of the Nation: George Washington’s Tomb, Mount Vernon, and the Memory of the First President (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019), 150, 158–60. 114.  Drew, Recollections, 1925, p. 5; Bruff, Journal, June 12, 1849, p. 44; Nathan Logan to George A. Anderson, “Letter from the Plains,” in Thomson, Crossing the Plains; Steele, Across the Plains in 1850, 71. 115. Thomson, Crossing the Plains, 82. 116.  Elizabeth Maria Campbell to George H. Himes, Reminiscence, February 23, 1904, Box 3, Oregon Historical Society Research Library Archives, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland. 117.  Abigail Scott Duniway, Overland Journal, p. 78; Esther Belle McMillan Hanna, Canvas Caravans, ed. Eleanor Allen (Portland, Ore.: Binfords & Mort, 1946), 28. On this sense of communal care for the dead and their memory, see Robert Carter, “‘Sometimes When I Hear the Winds Sigh’: Mortality on the Overland Trail,” California History 74, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 160–61. 118.  Chadwick, Diary, p. 78; Joseph McGee, “Our Travelers Strike into the Great Desert,” Story of the Grand River Country: Memoirs of Maj. Joseph H. McGee, 1821–1905 (Gallatin, Mo.: The North Missourian Press, 1909), Autry Research Library, Autry National Center, Los Angeles. 119.  Lillian Schlissel, “Women’s Diaries on the Western Frontier,” American Studies 18, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 90. 120.  James Aitken, Diary, May 20, 26, and 30, 1852, MSS 1630, Aitken Family Papers, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland. 121.  John Hawkins Clark, Overland to the Gold Fields of California in 1852: The Journal of John Hawkins Clark, ed. Louise Barry (Topeka: Kansas State Printing Plant, 1942), 253. 122. Charles Stackhouse quoted in Merrill J. Mattes, Platte River Road Narratives: A Descriptive Bibliography of Travel over the Great Central Overland Route to Oregon, California, Utah, Colorado, Montana, and Other Western States and Territories, 1812–1866 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), entry 632. 123.  Blanche Linden-­Ward, Silent City on a Hill: Landscapes of Memory and Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016), 165; John Hudson Wayman, A Doctor on the California Trail: The Diary of Doctor John Hudson Wayman from Cambridge City, Indiana, to the Gold Fields in 1852, ed. Edgeley Woodman Todd (Denver: Old West Publishing Company, 1971), 33. 124. Tate, Great Medicine Road, 90. 125.  On this privileging, see Howard R. Lamar, “Rites of Passage: Young Men and Their Families in the Overland Trails Experience, 1843–1869,” in “Soul-­Butter and Hog Wash” and Other Essays on the American West, ed. Thomas G. Alexander (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1978), 36–37.

Notes to Pages 107–113

233

126.  J. E. Brown, “Memoirs of an American Gold Seeker, Experiences of a ‘Forty-­Niner’ During His Journey Across the Continent,” Journal of American History (January–March 1908): 143; Senn, “An Annotated Transcription of Daniel H. Budd’s Overland Trail Journal,” 50. 127.  Amy Greenberg, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 US Invasion of Mexico (New York: Knopf, 2013), 179. 128.  John H. Hays, “Deaths on the Plains,” New Orleans Picayune, July 16, 1852. On newspaper lists as creating “communities of the dead,” see Thomas Walter Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015), 375. For other examples of published lists, see “Deaths on the Plains. Correspondence of the St. Louis Intelligencer,” Daily Ohio Statesman (London, England), Monday, July 19, 1852. See also “Deaths on the Plains,” New York Herald, July 16, 1852; and Daily Picayune, July 16, 1852. 129. “Gen. Twigg’s Command—Sickness on the Plains,” Massachusetts Ploughman and New England Journal of Agriculture, June 30, 1849, p. 3. 130.  “Deaths on the Plains. Correspondence of the St. Louis Intelligencer.” 131.  Confederates would use this same imagery in 1866, declaring that the mingling of the blood of Confederates from all over the South and the creation of a mingled band of graves had helped unite the South into one national body. Blair, Cities of the Dead, 59. 132.  “The Late Horrible Massacre,” Los Angeles Star, October 10, 1857, http://​mountain meadows​.unl​.edu​/archive​/mmm​.news​.las​.18571010​.2a​.html. 133.  “Horrible Massacre of Emigrants!! Over 100 Person Murdered!!,” Los Angeles Star, October 10, 1857, http://​mountainmeadows​.unl​.edu​/archive​/mmm​.news​.las​.18571010​.html; “More Outrages on the Plains!! Two Men Wounded!!,” Los Angeles Star, October 24, 1857, http://​mountainmeadows​.unl​.edu​/archive​/mmm​.news​.las​.18571024b​.html. 134.  “Massacre of Emigrants to California: Gwin-­Houston Debate on Mountain Meadows,” Congressional Globe, Washington, D.C., March 18, 1858, http://​ mountainmeadows ​.unl​.edu​/archive​/mmm​.news​.cg​.18580318​.html. 135.  “The Massacre at Mountain Meadows, Utah Territory,” Harper’s Weekly, August 8, 1859, http://​mountainmeadows​.unl​.edu​/archive​/mmm​.news​.harpers​.18590813​.html.

Chapter 4 1.  Kingsley M. Bray, Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), 41–43. 2.  Pekka Hämäläinen, Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2019), 250–52; Robert Utley, The Indian Frontier, 1846–1890, rev. ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), 69–70. 3.  Elliott West, Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023), 156–57; Kevin Waite, West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021), 190–91. 4.  For commentary on the Civil War’s overwhelming presence in nineteenth-­century history, see Elliott West, “The Future of Reconstruction Studies,” Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 1 (March 2017): 14. 5.  Historians William F. Deverell and Anne F. Hyde have also used this phrase in their primary source reader. William F. Deverell and Anne F. Hyde, Shaped by the West, Volume 2: A History of North America from 1850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 15. 6.  John Unruh famously ended his magisterial study of the Overland Trail in 1860, but many other studies extend through the 1860s including John Mack Faragher, Women and Men

234

Notes to Pages 113–118

on the Overland Trail (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979); and Michael L. Tate, Indians and Emigrants: Encounters on the Overland Trails (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006). 7.  Khal Schneider, “Distinctions That Must Be Preserved: On the Civil War, American Indians, and the West,” Civil War History 62, no. 1 (March 2016): 36–54. 8.  Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), xiv, 268. 9.  Martha Hodes, Mourning Lincoln (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015), 192; Scott Manning Stevens, “American Indians and the Civil War,” in Why You Can’t Teach US History Without Indians, ed. Susan Sleeper-­Smith, Julianna Barr, Jean M. O’Brien, Nancy Shoemaker, and Scott Manning Stevens (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 138. 10.  Elliott West, “Reconstructing Race,” The Western Historical Quarterly 34, no. 1, (Spring 2003): 6–26. For examples of historians who continue to center the Civil War and decenter Native history, see Waite, West of Slavery; and Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The U.S. and Its World in the Age of Civil Wars, 1830–1910 (New York: Penguin Random House, 2016). For calls to center Native history and the West, see Schneider, “Distinctions That Must Be Preserved,” 36–54; and Steven Kantrowitz, “Jurisdiction, Civilization, and the Ends of Native American Citizenship: The View from 1866,” Western Historical Quarterly 52, no. 1 (Summer 2021): 207–8. 11.  Thomas D. Richards Jr., Breakaway Americas: The Unmanifest Future of the Jacksonian United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020), 12, 262–64; Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800–1860 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 409–50. 12. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families, 421–34, 462–66; Gray H. Whaley, Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee: U.S. Empire and the Transformation of an Indigenous World, 1792–1859 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 17, 226, 233; Benjamin Madley, “California and Oregon’s Modoc Indians: How Indigenous Resistance Camouflages Genocide in Colonial Histories,” in Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America, ed. Alexander Laban Hinton, Andrew Woolford, and Jeff Benevenuto (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 132; Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016), 207, 253, 320–21. 13.  Thomas J. Farnham, Travels in the Great Western Prairies, the Anahuac and Rocky Mountains, and in the Oregon Territory, vol. 1 (Poughkeepsie, N.Y.: Killey and Lossing, Printers, 1841), 55. 14.  John Beeson, A Plea for the Indians with Facts and Features of the Late War in Oregon, 3rd ed. (New York: John Beeson, 1858), 14; Robert Winston Mardock, The Reformers and the American Indian (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971), 9–13; William L. Lang, “John Beeson (1803–1889),” Oregon Encyclopedia: A Project of the Oregon Historical Society, https://​oregonencyclopedia​.org. 15. Beeson, A Plea, 100–103. 16. Hämäläinen, Lakota America, 225–26. 17.  Thomas Cramer, “Overland Journey from Kansas,” June 10, 1859, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; Diana Mutti Burke, “Scattered People: The Long History of Forced Eviction in the Kansas-­Missouri Borderlands,” in Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States, ed. Adam Arenson and Andrew R. Graybill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 79; E. S. McComas, A Journal of Travel

Notes to Pages 118–122

235

(Portland, Ore.: Champoeg Press, 1954), ii; Alvin M. Josephy, The Civil War in the American West (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1991), 303. 18.  Sally Zanjani, Sarah Winnemucca (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 60–67; John D. Unruh Jr., The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-­Mississippi West, 1840–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 220. 19. Tate, Indians and Emigrants, 180–81; Unruh, Plains Across, 189–92. 20.  Stefanie Greenhill, “A White Man’s Empire: The United States Emigrant Escort Service and Settler Colonialism During the Civil War,” Muster: How the Past Informs the Present (July  28, 2020), https://​www​.journalofthecivilwarera​.org​/2020​/07​/a​-white​-mans​-empire​-the​ -united​-stated​-emigrant​-escort​-service​-and​-settler​-colonialism​-during​-the​-civil​-war/. 21.  Andrea Binder, “‘Deep Is the Grave, and Silent’: Death and Mourning on the Oregon-­ California Trails” (MA thesis, University of Wyoming, 2011), 51. 22.  William Ajax, Diary, August 16, 1862, 1861–1863, 2 vols., Vault MSS 1488, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. 23.  Susan Doyle, Journeys to the Land of Gold: Emigrant Diaries from the Bozeman Trail, 1863–66 (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 2000), 241–42. 24.  Jane Augusta Holbrook Gould, The Oregon & California Trail Diary of Jane Gould in 1862, ed. Bert Webber (Medford, Ore.: Webb Research Group, 1997), 59–61. 25.  Medorem Crawford, “Report on the Emigrant Road Expedition from Omaha, Nebr. Ter., to Portland, Oregon., June 16–October 30, 1862,” in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, series 1, vol. 50, ed. United States War Department (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1880–1901), 154. 26.  Brigham D. Madsen, The Shoshoni Frontier and the Bear River Massacre, 2nd ed. (Salt Lake: University of Utah Press, 1995), 222, 234, 193; Josephy, Civil War in the American West, 258–59; Dana Hedgpeth, “This Was the Worst Slaughter of Native Americans in U.S. History. Few Remember It,” Washington Post, September 26, 2021, https://​www​.washingtonpost​.com​ /history​/2021​/09​/26​/bear​-river​-massacre​-native​-americans​-shoshone/. 27. Faust, Republic of Suffering, 100–101; Hahn, A Nation Without Borders, 268–70. 28.  Not only were troops not sanctioned for killing Native noncombatants in battle, but they were also often promoted. Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 256. Those who spoke out were met with retribution. Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), 175–76. 29. Hämäläinen, Lakota America, 216–22. 30.  Richard White, “The Winning of the West: The Expansion of the Western Sioux in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of American History 65, no. 2 (September 1978): 321. 31.  White, “The Winning of the West,” 341–42; Hämäläinen, Lakota America, 224–26. 32.  For an argument that Native military prowess, not U.S. restraint, prevented additional massacres, see Jeffrey Ostler (@Jeff_Ostler) “June 25, 2021 is the 145th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, also known as the Battle of the Greasy Grass. I believe we should stop calling it a battle” Twitter thread, June 24, 2021, https://​twitter​.com​/Jeff​_​_Ostler​/status​ /1408165738691457025. 33.  Jeffrey Ostler, The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), 33–34, 44–45; Bray, Crazy Horse, 32–35, 43–44; Hämäläinen, Lakota America, 226–29.

236

Notes to Pages 123–129

34. Bray, Crazy Horse, 45–46. 35. Hämäläinen, Lakota America, 230–39. 36. Hämäläinen, Lakota America, 273; Bray, Crazy Horse, 76. 37. Hämäläinen, Lakota America, 259–62. 38. Kelman, Misplaced Massacre, 39. 39. Bray, Crazy Horse, 79; Hämäläinen, Lakota America, 259–74; Ostler, Lakota and the Black Hills, 53. 40. Hämäläinen, Lakota America, 244; George E. Hyde, Spotted Tail’s Folk: A History of the Brulé Sioux (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), 108. 41.  Victor Douville, “Mni Akuwin, Sinte Gleska and Tahca Ota” (unpublished manuscript in possession of the author, 2014), 1–44; “Indian Woman Who Helped Forge Peace to Be Reburied,” Billings Gazette, June 23, 2005. 42.  “How Abraham Lincoln’s Funeral Train Journey Made History,” June 2, 2022, https://​ www​.nationalgeographic​.org​/article​/how​-abraham​-lincolns​-funeral​-train​-journey​-made​ -history/; Douville, “Mni Akuwin, Sinte Gleska,” 9; David I. Bushnell Jr., “Burials of the Algonquian, Siouan, and Caddoan Tribes West of the Mississippi,” Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 83 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1927), 33–35. 43.  James C. Olson, Red Cloud and the Sioux Problem (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 30. 44.  George E. Hyde, Spotted Tail’s Folk: A History of the Brulé Sioux (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), 110. 45.  See Chapter 3. 46. Hyde, Spotted Tail’s Folk, 110. 47. Olson, Red Cloud and the Sioux Problem, 31. 48.  Wilson O. Clough, “Mini-­Aku, Daughter of Spotted Tail,” Annals of Wyoming 39, no. 2 (October 1967): 192–93. 49.  Eugene F. Ware, The Indian War of 1864, Being a Fragment of the Early History  .  .  . (Topeka, Kans.: Crane & Company, 1911), 293. 50.  Jared Farmer, On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 283–323. 51. Hämäläinen, Lakota America, 274–75. 52. Ostler, Lakotas and the Black Hills, 60–62, 101. 53.  Cynthia J. Capron, “The Indian Border War of 1876,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 13, no. 4 (January 1921): 476–503; Hyde, Spotted Tail’s Folk, 110. 54.  The photograph has been reprinted numerous times including in Tom Rea, “Peace, War, Land and a Funeral: The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868,” https://​www​.wyohistory​.org​ /encyclopedia​/peace​-war​-land​-and​-funeral​-fort​-laramie​-treaty​-1868. 55.  To avoid confusion, I refer to the older Joseph as “Tuekakas” and the younger Joseph as “Joseph” or “Chief Joseph.” 56.  Larry Nebula, Plateau Indians and the Quest for Spiritual Power, 1700–1850 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 88–89; Elliott West, The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 65–66, 51. 57.  Allen P. Slickpoo, Noon noo-­me-­poo (We, the Nez Perces): Culture and History of the Nez Perces (Lapwai, Idaho: Nez Perce Tribe of Idaho, 1973), 121; West, Last Indian War, 84. 58.  Young Joseph and William H. Hare, “An Indian’s View of Indian Affairs,” North American Review 128, no. 269 (April 1879): 419–20; West, Last Indian War, 117.

Notes to Pages 130–135

237

59.  Young Joseph, “An Indian’s View,” 418; West, Last Indian War, 106. 60.  Young Joseph, “An Indian’s View,” 418; West, Last Indian War, 106. 61.  Young Joseph, “An Indian’s View,” 418–19; Slickpoo, We the Nez Perces, 179; Alvin M. Josephy Jr., Nez Perce Country (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 99–101; West, Last Indian War, 106. 62.  Mark S. Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008), 30–34. 63. West, Last Indian War, 109–10, 113–16. 64.  Lucullus Virgil McWhorter and Ruth Bordin, Hear Me, My Chiefs! (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1952), 127–28. 65. West, Last Indian War, 116–18. On Nez Perce concepts of land, see also Jerome A. Greene and Alvin M. Josephy Jr., Nez Perce Summer, 1877: The U.S. Army and the Nee-­me-­Poo Crisis (Lincoln: Bison Books, 2022), 4–7. 66. West, Last Indian War, 130. 67. West, Last Indian War, 130, 185–86, 189–202; Peter Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016), 328; J. Diane Pearson, The Nez Perces in the Indian Territory: Nimiipuu Survival (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 46. 68.  On the murky origins of the speech and its heavy edits, see Thomas H. Guthrie, “Good Words: Chief Joseph and the Production of Indian Speech(es), Texts, and Subjects,” Ethnohistory 54, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 509–38; Pearson, Nez Perces, 53; West, Last Indian War, 284. 69. Pearson, Nez Perces, 68. 70.  Bismarck Tri-­Weekly Tribune, November 23, 1877, quoted in West, Last Indian War, 306. 71. West, Last Indian War, 282; Pearson, Nez Perces, 72. 72. Pearson, Nez Perces, 73–75. 73. Josephy, Nez Perce Country, 135–38. 74.  Young Joseph and Hare, “An Indian’s View,” 413. 75.  David J. Wishart, An Unspeakable Sadness: The Dispossession of the Nebraska Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 147–48; Scott Eugene White, “A History of the Poncas in Nebraska: A Struggle for Survival” (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2003), 1, 88–89. 76.  Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York: Henry Holt, 1970), 352; White, “A History of the Poncas,” 95. 77. Hämäläinen, Lakota America, 290–93. 78. White, “A History of the Poncas,” 115–16; Wishart, Unspeakable Sadness, 202–34; Hämäläinen, Lakota America, 331–32. 79.  White, “A History of the Poncas,” 118, 121. 80. Wishart, Unspeakable Sadness, 210–11. 81.  Stanley Clark, “Ponca Publicity,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 29, no. 4 (March 1943): 499. 82.  Mark R. Ellis, “Standing Bear,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, https://​www​.okhistory​.org​/publications​/enc​/entry​.php​?entry​=​ST013; White, “A History of the Poncas,” 184–89. 83.  Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1982), 155; T. H. Tibbles, The Ponca Chiefs: An

238

Notes to Pages 135–142

Indian’s Attempt to Appeal from the Tomahawk to the Courts, With Some Suggestions Toward a Solution of the Indian Question (Boston: J. S. Lockwood, 1887), 13–15. 84. Tibbles, The Ponca Chiefs, 26. 85.  James N. Leiker and Ramon Powers, The Northern Cheyenne Exodus in History and Memory (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 12–13. 86.  Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 4–5; “Chief Standing Bear, National Park Service, https://​www​.nps​.gov​/mnrr​/learn​/history culture​/standingbear​.htm. 87. Tibbles, The Ponca Chiefs, 118. 88.  Italicized in the original. Tibbles, The Ponca Chiefs, 119. 89. Kelman, Misplaced Massacre, 213–14. 90.  Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1881), 87. 91.  Jennifer Bailey, “Voicing Oppositional Conformity: Sarah Winnemucca and the Politics of Rape, Colonialism, and ‘Citizenship’: 1870–1890” (MA thesis, Portland State University, 2012), i; Louis Warren, God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 77. 92. Zanjani, Sarah Winnemucca, 60–67; Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, ed. Mrs. Horace Mann (Boston: Cupples, Upham & Co., 1883), 70–72. 93. Zanjani, Sarah Winnemucca, 72. 94. Zanjani, Sarah Winnemucca, 102–3. 95. Zanjani, Sarah Winnemucca, 91, 96, 197; Nicole Strathman, Through a Native Lens: American Indian Photography (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020), 30, 28. 96.  Cari M. Carpenter, “Sarah Winnemucca Goes to Washington: Rhetoric and Resistance in the Capital City,” American Indian Quarterly 40, no. 2 (Spring 2016): 87. 97.  Bailey, “Voicing Oppositional Conformity,” 4. 98.  Sarah Winnemucca, “The Pah-­Utes,” Californian 6, no. 33 (September 1882): 252–53. 99. Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes, 75. 100.  “Letter from Texas Emigrants, El Paso del Norte, July 1, 1849,” Southern Shield, September 15, 1849, “Alabama to Arkansas,” Ralph P. Bieber Collection, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 101.  Virginia Reed Murphy, “Across the Plains in the Donner Party (1846),” Century Illustrated Magazine 42 no. 3 (July 1891): 13. See also Robert V. Wells, Facing the “King of Terrors”: Death and Society in an American Community, 1750–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 73. 102. Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes, 11–12. 103. Cathleen Cahill, Federal Fathers & Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 79; Margaret D. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 165–70. 104.  On Christian influence on Native peoples in Nevada, see Warren, God’s Red Son, 97–99. 105.  Justin Gage, We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us: Native Networks and the Spread of the Ghost Dance (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020), 61; Steven Crum, “The Paddy Cap Band of Northern Paiutes: From Southeastern Oregon to the Duck Valley Reservation,” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 51, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 188.

Notes to Pages 142–146

239

106. Hoxie, Final Promise, 44–52. 107.  Megan Black, The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018), 27.

Chapter 5 1.  Gerald Vizenor, “Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice,” in Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 1–2. 2.  Frederick J. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Historical Archives, American Historical Association, https://​www​.historians​.org​/about​-aha​-and​ -membership​/aha​-history​-and​-archives​/historical​-archives​/the​-significance​-of​-the​-frontier​-in​ -american​-history​-​(1893). 3.  Glenda Riley, “Frederick Jackson Turner Overlooked the Ladies,” Journal of the Early Republic 13, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 217–18; John Mack Faragher, “‘A Nation Thrown Back Upon Itself ’: Frederick Jackson Turner and the Frontier,” in Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: The Significance of the Frontier in American History and Other Essays, ed. John Mack Faragher (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 1–10; Richard White, “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill,” in The Frontier in American Culture, ed. John Grossman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 47. 4.  Edwin Bryant, What I Saw in California (Philadelphia: G. S. Appleton, 1849), 31. The simultaneity of migration and memory-­making was part of a broader shift of understanding of history and memory-­making that began in western Europe and spread to the United States in the early nineteenth century. Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 1–10; Peter Fritzsche, “Specters of History: On Nostalgia, Exile, and Modernity,” American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (December 1, 2001): 1587–1618. 5.  David Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 1–7, 13; Levida Hileman, In Tar and Paint and Stone: The Inscriptions at Independence Rock and Devil’s Gate (Glendo, Wyo.: High Plains Press, 2001), 18, 33–34, 37, 107–9; Will Bagley, “Independence Rock,” in The Encyclopedia of Wyoming History, November 8, 2014, https://​www​.wyohistory​.org​/encyclopedia​/independence​-rock; Franklin Langworthy, Scenery of the Plains, Mountains and Mines: Or, A Diary Kept Upon the Overland Route to California, By Way of the Great Salt Lake: Travels in the Cities, Mines, and Agricultural Districts—Embracing the Return by the Pacific Ocean and Central America, in the Years 1850, ’51, ’52, and ’53 (Ogdensburgh: J. C. Sprague, 1855), esp. 59, 73. 6.  Warrior Art of Wyoming’s Green River Basin: Biographic Petroglyphs Along the Seedskadee, ed. James D. Keyser (Portland: Oregon Archaeological Society, 2005), 77–79. 7.  David M. Wrobel, Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 100–101. 8.  Charles Edward Pancoast, A Quaker Forty-­Niner: The Adventures of Charles Edward Pancoast on the American Frontier, ed. Anna Paschall Hannum (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930), xiii; William H. Paine, Diary, 1854 May–1855 November, June 1854, Box 1, William H. Paine Papers, MS 475, The New-­York Historical Society; Library of Congress, “Library of Congress Subject Headings PDF Files,” https://​www​.loc​.gov​/aba​/publications​ /FreeLCSH​/freelcsh​.html. 9. Wrobel has also recognized the frequent comparisons between railroad travel and that of “wagon days.” Wrobel, Promised Lands, 104–7. Historians have traced the writing and

240

Notes to Pages 146–151

publication of railroad company travel guides and advertisements, showing how they created colonial visions of the U.S. West for passengers and a national audience. See Marguerite S. Shaffer, “‘See America First’: Re-­Envisioning Nation and Region Through Western Tourism,” Pacific Historical Review 65, no. 4 (1996): 559–81. For a discussion of the railroads’ tarnished image, see William F. Deverell, Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 176. 10.  Adam Arenson, “John Gast’s American Progress: Using Manifest Destiny to Forget the Civil War and Reconstruction,” in Empire and Liberty: The Civil War and the West, ed. Virginia Scharff (Oakland: Autry National Center of the American West in association with University of California Press, 2015), 122–39. 11.  Pekka Hämäläinen, Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2019), 290–93. 12.  James E. Vance, “The Oregon Trail and Union Pacific Railroad: A Contrast in Purpose,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 51, no. 4 (December 1961): 357–79; Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 49. 13.  Glen Willumson, Iron Muse: Photographing the Transcontinental Railroad (Oakland: University of California Press, 2013), 80–81. 14.  Gordon H. Chang, Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020), 224, 228, 107. 15.  “The Donner Tragedy: The Old Times and the New—Interesting Coincidence,” Daily Alta California (San Francisco), June 22, 1868, p. 1. 16.  George A. Crofutt, Crofutt’s New Overland Tourist, and Pacific Coast Guide . . . (Omaha, Nebr.: Overland Publishing Company, 1883), 29–30. 17.  Mary Elizabeth Blake, On the Wing: Rambling Notes of a Trip to the Pacific (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1883), 186. 18.  I. J. Baldwin, Diary, 1873, pp. 31–32, I. J. Baldwin Collection, Colorado Historical Society, Denver. 19.  Kate Ball Powers, “Trip to California,” MSS 1741, John Ball Papers, 20th Century Western & Mormon Manuscripts, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. 20.  C. F. McGlashan to Eliza Donner Houghton, August 18, 1898, Box 2, mssHOU, Papers of Sherman Otis Houghton, 1828–1914, The Huntington Library, San Marino. On tourists tracing the routes of former explorers as a form of playacting that allowed them to lay claim to this earlier experience as they memorialized it, see Phoebe S. Kropp, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 100–102. 21. Crofutt, Crofutt’s New Overland Tourist, 35. 22.  Judith M. Bennett, “Death and the Maiden,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42, no. 2 (May 2012): 269–305; Christine Quigley, The Corpse: A History (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1996), 29, 34; Hans Baldung, Death and the Maiden, 1515, Google Arts & Culture https://​g​.co​/arts​/8WopEYr4XPE1BHJ68; Edvard Munch, Death and the Maiden, 1894, Philadelphia Museum of Art, https://​philamuseum​.org​/collection​/object​/76471. Hans Baldung is also known as Hans Baldung Grien. See Hans Baldung Grien, Biography, National Gallery of Art, https://​www​.nga​.gov​/collection​/artist​-info​.323​.html. 23. Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 66; Peter Thorsheim, “The

Notes to Pages 151–155

241

Corpse in the Garden: Burial, Health, and the Environment in Nineteenth-­Century London,” Environmental History 16, no. 1 (January 2011): 42; Bennett, “Death and the Maiden,” 270; Lisa Bright, “Frozen Charlotte: A Cautionary Tale Baked into a Cake,” MSU Campus Archaeology Program, February 9, 2016, http://​campusarch​.msu​.edu​/​?p​=​3934; Anne Ewbank, “The Haunting History of ‘Frozen Charlotte’ Dolls,” March 4, 2019, Atlas Obscura, https://​www​.atlasobscura​.com​/articles​/frozen​-charlotte​-dolls. 24.  Jeremy Engels and Greg Goodale, “‘Our Battle Cry Will Be: Remember Jenny McCrea!’: A Précis on the Rhetoric of Revenge,” American Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2009): 93–110. McCrea’s story remained salient into the twentieth century. See O. C. Auringer, The Death of Maid McCrea (Boston: Gotham Press, 1909), 34. 25. Auringer, The Death of Maid McCrea, 34; Alysa Landry, “This Date in History: Scalping of Jane McCrea Used to Portray Natives as Evil,” Indian Country Today, https://​indiancountry today​.com​/archive​/date​-history​-scalping​-jane​-mccrea​-used​-portray​-natives​-evil. 26. Amy Leiser, “The Legend of Lover’s Leap,” Monroe County Historical Association, https://​www​.monroehistorical​.org​/articles​_files​/021410​_loversleap​.html. 27.  Jared Farmer, On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 283–323. 28.  For details on Crofutt’s series of publications, see J. Valerie Fifer, American Progress: The Growth of the Transport, Tourist, and Information Industries in the Nineteenth-­Century West, Seen Through the Life and Times of George A. Crofutt, Pioneer and Publicist of the Transcontinental Age (Guilford, Conn.: Globe Pequot Press, 1988), 171–73. Crofutt’s guidebook was one of many to tell this tale, and on at least some trains guides employed by the railroad appear to have described the history of the landmark as passengers gazed on the grave through their car windows. See Mrs. Mallie Stafford, March of Empire Through Three Decades; Embracing Sketches of California History; Early Times & Scenes: Life in the Mines: . . . Crossing the Plains . . . (San Francisco: George Spaulding & Co., 1884), 145. On the prescriptive nature of tourism literature and its role in instilling nationalism in tourists, see Shaffer, See America First, 1–5. 29.  George A. Crofutt, Crofutt’s Trans-­Continental Tourist’s Guide (New York: G. A. Crofutt, 1871), 134–35. 30. Crofutt, Crofutt’s Trans-­Continental Tourist’s Guide, 134–35. 31.  Henry Williams, The Pacific Tourist: Williams’ Illustrated Trans-­Continental Guide to Travel, From the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Containing Full Descriptions of Railroad Routes . . . A Complete Traveler’s Guide (New York: H. T. Williams, 1876), 185. 32.  White, “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill,” 9, 49. 33.  Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 187–93. 34.  Review of The Virginian in Nation 75 (October 23, 1902): 331, quoted in Silber, The Romance of Reunion, 188. 35.  Randy Brown and Reg Duffin, eds., Graves and Sites on the Oregon and California Trails, 2nd ed. (Independence, Mo.: Oregon-­California Trails Association, 1998), 10–11; Reg P. Duffin, “Amanda Lamin—Devonshire, England, or Amanda Lamme—Marthasville, Missouri,” Nebraska History 58 (1977): 301–6, https://​hdl​.handle​.net​/2027​/loc​.ark:​/13960​/t0ht2xb9g; “Rachel Pattison Grave,” Ash Hollow State Historical Park, https://​www​.visitgardencounty​.com​/ash​-hollow​-state​ -historical​-park​.html; Randy Brown, “The Grave of Susan Haile,” Adams County Nebraska Historical Society (2002), https://​www​.adamshistory​.org​/index​.php​?option​=​com​_content​&​view​=​ article​&​id​=​39:​haile​-grave​&​catid​=​2​&​Itemid​=​42.

242

Notes to Pages 155–159

36.  Robert Harvey, “Rachel E. Patterson’s Grave,” Publications of the Nebraska State Historical Society, vol. 18, ed. Albert Watkins (Lincoln: Nebraska State Historical Society, 1917), 108– 10. While Harvey identified Rachel as Patterson, Pattison is the commonly accepted spelling. 37.  Collection of Nebraska Pioneer Reminiscences: Issued by the Nebraska Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution (Cedar Rapids, Iowa: Torch Press, 1916), 12–13, https://​archive ​.org​/details​/collectionofnebr00daug​/page​/12; Randy Brown, “The Grave of Susan  C. Haile,” Overland Journal 25, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 30–31. 38.  J.P. Munro-­Fraser, History of Solano County Comprising an Account . . . of its Cities, Towns, Villages, Churches, Schools, Secret Societies . . . A Full and Particular Biography of Its Early Settlers and Principal Inhabitants (San Francisco, Cal.: Wood, Alley & Co., 1879), 410–11; Brown, “The Grave of Susan C. Haile,” 24–36. 39. Harriet E. Parsons Hoff, Untitled Poem, Mary Parsons, “Recollections,” p. 5, MSS 1508, Overland Journeys to the Pacific Collection, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Research Library, Portland. 40.  James Schouler, History of the United States of America, Under the Constitution, rev. ed. (1904), 5: 135–36, quoted in John D. Unruh Jr., The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-­Mississippi West, 1840–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 24. 41.  Ezra Meeker, Story of the Lost Trail to Oregon (Seattle: n.p., 1915), 23; “To Mark the Route of the Oregon Trail,” Cong. Globe, 60th Cong., 1st Sess. 5226 (1908), 1–5; Washington State Historical Society Publications, vol. 2, 1907–1914 (Olympia, Wash.: State Historical Society, 1915), 294–95, quoted in Larsen, The Missing Chapters, 88, 256; Wrobel, Promised Lands, 109–13; Unruh, Plains Across, 20–22. 42.  Ezra Meeker to Caddie Meeker, quoted in Dennis M. Larsen, The Missing Chapters: The Untold Story of Ezra Meeker’s Old Oregon Trail Monument Expedition, January 1906 to July 1908 (Puyallup, Wash.: Ezra Meeker Historical Society, 2006), 76. 43.  For an example of this visual effect, see Unruh, Plains Across, 21. 44.  Ezra Meeker, The Busy Life of Eighty-­five Years of Ezra Meeker: Ventures and Adventures of Ezra Meeker (Seattle: Ezra Meeker, 1916), 328. 45.  Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 101. 46. Wrobel, Promised Lands, 95–104. 47.  For further discussion of the Jayhawker reunions, see Wrobel, Promised Lands, 95–103; and C. F. McGlashan, History of the Donner Party: A Tragedy of the Sierra (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1940), 90, 85, 118. 48.  J. W. Brier Sr. to Charles B. Mecum, January 17, 1876, JA 70, Box 1, Folder 34, mssJA, Jayhawker Party Collection of Materials, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 49.  Calista Willard Scott to Eliza Poor Donner Houghton, May 20, 1896, Box 1, Papers of Eliza Poor Donner Houghton, 1820–1978, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 50.  Brier to Mecum, January 17, 1876, JA 70, Box 1, Folder 34, mssJA, Jayhawker Party Collection of Materials; Eliza Donner Houghton, The Expedition of the Donner Party, and Its Tragic Fate, 2nd ed. (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1920), 347–49. 51.  Doris Foley, The Pioneer (Donner) Monument: The Origin of a Statue (Nevada City, Calif.: Nevada County Historical Society, 2000); Cynthia Culver Prescott, Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), 46. 52.  Douglas Tilden to C. W. Chapman, February 2, 1911, Box 2, Papers of Eliza Poor Donner Houghton, 1820–1978, The Huntington Library, San Marino.

Notes to Pages 159–166

243

53. Prescott, Pioneer Mother Monuments, 45–47. 54. Foley, The Pioneer (Donner) Monument, 3–5, 20; C. W. Chapman to Eliza Donner Houghton, May 22, 1910, HM 58139, Box 2, Papers of Eliza Poor Donner Houghton, The Huntington Library, San Marino. 55. Foley, The Pioneer (Donner) Monument, 21. 56.  Michael S. Makley, The Small Shall Be Strong: A History of Lake Tahoe’s Washoe Indians (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018), x, 18–19, 120–22. 57.  Justin Gage, We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us: Native Networks and the Spread of the Ghost Dance (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020), 122–41. 58.  Louis Warren, God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 93–99; Gage, We Do Not Want the Gates Closed, 122–41. 59. Warren, God’s Red Son, 197–99, 252–53, 297. 60.  Heather Cox Richardson, Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 17, 15–16, 199–200; Jerome Greene, American Carnage: Wounded Knee, 1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021), 228–29. The Wichakasotapi continues to reverberate to this day, remaining perhaps the most well-­known of the many massacres the United States committed against Native peoples. David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present (New York: Riverhead, 2019); Patti Jo King, “The Truth About the Wounded Knee Massacre,” Indian Country Today, https://​indiancountrytoday​.com​/archive​/the​-truth​-about​-the​-wounded​-knee​-massacre. 61.  Christian Klein, “‘Everything of Interest in the Late Pine Ridge War Are Held by Us for Sale’: Popular Culture and Wounded Knee,” Western Historical Quarterly 25, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 45–56. 62. Richardson, Wounded Knee, 277, 293; Greene, American Carnage, 301–2. 63.  Eyewitness at Wounded Knee, ed. Richard E. Jensen, R. Eli Paul, and John E. Carter (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 106. 64. Greene, American Carnage, 350; David W. Grua, Surviving Wounded Knee: The Lakotas and the Politics of Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 92. 65. Warren, God’s Red Son, 51–52; Grua, Surviving Wounded Knee, 95–96, 93. 66. Grua, Surviving Wounded Knee, 84–89. 67. Greene, American Carnage, 95–101, 315. 68.  John W. Troutman, Indian Blues: American Indians and the Politics of Music, 1879–1934 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), 31–33, 52–56. 69. Grua, Surviving Wounded Knee, 99–102. 70. Grua, Surviving Wounded Knee, 118–19. Gilmore went on to become a celebrated ethnobotanist who built a deep relationship with the Arikara. “Melvin Gilmore: His Work on Arikara Ethnobotany,” Native Plant Ethnobotany Research Program, University of Kansas, https://​ nativeplants​.ku​.edu​/ethnobotany​-research​-2​/native​-american​-ethnobotany​/melvin​-gilmore​ -his​-work​-on​-arikara​-ethnobotany. 71. Wrobel, Promised Lands, 121–23; Clyde A. Milner, “The Shared Memory of Montana Pioneers,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 37, no. 1 (1987): 2–13; Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991), 219; Abner Sylvester Baker, “The Oregon Pioneer Tradition in the Nineteenth Century: A Study of Recollection and Self-­Definition” (PhD diss., University of Oregon, 1968), 6–7, 33–42; Amanda L. Paige, “Susette La Flesche: Indian Rights and Rural Protest in 19th Century America” (MA thesis, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, 2009), 65; Sarah Keyes, “From Stories

244

Notes to Pages 166–171

to Salt Cairns: Uncovering Indigenous Influence in the Formative Years of the Oregon Historical Society Research Library, 1898–1905,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 121, no. 2 (Summer 2020): 188, 202–7; Boyd Cothran, Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 151–52. 72.  Lauren Grewe, “‘To Bid His People Rise’: Political Renewal and Spiritual Contests at Red Jacket’s Reburial,” Native American and Indigenous Studies 1, no. 2 (2014): 44–68. 73. “Funeral of Ulysses S. Grant,” National Park Service, https://​www​.nps​.gov​/articles ​/000​/funeral​-of​-ulysses​-s​-grant​.htm; Elliott West, The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 311–12. 74. West, Last Indian War, 312–13; James McLaughlin, My Friend the Indian (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 366. 75. McLaughlin, My Friend, 366. 76.  George A. Frykman, Seattle’s Historian and Promoter: The Life of Edmond Stephen Meany (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1998), 66–67, 93, 97–98. 77.  Mick Gidley, Kopet: A Documentary Narrative of Chief Joseph’s Last Years (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1983), 36. 78. Alan J. Stein, “Chief Joseph Watches a University of Washington Football Game and Gives Speech in Seattle on November 20, 1903,” HistoryLink.org, January 1, 2013, https://​www​.historylink​.org​/File​/10286. 79.  On the other side it said he led his people in the Nez Perce War of 1877 and listed his date of death and age. Robert Longley, “Chief Joseph: Tagged ‘The Red Napoleon’ by American Press,” February 25, 2019, ThoughtCo., https://​www​.thoughtco​.com​/chief​-joseph​-4586460. 80.  “The Reburial of Chief Joseph,” Seattle Post Intelligencer, June 25, 1905, p. 12. 81. Gidley, Kopet, n.p., figure 29. 82.  Helen Addison Howard, Saga of Chief Joseph (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), 319. 83.  Samantha Rae Dean, “‘As Long as Grass Grows and Water Flows’: Lyda Conley and the Huron Indian Cemetery” (MA thesis, Fort Hays State University, 2016), 1–2, 21–22, 212. 84.  “Wyandot History in Kansas,” Wyandot Nation of Kansas, https://​www​.wyandot​.org​ /wyandotKS​/wyandot​-history​-in​-kansas/; John P. Bowes, Exiles and Pioneers: Eastern Indians in the Trans-­Mississippi West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 87, 90; Michael L. Tate, Indians and Emigrants: Encounters on the Overland Trails (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), 121–22; Andrew Shaler, “The Cherokee and Wyandot Companies on the Overland Trails to California: Histories of Indigenous Migration,” Journal of the Civil War Era 11, no. 1 (March 2021): 9–35. 85. “A Rich History and Culture,” Historic Kansas City, https://​ www​ .historickansas city​.org​/kansas​-city/; “Why Is There a Kansas City in Both Kansas and Missouri?” Kansas City Public Library, https://​kchistory​.org​/faq​/why​-there​-kansas​-city​-both​-kansas​-and​-missouri. 86.  “Library History: Overview,” Kansas City Public Library, https://​www​.kckpl​.org. 87. Emma Rothberg, “Lyda Conley,” National Women’s History Museum, https:// ​www​.womenshistory​.org​/education​-resources​/biographies​/lyda​-conley. 88.  Dean, “‘As Long as Grass Grows and Water Flows,’” 59; Karen Berger Morello, “Rebels and Reformers,” in The Invisible Bar: The Woman Lawyer in America, 1638 to the Present (New York: Beacon Press, 1986), 124. 89. I. T. Martin, “Lyda Conley Interview, 1909,” Kansas Magazine (June 1909): 52–53, https://​www​.kckpl​.org​/kansas​/articles​/conley​-family​/190906​-lyda​-conley​-interview​.pdf.

Notes to Pages 171–177

245

90.  Lyda Burton Conley, “Huron Cemetery, Kansas City, Kansas, Argument Presented to the Supreme Court of the United States,” 1909, https://​www​.kckpl​.org​/kansas​/articles​/conley​ -family​/1909​-conley​-supreme​-court​-argument​.pdf; Andrew E. Steinmann, David G. Firth, and Tremper Longman III, Genesis: An Introduction and Commentary (Westmont, Ill.: InterVarsity Press 2019), 71. 91.  Conley, “Huron Cemetery.” 92.  Conley, “Huron Cemetery.” 93.  Conley, “Huron Cemetery.” 94.  Rothberg, “Lyda Conley”; Dean, “‘As Long as Grass Grows and Water Flows,’” 62–65. 95. Treuer, Heartbeat, 198.

Chapter 6 1.  Warren Gamaliel Harding, Speeches and Addresses of Warren G. Harding . . . Delivered During . . . His Tour from Washington, D.C., to Alaska . . . (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1923), 258; Chelsea K. Vaughn, “‘The Road That Won an Empire’: Commemoration, Commercialization, and the Promise of Auto Tourism at the ‘Top o’ Blue Mountains,’” Oregon Historical Quarterly 115, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 8–9, 22–23. 2.  Review of The Covered Wagon, Box 37, Emerson Hough Folder 40, Coll. 400008, Grace Raymond Hebard Papers, 1829–1947, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie. 3.  James Cruze, The Covered Wagon, 1:13:00, 1:16–1:21, YouTube, https://​www​.youtube ​.com​/watch​?v​=​rImU9gzjW5k. 4. Cruze, The Covered Wagon, 1:13:00, 1:16–1:21; Kiara M. Vigil, Indigenous Intellectuals: Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the American Imagination, 1880–1930 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 235. 5. Cruze, The Covered Wagon, 1:36–1:38. 6.  John Perry, “The Covered Wagon,” Film Heritage 4, no. 3 (1969), 17; Marilyn Ann Moss, “The Big Trail,” Library of Congress, https://​www​.loc​.gov​/static​/programs​/national​-film​-preservation​-board​/documents​/big​_trail​.pdf. 7.  Nut Tree timeline, http://​www​.nuttreeusa​.com​/history​/timeline/. 8.  J. W. Cheney, “The Story of an Emigrant Train,” Annals of Iowa 13, no. 2 (July 1915): 95–97; Dorothy Kupcha Leland, Sallie Fox: The Story of a Pioneer Girl (Davis, Calif.: Tomato Enterprises, 1995); Amy McGinnis-­Honey, “Travel Back in Time at Sallie Fox Day in Vacaville,” Daily Republic, May 1, 2015, https://​www​.dailyrepublic​.com​/all​-dr​-news​/solano​-news​/vacaville​ /travel​-back​-in​-time​-at​-sallie​-fox​-day​-in​-vacaville/. 9.  Paul Scolari, “Indian Warriors and Pioneer Mothers: American Identity and the Closing of the Frontier in Public Monuments, 1890–1930” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2005), 172. 10.  “Ezra Meeker and the Pathfinder Automobile,” c. 1928, Kansas City Public Library, https://​kchistory​.org​/image​/ezra​-meeker​-and​-pathfinder​-automobile​?solr​_nav​%5Bid​%5D​=​ 50b629620beaaa87ffac​&​solr​_nav​%5Bpage​%5D​=​3140​&​solr​_nav​%5Boffset​%5D=. 11.  Peter Blodgett, Motoring West: Automobile Pioneers, 1900–1909, vol. 1 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), 60. 12.  Sutter’s Fort State Historic Park, “Guide to the Charles E. Davis Overland Trail Project Collection,” 28–30, https://​www​.parks​.ca​.gov​/pages​/485​/files​/donnermasterguide​.pdf. 13.  Gabrielle Burton, Searching for Tamsen Donner (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 210.

246

Notes to Pages 177–182

14.  For biographical background on Davis, see Nell Murbarger, Sovereigns of the Sage: True Stories of People and Places in the Great Sagebrush Kingdom of the Western United States (Palm Desert, Calif.: Desert Magazine Press, 1958), 302–9. 15.  Charles E. Davis, “Reed-­Donner Party Exploration,” 1927–28, p. 6, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Nevada, Reno. 16.  Davis, “Reed-­Donner Party Exploration,” 11. 17.  Davis, “Reed-­Donner Party Exploration,” 11. 18.  Davis, “Reed-­Donner Party Exploration,” 11. 19.  Davis, “Reed-­Donner Party Exploration,” 11. 20.  Diane Bush, “Thaw: A Memoir” (MS thesis, Utah State University, 2009), 66. 21.  Like many Protestant white Americans, she attributed the benefits of migration to the racial superiority of northern Europeans. As immigration shifted from northern to southern and eastern Europe, Hebard dedicated herself to Americanizing immigrants, teaching civics classes, and giving speeches on the necessity of Americanization across the country. Frank Van Nuys, Americanizing the West: Race, Immigrants, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 18, 119–20. 22.  Scolari, “Indian Warriors and Pioneer Mothers,” 165–68, 172, 175–76. 23.  Mike Mackey, Inventing History in the American West: The Romance and Myths of Grace Raymond Hebard (Powell, Wyo.: Western History Publications, 2005), 5–10; George A. Frykman, Seattle’s Historian and Promoter: The Life of Edmond Stephen Meany (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1998), 68. 24.  Clark P. Rice to Grace Raymond Hebard, November 3, 1925, Box 37, Folder 34, Coll. 400008, Grace Raymond Hebard Papers. 25.  Leura Homsley Gibson to Grace Raymond Hebard, June 8, 1926, Box 37, Folder 34, Grace Raymond Hebard Papers; Alexander G. Brown, “Pioneer’s Grave Gives Up Secret,” The Oregonian, June 11, 1926, Box 37, Folder 34, Grace Raymond Hebard Papers. 26. Randy Brown, “The Grave of Mary Homsley,” Wyoming History Encyclopedia, https://​www​.wyohistory​.org​/encyclopedia​/grave​-mary​-homsley; Box 37, Folder 34, Grace Raymond Hebard Papers; Grace Raymond Hebard to State Historian, Nebraska, June 9, 1926, Box 37, Folder 34, Grace Raymond Hebard Papers. 27.  Alison K. Hoagland, “Architecture and Interpretation at Forts Laramie and Bridger,” Public Historian 23, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 27–54; Merrill J. Mattes, “Fort Laramie Park History, 1834–1977,” Rocky Mountain Regional Office, National Park Service, U.S. Department of Interior, 50–51, https://​www​.nps​.gov​/fola​/learn​/historyculture​/upload​/fola​_history​.pdf. 28.  Liza Nicholas, “Wyoming as America: Celebrations, a Museum, and Yale,” American Quarterly 54, no. 3 (September 2002): 439, 450–59. 29.  M. S. Garretson to Edmund Seymour, December 26, 1935, Box 5, Edmund Seymour Collection, American Heritage Center, Laramie Wyoming. 30.  Oregon Trail Memorial Association, Oregon Trail: A Plan to Honor the Pioneers (New York City: The Association, 1929), 14; R. S. Ellison to Grace Raymond Hebard, December 20, 1929, Box 35, Folder 11–13, Grace Raymond Hebard Papers. 31.  “The Oregon Trail: The Remarks of Hon. Carl Hayden of Arizona,” Congressional Record Appendix, 1930, 7279, Box 1, Edmund Seymour Collection, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie. 32.  Oscar E. Berninghaus, The Homeseekers, MutualArt, https://​www​.mutualart​.com​/Art work​/The​-Homeseekers​/9CFF682270A6571F. Berninghaus did depict Indian attacks on wagon

Notes to Pages 182–187

247

trains in other art pieces. For additional information on Berningahus and his work, see Attack on the Wagon Train, DLR02172, Smithsonian Institution Collections, https://​collections​.si​.edu​ /search​/detail​/edanmdm:​npg​_DLR02172​?q​=​berninghaus​&​record​=​15​&​hlterm​=​berninghaus; Oscar Edmund Berninghaus, Smithsonian American Art Museum, https://​americanart​.si​.edu​ /artist​/oscar​-edmund​-berninghaus​-377. 33.  Tom Rea, Devil’s Gate: Owning the Land, Owning the Story (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), 221–22; Clinton S. Martin, Boy Scouts and the Oregon Trail, 1830–1930: The Story of the Scout Pilgrimage to Independence Rock, Wyoming, to Hold Rendezvous in Honor of the Pioneers Who Won and Held the West (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1930), 22–24. 34. Rea, Devil’s Gate, 221–22; Martin, Boy Scouts and the Oregon Trail, 63, 75. 35.  Delores J. Morrow and Sandra J. Baker, “Unexpected Treasures Among the Photographs of Ed and Emil Kopac,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 55, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 63–67; Ed and Emil Kopac Photograph Collection, PAC 81-­65, Montana Historical Society Research Center, Helena. As of March 2023 the Kopac Photograph Collection is unprocessed, but the photographs are numbered. For an example of an emigrant grave that is difficult to discern, see 89I. For examples of “unmarked graves,” see 100B, 17L, 6M, 24M. For discussion of deaths from cholera and other “scourges” and diseases, see 30F, 82I, 89I, 34J, 17L, 20M, 45M, 58M, 49R. On white attacks on “sustenance” and other “injustices,” see 52E, 53I, 34J, 38J, 9K, 56F, 63F, 46M, 24P. 36.  Kim Clarke, “Gruesome but Honorable Work: The Return of the Dead Program Following World War II,” Perspectives Daily, May 24, 2021. 37.  C. F. McGlashan, History of the Donner Party: A Tragedy of the Sierra (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1940), 182; Rachel Kelly Laurgaard, Patty Reed’s Doll (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1965). 38. James Rosin, Wagon Train: The Television Series (Philadelphia: Autumn Road Co., 2012), 22, 169, 174, 190; Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 19. Detailed synopses of Wagon Train episodes can be found in the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), https://​www​.imdb​.com​/title ​/tt0050073​/​?ref​_​=​ttep​_ep​_tt. 39.  W. W. Morrison Papers, 1804–1977, Box 4, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie. 40.  “At Mary E. Homsley Grave July 13, 1969,” W. W. Morrison Papers, 1804–1977, Box 4, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie. Morrison referred to communists with the term “land-­grabber,” which derived from a common interpretation of Marx’s Capital. “Enclosure on the Grand Scale,” The Land: An Occasional Magazine About Land Rights 13 (Winter 2012–13), https://​www​.thelandmagazine​.org​.uk​/articles​/enclosure​-grand​-scale. 41.  Howard C. Bartlett, “The Maiden’s Grave,” January 16, 1964, papers in author’s personal possession. I would like to thank Frank Tortorich for his assistance with this research. In 2004, the Oregon-­California Trails Association struck a compromise between the now long-­dead Bliss and Sargent, keeping the name but telling the story of Rachel and Allen on a new marker titled “Who is really buried in the Maiden’s Grave?” https://​www​.hmdb​.org​/PhotoFullSize​.asp​?PhotoID​=​37445. 42.  Howard C. Bartlett, “The Maiden’s Grave,” January 16, 1964, papers in author’s personal possession. 43.  Oregon-­California Trails Association, “Lucinda Duncan: The Maiden’s Grave,” http:// ​www​.octa​-trails​.org​/gravesites​/lucinda​-duncan (December 26, 2016). 44.  “The Maiden’s Grave,” ed. Mrs. Andy Welliver, Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 6, nos. 3 and 4 (Fall and Winter 1963): 1–22.

248

Notes to Pages 187–193

45.  Rosalyn R. LaPier and David R. M. Beck, City Indian: Native Activism in Chicago, 1893– 1934 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 123–26. 46.  Theda Perdue, “The Legacy of Indian Removal,” Journal of Southern History 78, no. 1 (February 2012): 30. 47.  William J. Bauer Jr., California Through Native Eyes: Reclaiming History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016), 4–9. 48.  Angelina (Smith) Crews, “A Brief Sketch and History of an Oregon Pioneer,” p. 14, 1930, Box 14, Folder 7, Frederick Lockley Reminiscences and Letters, 1913–1940, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland. 49. Bauer, California Through Native Eyes, 100–101. 50.  Interview with William J. Onan, p. 3, and interview with Cunnie Martin, p. 8, Works Progress Administration, Indian-­Pioneer Papers Collection, Western History Collection, University of Oklahoma, https://​digital​.libraries​.ou​.edu​/whc​/pioneer/. 51.  Mick Gidley, Kopet: A Documentary Narrative of Chief Joseph’s Last Years (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1983), 91. 52.  David W. Grua, Surviving Wounded Knee: The Lakotas and the Politics of Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 152–53. 53.  Vine Deloria Jr., “This Country Was a Lot Better Off When the Indians Were Running It,” New York Times, March 8, 1970. 54.  Donald Lee Fixico, Indian Resilience and Rebuilding: Indigenous Nations in the Modern American West (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013), 144; David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present (New York: Riverhead, 2019), 10–11, 231; Sherry L. Smith, Hippies, Indians, and the Fight for Red Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 186. 55. Grua, Surviving Wounded Knee, 165–67. 56.  Edward Welch, “Oscar Howe’s Wounded Knee Massacre and the Politics & Popular Culture of an American Masterpiece,” Weber—The Contemporary West (Spring 2013): 133–40. 57.  Trail of Tears, Brummett Echohawk, March 3, 1922–February 6, 2006, Native American; Pawnee (Artist), Gilcrease Museum: Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art, https://​collections​.gilcrease​.org​/object​/021487. 58. Anne Courtemanche-­ Ellis, “Dee Brown (1908–2002),” Encyclopedia of Arkansas, https://​encyclopediaofarkansas​.net​/entries​/dee​-brown​-1086/. 59. Treuer, Heartbeat, 451–52. 60.  Centennial, TV miniseries, 1978–79, Internet Movie Database, https://​ www​ .imdb ​.com​/title​/tt0076993/. 61.  Colin Dickey, “The Suburban Horror of the Indian Burial Ground,” New Republic, October 9, 2016, https://​newrepublic​.com​/article​/137856​/suburban​-horror​-indian​-burial​-ground. 62.  Devon A. Mihesuah, “Introduction,” Special Issue: Repatriation: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, American Indian Quarterly 20, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 153–64. 63.  Scott W. Berg, 38 Nooses: Lincoln, Little Crow, and the Beginning of the Frontier’s End (New York: Vintage Books, 2013), 300; Curt Brown, “Little Crow’s Legacy,” August 17, 2012, https://​www​.startribune​.com​/little​-crow​-s​-legacy​/166467906/. 64.  Johnny P. Flynn and Gary Laderman, “Purgatory and the Powerful Dead: A Case Study of Native American Repatriation,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 4, no. 1 (1994): 51–75.

Notes to Pages 193–197

249

65.  Judith A. Boughter, The Pawnee Nation: An Annotated Research Bibliography (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2004), xx. 66. “History,” Genoa, Nebraska, The Pawnee Capital of Nebraska, https://​ ci​ .genoa​ .ne ​.us​/history/. 67.  “Facilitating Respectful Return,” Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, National Park Service, https://​www​.nps​.gov​/subjects​/nagpra​/index​.htm. 68.  Quoted in David Hurst Thomas, Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the ­Battle for Native American Identity (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 210, 214. 69.  Quoted in Kathleen S. Fine-­Dare, Grave Injustice: The American Indian Repatriation Movement and NAGPRA (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 117. 70. Deborah J. Shepherd, “Current Native (and Other) Views of NAGPRA,” Teaching Anthropology: SACC Notes 18, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 8–12; Joe Duggan, “Returning What’s Theirs: Two Decades After Passage of Federal Law, Repatriations Still Generate Controversy Nationally. Native Repatriations Nearly Complete in Nebraska,” Lincoln Journal Star, October 10, 2010, p. A1; “Picture of East Campus Native American Memorial Plaque,” Nebraska U: A Collaborative History, https://​unlhistory​.unl​.edu​/exhibits​/show​/bones​_controversy​/item​/664. 71. Jodi Rogstad, “Bones of Oregon Trail Pioneers Being Laid to Rest on Ranch near Glendo,” Wyoming Tribune Eagle, April 27, 2015, https://​www​.wyomingnews​.com​/things​_to​_ do​/bones​-of​-oregon​-trail​-pioneers​-being​-laid​-to​-rest​-on​-ranch​-near​-glendo​/article​_14df318d​ -ef39​-5789​-95df​-22b297a8262e​.html. 72.  Patsy Parkin, “Pioneer Remains to Be Reinterred,” Platte County Record Times, April 22, 2015. 73. Abigail Scott Duniway, Overland Journal, p. 36, MSS 432, Abigail Scott Duniway Papers, 1852–1915, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland; Margaret White Chambers, “Reminiscences, 1851,” p. 10, MSS 1508, Overland Journeys to the Pacific Collection, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland. 74.  Elizabeth Weiss, “Kennewick Man’s Funeral: The Burying of Scientific Evidence,” Politics and the Life Sciences 20, no. 1 (March 2001): 14. 75.  Victor Douville, “Mni Aku and Sinte Gleska and Tahca Ota” (unpublished manuscript in possession of the author, 2014), 25–27. 76.  “Mni Akuwin Exhibit Dedication & 156th Anniversary Celebration,” National Park Service, 2005, https://​web​.archive​.org​/web​/20081021022920​/http://​www​.nps​.gov​/archive​/fola​ /pphtml​/eventdetail16767​.html. 77. “Honoring Maynadier & Spotted Tail: Celebrating Two Cultures: The Story,” https://​maynadierspottedtail​.wordpress​.com​/the​-story; “Indian Woman Who Helped Forge Peace to Be Reburied,” Wind River News, July 7, 2005, 8. 78.  John Morgan, “Peacemakers from the Past: Saturday Fort Laramie Ceremony Honors Indian Woman,” Casper Star-­Tribune, June 24, 2005. 79.  “A Father’s Grief—A Soldier’s Honor—Fort Laramie National Historic Site, Fort Laramie, WY,” https://​www​.waymarking​.com​/gallery​/image​.aspx​?f​=​1​&​guid​=​02458ab6​-9611​-4e2d​ -b98d​-380999d70588. 80.  Tom Mast, “140 Years Later Agreement over Sioux Land,” Rapid City Journal, June 30, 2011; “Flag Flown at Half,” Star Herald, January 31, 2015; Nick Estes, “The Battle for the Black Hills,” High Country News, January 1, 2021, https://​www​.hcn​.org​/issues​/53​.1​/indigenous​-affairs​ -social​-justice​-the​-battle​-for​-the​-black​-hills; Tim Giago, “The Black Hills Award Approaching

250

Notes to Pages 197–200

1 Billion Dollars,” Indianz, March 22, 2022, https://​www​.indianz​.com​/News​/2022​/03​/22​/tim​ -giago​-sioux​-nation​-refuses​-payout​-for​-stolen​-land/. 81.  Dianne Lugo, “‘Homecoming’: 100 Years After Forceful Removal, Nez Perce People Celebrate Reclaimed Land,” Statesman Journal, July 29, 2021, https://​www​.statesmanjournal​ .com​/story​/news​/2021​/07​/29​/oregon​-nez​-perce​-tribe​-celebrate​-reclaimed​-reservation​-land​ -history​-treaty​-chief​-joseph​-amsaaxpa​/5424269001/. 82.  Associated Press, “South Dakota Tribes Buy Land near Wounded Knee Massacre Site,” Oregonian, September 15, 2022, https://​www​.oregonlive​.com​/native​-american​-news​/2022​/09​ /south​-dakota​-tribes​-buy​-land​-near​-wounded​-knee​-massacre​-site​.html. 83.  B. Toast, “After the Palisades Tahoe Name Change, Where Is the Washoe Tribe Looking Next?” High Country News, September 22, 2021, https://​www​.hcn​.org​/articles​/indigenous​ -affairs​-interview​-after​-the​-palisades​-tahoe​-name​-change​-where​-is​-the​-washoe​-tribe​-looking ​-next; Bill Chappell, “Interior Secretary Deb Haaland Moves to Ban the Word ‘Sq—’ from Federal Lands,” National Public Radio, November 19, 2021, https://​www​.npr​.org​/2021​/11​/19​ /1057367325​/interior​-secretary​-deb​-haaland​-moves​-to​-ban​-the​-word​-squaw​-from​-federal​ -lands. 84.  “A Gathering Storm: American Indians and Emigrants in the 1830s,” National Park Service, https://​www​.nps​.gov​/articles​/000​/a​-gathering​-storm​-american​-indians​-and​-emigrants​ -in​-the​-1830s​.htm; “War on the Oregon & California Trails,” National Park Service, https://​www​ .nps​.gov​/articles​/000​/war​-on​-the​-oregon​-california​-trails​.htm. 85.  “Western Shoshone,” California Trail Interpretive Center, https://​www​.californiatrail center​.org​/western​-shoshone/. 86.  Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 10, 51–53. 87.  “The Oregon Trail Game’s Minnesota Roots,” Here & Now, WBUR, May 17, 2016, https://​www​.wbur​.org​/hereandnow​/2016​/05​/17​/oregon​-trail​-roots. 88.  William J. Bauer Jr., Margaret Huettl, and Katrina M. Phillips, “Retracing The Oregon Trail,” California History 99, no. 3 (Fall 2022): 53–63. 89.  Tom Base, “It’s Official: Whitman Statue Being Replaced by One of Tribal-­Rights Activist Billy Frank Jr.,” Oregon Public Broadcasting, April 14, 2021; Frankie Kerner and Taylor Press, “UO Pioneer Statues Taken Down by Unknown Activists,” Eugene Weekly, June 14, 2020; Amy Lonetree, “Decolonizing Museums, Memorials, and Monuments,” Public Historian 43, no. 4 (November 2021): 21–27.

INDEX

African Americans, 8–9, 33, 58, 74, 89, 100, 206n25, 226n26 Akuwin, Mni, 124–28, 152, 180, 196–98 Alabama, 76, 100 allies, 20, 64, 125; Native, 87, 104, 180; white, 27, 29, 36, 171 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), 26 American Indian Movement (AIM), 190–91 ancestors, 17, 21, 23, 27–28, 31–32, 38–39, 50, 170, 193 anti-­removal campaigns, 15, 17–18, 23, 27–34, 37; activists, 20–21, 25, 36, 211n1. See also removal Apess, William, 25–26, 28 Arapaho People, 3(fig.), 52, 61–62, 84, 115(fig.), 124 Arkansas, 12, 100, 108; Helena, 132, 140 Ash Hollow, 115(fig.), 122, 199(fig.) Ashley, William, 11 Baker, George Holbrook, 81(fig.) Bannock People, 118, 123 Bannock War, 139 Battle of Little Bighorn, 61 Bear River Massacre, 115(fig.), 119–20 Bear’s Paw, 115(fig.), 132–33, 167, 169 Beecher, Catherine, 20–21 Beeson, John, 117, 192 Bent, George, 52, 61 Berninghaus, Oscar Edmund, 182 Bidwell-­Bartelson Party, 11 Big Hole, 115(fig.), 132 Black Hawk, 28, 226n28 Black Hills, 197 Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, 200 Blake, Mary, 148–49 Bliss, William, 185, 247nn41–42 Boudinot, Elias, 29, 33

Boy Scouts of America, 182 Bozarth, Mrs. L. A., 65, 89 Braddock, General, 96 Brier, John W., 158 Brown, Dorris “Dee,” 191–92 Brown, Randy, 155–56 Bruff, J. Goldsborough, 83, 93, 96, 100, 181 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), 31, 162–63 Bureau of Land Management (BLM), 198 California, cities and counties in: Amador County, 185; Los Angeles, 109, 145; Owens Valley, 188; Sacramento, 82–83, 177; Sacramento Valley, 48; San Bernardino, 119; San Francisco, 104, 138, 149, 158–59, 176, 200; San Marino, 145; Santa Barbara, 193; Vacaville, 176 Camp Douglas, 115(fig.), 119 Canada, 53, 128, 131, 166, 168 cannibalism, 4, 48, 139–41, 184 Cashbaugh, Jennie, 188–89 Catawba Nation, 188 Catlin, George, 59 Cayuse People, 2–3, 94, 115(fig.), 166 cemeteries, 14, 18, 100, 109, 171, 177, 200; “city of the dead,” 6, 82; Forest Lawn, 166; Genoa, 193; Harmony Grove, 37; Huron, 170, 172; Kanesville, 101; Mount Auburn, 37; Pêre Lachaise, 36; rural, 34–38, 50, 83, 98–99, 151; Wyandot, 170, 172 Cherokee Nation, 20–24, 36, 41–46, 50, 80, 189, 215n56; anti-­removal campaign, 28–34, 37–38, 211n1; Grand River Cherokee Nation, 105; National Council, 30 Cherokee Nation v. The State of Georgia, 37–38 Cherokee Phoenix and Indians’ Advocate, 29 Cheyenne Nation, 52, 61, 61–62, 84, 115(fig.), 124, 136, 194, 198

252

Index

Chickasaw Nation, 9, 22–23, 27 Chief Joseph, 128–30, 132–33, 166–69, 189 Choctaw Nation, 9, 22–23, 26, 29, 38–40, 42–43, 61 Christianity, 12, 32, 133, 137, 141, 171–72; Catholicism, 26, 47, 226n24; and death, 35, 37, 126; and missionaries, 11, 15, 26, 29, 41, 43, 54, 159, 226n24. See also Protestantism colonialism/imperialism, 17, 24, 33, 53, 78, 87, 116–17, 201; settler, 10, 21, 23–26, 169; violent, 60, 143–44, 187, 190–92, 196 Colorado, 102, 117; Denver, 124 communication systems, 1, 53, 108; “bones express,” 92; telegraph, 92, 132, 146 communism, 184–85, 247n40 Comstock Lode, 138 Confederacy, the, 6, 109–10, 112–13, 167, 187, 192, 201, 233n131 Conley, Eliza “Lyda” Burton, 170–72 Connor, Patrick Edward, 119–20 Cooper, James Fenimore, 24–25 Crawford, Medorem, 118–19 Crazy Horse, 61, 112 Creek Nation, 9, 22(fig.), 26, 38–39, 44–45 Crofutt, George A., 146, 148, 150, 152–54 Crook, George, 136 Cross, Osborne, 94–95 Custer, George Armstrong, 61 Cuulim Maqsmaqs, 169, 189 Dakota People, 118, 123, 190, 193 Darwin, Charles Ben, 48, 72, 94, 100 Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), 179–80 Davis, Charles, 177–79 dead maidens, trope of, 151–54. See also Maiden’s Grave deportation, 20–23, 27, 31, 34, 38–45, 70, 85, 191, 215n56 deserts, 6, 84, 91, 148–50, 167, 175, 179, 182; and death, 13, 80–82, 106, 137–42, 153, 177; Humboldt, 5, 80, 153(fig.); Mojave, 3(fig.), 82, 145, 157–58; Sonoran, 82 disease, 24–25, 104, 109, 187; cholera, 2, 13, 17–18, 41–42, 52–79, 82–83, 98, 101–2, 107, 120–21, 138, 140, 170, 183, 201; dysentery, 2, 13, 54, 200; malaria, 13, 54–56, 135; measles, 41, 129; “prairie cure,” 59;

smallpox, 60–61, 65–66, 68; tuberculosis, 13, 54, 68, 124; yellow fever, 13, 54 dispossession, 4, 21, 23–25, 45, 64, 130–31, 137–38, 152, 174–75, 192; during Civil War, 18, 113, 116, 120, 124, 142, 166; resistance to, 10, 85, 169. See also genocide; removal Donner Lake, 3(fig.), 115(fig.), 147, 148, 158–60 Donner Party, 4, 18, 47–51, 72, 90, 104–5, 139–41, 147–48, 177–78, 184; memorialization of, 157–60, 174, 199(fig.) Donner Pass, 174, 200 Duncan, Lucinda, 186–87 Duniway, Abigail Scott, 92, 99, 106, 195 Echohawk, Brummett, 191 Emigrant Escort Service, 118 familial geography, 18, 96–97, 102, 104, 110 Faragher, John Mack, 8, 205n21 Flesche, Susette La, 135, 166 Floyd, George, 200 Fly, Sarepta Gore, 155 Folsom, David, 26, 28 forts: Bridger, 105; Hall, 86; Kearny, 86, 115(fig.), 199(fig.); Laramie, 3(fig.), 60, 62(fig.), 64, 67, 86, 115(fig.), 121–28, , 180–81, 196–97, 199(fig.); Leavenworth, 122–23; Pierre, 122; Riley, 163; Robinson, 136; Sumter, 6, 112, 116; Sutter’s, 3(fig.), 48, 177, 199(fig.) Fox, Sallie, 176 freedom, 4, 113, 120, 128, 136, 166, 168 Free Soilers, 117 Frémont, Jessie Benton, 46 Frémont, John Charles, 46–47, 86 frontier thesis, 144, 154 fur trading, 11, 15, 53, 84, 86, 121, 125 Garrison, William Lloyd, 33 Gast, John, 146 gender, 8, 20, 73–77, 106, 138–39, 141–42, 151, 154–55, 179, 184; femininity, 73–74, 77, 171; masculinity, 8, 73, 76–77, 154 genocide, 23, 25, 116. See also dispossession; removal Georgia, 24, 29–30, 37–38 Gettysburg Address, 120, 132, 142, 157. See also Lincoln, Abraham

Index Ghost Dance movement, 143, 161–62, 198 Gill, George, 195–96 gold rush, 52, 56, 71–72, 75–78, 189; miners, 12, 28, 80, 83, 105, 116, 119, 123, 129, 138 Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), 166 Grand Council Fire of American Indians (GCFAI), 187–88 Grant, Ulysses S., 167 Grattan, John, 117, 121 grave lists, 107–8, 143 grave markers, 4–5, 7, 82, 103, 106–7, 143, 153, 155; as communication system, 92–93, 119; Native, 39, 45, 174, 190; as U.S. claim to West, 15, 112, 150, 179 Graves, Mary Ann, 48 Gray, Charles Glass, 77–78 Great Basin, 93, 112, 118, 160 “Greater Reconstruction, the,” 116 “Great Father, the,” 121 Haaland, Deb, 198 Haile, Susan, 155–56, 177 Hamlin, Augustin, Jr., 26–28 Harjo, Suzan Shown, 194 Harney, William S., 122–23 Hebard, Grace Raymond, 179–80, 185 High Forehead, 117–21 Hoff, Harriet E. Parsons, 156 Hoffman, William, 102–3 Homsley, Mary, 179–80, 185 Hoover, Herbert, 181 Horn Cloud, Joseph, 163–64 Horne, Jefferson Van, 42–43 Houghton, Eliza Donner, 148–49, 159 Howard, Oliver Otis, 130–32, 139, 167 Howe, Oscar, 190 Hutchings, J. M., 80–82 Idaho, 46, 100, 119–20, 123, 168 Illinois, 11–12, 47, 57, 71, 82, 108; Chicago, 188; Nauvoo, 75; Springfield, 48, 126 Independence Rock, 3, 46–47, 144–45, 182–83, 199(fig.) “Indian Princess” Winona, 152 Indian Removal Act, 20, 32–33, 38 Indian Territory, 9, 38, 42, 44, 59, 105, 135–36, 166, 191 Indian War Veterans Association, 166 Indigenous activists, 19, 26–27, 41, 111, 114, 138–39, 141–42, 190, 192–94, 200–201;

253

Cherokee, 29–31, 33, 50. See also anti-­ removal campaigns Iowa, 11–12, 57, 108, 118, 207n37; Kanesville, 59 Iron Hawk, Manny, 198 Iroquois People, 166, 215n56. See also Six Nations Irving, Washington, 24, 36, 151 Jackson, Andrew, 29–32, 36, 38, 40, 174 Jackson, Helen Hunt, 137–39 Jackson, William Henry, 182 Jayhawker Party, 145, 157–58 Jefferson, Thomas, 34 Kansas, 39, 54, 66, 83, 85, 117, 122, 145, 170, 172 Kearny, Stephen Watts, 104–5 Kemp, Anna, 1–2, 5 Kemp, Riley, 1–2, 4–5 Kentucky, 12, 57, 103, 108 Kiowa People, 3(fig.), 22(fig.), 61, 62(fig.), 115(fig.) Kiowa Sun Dance, 61, 62(fig.) Kopac, Ed, 183 Ku Klux Klan, 181 Laderman, Gary, 10–11, 208n48 Lake Tahoe, 160 Lakota People, 4, 22(fig.), 46, 67, 147, 161– 63, 196–97; and cholera, 52, 59, 61–64; and death practices, 84, 86–87, 95, 226n28; and Fort Laramie, 180–81; Oglala band, 61, 64, 123, 128; and U.S. relations, 112–13, 115–17, 120–28, 133–34; and Wounded Knee, 165–66, 190. See also U.S.–Lakota alliance Lamin, Amanda, 155 Lincoln, Abraham, 112, 120, 125–26, 142, 157. See also Gettysburg Address Maiden’s Grave, 150–54, 177–79, 185–87 Maine, 47, 77, 192 maps, 10, 13, 79, 102, 116; featured maps in book, 3(fig.), 22(fig.), 62(fig.), 115(fig.), 199(fig.) Maryland, 31, 74 Mashpee Wampanoag People, 25–26 Massachusetts, 25, 177; Cambridge, 37; Plymouth, 24, 37; Salem, 37

254

Index

Massacre of Mountain Meadows, 109, 199(fig.) Maynadier, Henry E., 126–27, 196–97 McCrea, Jane, 151–52, 216n89 McGlashan, Charles F., 149–50, 157–58, 184 McKenney, Thomas Lorraine, 31 Meany, Edmond, 167–69, 179 Meeker, Ezra, 156–57, 176–77, 181–82 Melton, Allen, 185–86 memorialization, 13–14, 47, 81(fig.), 96, 98, 106, 120, 146, 179; Donner Party, 49; practices, 88, 92; of settler women, 155; white of Indigenous, 17, 127 memory-­workers, 7, 145, 150, 185, 195–96; white, 145, 156–57, 172, 175–76, 180–82, 189 Methodist church, 26, 41 Mexican California, 47–48 Miami People, 22(fig.), 39 Michigan, 39, 54, 101–2, 108 Michigan Wolverine Rangers, 66 Miles, Nelson, 132–33, 167 Missouri, 11, 17, 55, 108, 170; Kansas City, 170; Ray County, 186; St. Joseph, 12, 56–58, 101, 184; St. Louis, 62(fig.), 76, 129 Mojave People, 176 Morrison, Wanda Mae, 185 Morrison, William Wayne, 184–85 Murphy, Virginia Reed, 48, 141 Murphy, William Green, 158

Nebraska Bill 340, 193–94 Nevada, 117, 138–40, 149–50, 152–54, 178–79; Beowawe, 152, 154, 177–78, 186; Reno-­Sparks, 47; Ruby Valley, 118 New York, 53, 55, 98, 117, 166–67, 181–82; Buffalo, 99; New York City, 31, 57, 65, 82, 145 Nez Perce Dreamer theology, 129–30 Nez Perce People, 2–3, 115(fig.), 128–33, 166–69, 189–90, 197, 226n24; Am’sáaxpa, 198 Northern Cheyenne People, 136, 194 Northern Paiute People, 3–5, 80, 115(fig.), 118, 137, 160

Names Hill, 145 nationalism, 17, 36, 46, 49–50, 104–11, 143, 151, 189 National Park Service (NPS), 8, 196 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), 193–96 Native American Rights Fund, 193 Native commemoration, 21, 39–40, 114, 120, 140, 144, 159, 163–66, 175, 194–96. See also Akuwin, Mni; Chief Joseph; Wounded Knee Monument Native place, 125, 160, 189; defense of, 4, 21, 23–28, 30–31, 36, 38–40, 50, 128–29, 192–93 Native Sons of the Golden West, 158 Nebraska, 84, 86, 106, 119, 122, 135–36, 177, 180, 191, 193; Adams County, 155; Bellevue, 63; Genoa, 193; Oshkosh, 183; Scotts Bluff, 46, 89

Pacific Exploring Expedition, 11 Pacific Ocean, 3–4, 6, 9, 19, 71; coast, 15–16, 48, 50; emigrant control over, 117 Pancoast, Charles Edward, 17, 145 Parke, Charles R., 13, 49, 58, 66 Parker, Ely S., 166 Parkin, Patsy “Bixby,” 195 Parkman, Francis, 58–59 Pattison, Rachel E., 68, 155, 177 Pawnee Nation, 3(fig.), 22(fig.), 52, 61, 63–64, 66, 94–95, 115(fig.), 191, 193–94 Pennsylvania, 82, 108, 145; Gettysburg, 120, 142, 157 Penobscot Nation, 192 Petit, Benjamin Marie, 43–44 Pine Ridge Reservation, 161 Pioneer Monument, 158–60, 174–75, 200–201. See also Donner Party Pipe-­on-­Head, James, 190

Office of Indian Affairs (OIA), 167 Ohio, 12, 76, 103, 108; Cincinnati, 26; Findlay, 107 Ojibwe People, 190 Omaha People, 135 Oregon, cities in, 2; Joseph, 198; Meacham, 175 Oregon-­California Trails Association, 187 Oregon Trail: book, 59; game, 198; trail, 1, 3(fig.), 62(fig.), 115(fig.), 166, 175, 199(fig.) Oregon Trail Memorial Association (OTMA), 181 Osage Nation, 3(fig.), 54, 61–63, 84–85 Ottawa Nation, 22(fig.), 26–28, 212n21 Oyuhi, Mato, 117, 121

Index placemaking, 10, 21, 23, 50, 152 Plains, 52, 112, 121–23, 173 Pocahontas, 127, 152 Polk, James and Sarah, 56 Ponca People, 133–37 Potawatomi People, 9, 22(fig.); “Yellow River Band,” 43–44 Protestantism, 10–11, 13–14, 26–27, 54, 129, 246n21; and conventions toward death, 34–36, 47, 50, 80, 82, 85, 87, 90, 151, 208n48 Pyramid Lake War, 118, 138 Quakers, 87, 145 racism, 15, 40–41, 60, 65, 91, 94, 100–101; by emigrants, 119, 152, 182–83, 187 railroads, 18, 98, 105, 128, 134, 143, 153–54, 159–61, 174, 176; Central Pacific, 146–48; guidebooks, 148, 186–87, 241n28; history with Overland Trail, 146–50, 239–40n9; Union Pacific, 146–47, 184 reburial ceremonies, 166, 168–69, 189, 193–98 Red Cloud, 128 Red Jacket, 166 Red Leaf, 122 Red Plume, 122 Red Wolf, Josiah, 131 Reed, James, 178 removal, 20–43, 111, 119, 134, 142, 170, 174, 188–89, 191; civilian contractors, 21, 162; resistance to, 17–18, 50, 201; routes, 22(fig.). See also dispossession; genocide repatriation, 184, 193–96 resurrection, 35, 87, 98, 137–42 Ridge, John Rollin, 80, 105 rivers/creeks: Bear River, 107, 115(fig.), 119–20; Buffalo, 119; Carson, 138; Chickamauga, 30; Columbia, 95; Feather, 94; Ganges, 53; Gila, 176; Grand Ronde, 129; Green, 105; Humboldt, 80, 138–40; Mississippi, 55–56, 82, 116, 127; Missouri, 12, 55; Niobrara, 122, 133–34; Platte, 60, 63–64, 67, 70, 74, 84, 88, 94–95, 99–100, 121, 134, 146, 148; Ponca, 134; Powder, 124–26; Republican, 121; Salmon, 130; Snake, 46, 130; Truckee, 47; Vermillion, 66, 83; Wabash, 21; Walker, 138; Wallowa, 129; Yellowstone, 121

255

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 188 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 182 Roosevelt, Theodore, 156 Ross, Eliza Jane, 21, 45 Ross, John, 21, 28, 30, 33–34 Salt Lake, 3(fig.), 69, 75, 93, 115(fig.), 118–19, 199(fig.) Sand Creek massacre, 115(fig.), 124, 192 Sauk People, 28, 226n28 Saunt, Claudio, 23, 38 savages, stereotype of, 25, 30, 32, 59, 82, 84, 140–41, 146, 152; hostile, 65, 69, 78, 140, 163; violent, 8, 93, 182 Scott, Ann Roelofson, 195–96 Seminole People, 85 Seminole War, 85 Seneca, Tonawanda, 166 Seneca People, 166 Serra, Junípero, 159 settlers, 4, 10, 24–25, 39, 55, 95, 178, 219n28; and colonialism, 21, 23, 206n30; and fraternal organizations, 158; histories by, 150, 152, 154–56, 180, 192; memorial practices of, 18–19, 49, 89, 207n31; settlements, 6–7, 26, 118–20, 128, 153–54, 158, 165, 173, 213n29; and trail memory, 165–67, 169, 173, 195; and violence, 116–18, 130–32, 161. See also colonialism/ imperialism Shawnee Mission, 3(fig.), 60, 199(fig.) Shawnee People, 9, 22(fig.), 39–40, 45, 60 Shoshone People, 3–4, 80, 86, 118–20, 183, 198, 206n26, 226n24 Sicangu People, 117, 120–21, 123 Sierra Nevada, 52–53, 118, 150, 185, 198, 208n41; and Donner Party, 4, 47–49, 147, 157, 159–60, 174 Sioux People, 190; Cheyenne River, 198; Oglala band, 190; Rosebud, 196 Six Nations, 166. See also Iroquois People slavery, 4, 15, 74, 85, 113, 117, 137, 200; anti-­, 33–34 South Dakota, 7, 122, 161–62, 191(fig.); Rosebud, 128 Southern Cheyenne People, 61, 161 Southern Paiute People, 3–4, 82, 115(fig.) South Pass, 3(fig.), 7, 11, 115(fig.) Spalding, Henry H., 129 Spotted Elk, 122

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Spotted Tail, 120, 122–24, 126–28, 180, 196–97 Standing Bear, 133, 135–37 Standing Bear v. United States, 136–37 Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 137 Sully Alfred, 123–24 Talbot, Theodore, 46, 84 Taylor, Bayard, 82 Taylor, Zachary, 56 Tejon Indian Reservation, 188 Tennessee, 12, 56, 107; Memphis, 44; Nashville, 56 territory, 2, 48, 65–66, 78, 89, 102, 104, 133–34, 137–39, 186; and graves, 9–11, 15, 19–21, 23–24, 50, 100, 110–11; and monuments, 46–47; Native, 26, 28–29, 64, 80, 84, 114, 118–19, 127, 131; U.S. expansion, 4, 7, 61, 71, 116–17, 121–23, 125, 129, 201. See also Indian Territory Tibbles, Thomas Henry, 135–36 tombs, 5, 35(fig.), 83, 99–101, 103–4, 106–8, 151, 167, 216n89; George Washington’s, 49, 172; and Maiden’s Grave, 185, 187; Native, 17, 33–34 traders, 29, 53, 56, 59, 61, 85–86, 91, 121–22, 141, 180. See also fur trading Trail history, 4–5, 8, 16, 155, 184, 194, 196, 198, 200 “trail of death,” 43, 177 “trails of graves,” 21, 40–46 trails: Bozeman, 119, 123, 127, 197; California, 2–3, 62(fig.), 115(fig.), 199(fig.); Oregon, 1, 3(fig.), 62(fig.), 115(fig.), 166, 175, 199(fig.); Santa Fe, 85, 199(fig.); Southern, 3(fig.), 62(fig.), 85; Trail of Tears, 21, 45 treaties: Horse Creek, 123; Fort Laramie, 134, 147, 197; Guadalupe Hidalgo, 116; New Echota, 33, 45 Treuer, David, 190–92 Truckee Meadows, 177 Truckee People, 149, 158 Tuekakas, 129–30, 133 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 144, 154 Umatilla People, 2–3, 115(fig.) Unruh, John, 7–8, 203n8, 205n20, 205n23, 233–34n6 Upper Platte Agency, 121

U.S. Civil War, 6, 18, 77, 116, 143, 146, 186, 209nn51–52; and death practices, 14–15, 109–11; and the War Against Native Americans, 112–14, 116, 118, 120, 142 U.S.–Lakota alliance, 86, 120–24, 127, 180, 226n28 U.S.–Mexican War, 56, 108, 116 U.S. military, 9, 15, 38–42, 86, 96, 131; Army, 39–40, 84, 108, 112–13, 117, 120, 123, 132, 136, 161–62; conflict, 18, 20, 117–19, 121–23; control over Overland Trail, 112– 13; and Mni Akuwin, 126–28, 180, 197; Native alliances, 124, 139; against Native Americans, 134–36, 142–43, 162–63, 165, 167–68, 174, 193; and smallpox, 61, 66; and trail deaths, 108, 110. See also Confederacy, the; Seminole War; soldiers; Union, the; U.S. Army U.S.–Nez Perce War, 116, 131–33, 166–67 Utah, 109, 119, 181; Ogden’s Hole, 46; Salt Lake City, 118–19 “vanishing Indian,” myth of, 17–18, 24–26, 30, 36, 152, 213n29 Virginia, 58, 108; Mount Vernon, 49, 106, 172 Wabanaki People, 47, 192 Wallowa Valley, 3(fig.), 115(fig.), 130, 132, 166, 167–68, 189, 197 War Against Native America, 113–21, 124, 132–38, 161 Washington, D.C., 56, 126, 138, 170 Washington, George, 49, 96 Washington State, 118, 156, 163; Walla Walla, 200 Washoe People, 3(fig.), 47–50, 52, 115(fig.), 160, 198 Welsh, John Pratt, 70, 101 Wentworth, John, 71, 104 West, Elliott, 7–8, 21, 116 western genre/Wild West, 167, 184 Western history, 7–9, 144–50, 167, 179, 181 westward expansion, 19, 64, 121, 160, 191, 201; and death, 6–7, 9, 11; expansionists, 104–5; historians of, 17; and removal, 50, 174, 189; white mythology of, 143–46, 200–201 white culture, 26, 50, 73; of death, 9, 13–15, 34, 96–97, 184, 192 Wichakasotapi (massacre), 162–65

Index Wier, Jeanne, 179 Wilhautyah, 130 Wilkes, Henry, 11 Wilkins, James, 85, 97, 101 Wilkinson, J. A., 101–2 William brothers, 118, 138 Williams, Henry T., 154, 186 Winnemucca, Chief, 138 Winnemucca, Natchez, 138 Winnemucca, Sarah, 137–42 Winslow, George, 72–73 Winters, Rebecca, 177 Wisconsin, 12, 93, 152; Portage, 144; Sheboygan, 145 Wister, Owen, 154–55 Wodziwob, 160 wolves, threat of, 13, 44–45, 63, 67, 83, 87–88, 104, 109, 187, 227n37; “wolf stones,” 89

257

Wood, Charles Erskine Scott, 132–33 Wood, Henry Clay, 130 Worcester v. Georgia, 37–38 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 188–89 Wounded Knee, 162; Monument, 163–66, 190–91, 198; Survivors Association, 198 Wovoka, 160–61 Wyandot People, 3(fig.), 22(fig.), 39, 169–70, 172 Wyeth, John B., 53 Wyoming, 46, 60, 100, 105, 121, 144–45, 179–83, 185, 194–95 Yakima Agency, 142 Yaqui People, 105 Yellow Wolf, 189 Yoholo, Opothle, 38–39

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wrote most of this book in physical isolation. From January 2018 to the start of Covid in March 2020 a combination of good fortune and professional support landed me a windowless carrel labeled with a “K” on the fourth floor of the library at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR). After Covid drove me home I worked from a west-­facing loft that blazed each evening with the heat of the setting sun. The rhythms of other humans set my writing pace. Parents of young children plan less and maneuver more. The unexpected schedules our days. Every day I gave thanks to the women who cared for my daughters. Dellia Munoz of the YWCA of Lubbock, Texas, Heather Sergi and Kaitlin Farley Cortes of UNR, and Natsumi Housley, now of Japan, are shining stars among the millions of talented early childhood educators who support our youngest learners and their families. None of us could do this without them. My daughters, Ruthie and Rose, get me up in the morning and send me to bed exhausted and accomplished. To thank them and my partner, Ken, is to thank the people who give meaning to my adult life. The list of people who supported and shaped this book is long. At Pomona College, Helena Wall introduced me to history. As I labored to conclude this manuscript, she steered me to the finish. It was Helena’s wise advice that pointed me to the graduate program at the University of Southern California (USC) and Bill Deverell’s burgeoning Huntington-­USC Institute on California and the West. I loved Bill’s Whitewashed Adobe the moment I heard the title. I loved reading it even more. At USC Bill created a world of history for his graduate students that was ever-­engaging, parsed of pretension, and always about the West. Bill knows precisely what to say and when to say it, a skill as critical to mentoring graduate students as those more celebrated by members of our profession. Peter Mancall, Richard Fox, Carole Shammas, María Elena Martínez, Karen Halttunen, Judith Bennett, and Cynthia Herrup led by example in ways large and small. Richard’s penchant for proffering pearls of wisdom as they occurred to him means that the history copy room and

260

Acknowledgments

the lobby of USC human resources remain as important to my professional and intellectual development as his classroom. My grad school colleagues, including Jen Black, Ben Uchiyama, and Matt Fox-­Amato, helped me navigate becoming a professional historian. Michael Block, Jessica Kim, Rosina Lozano, and Andie Reid remain dear friends. Will Bagley, Richard Rieck, and the staff and members of the Oregon-­California Trails Association shared their expertise and their contagious enthusiasm for all things trails. Members of the Huntington Library community, especially Roy Ritchie, Elliott West, Sherry Smith, Anne Hyde, David Wrobel, and Peter Blodgett, welcomed me into the historical profession. Peter remains one of my biggest supporters and friends. He has my immense gratitude. After graduate school, a series of positions allowed me to finish this book. At the Bill Lane Center for the American West, Brenda Frink was a cheery officemate and supportive sounding board. Richard White took the time to guide me through the job market and encouraged me to take ownership of this book. Generous support from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) brought me to the department of history at the University of California, Berkeley. There Robert Chester, Kira Blaisdell-­ Sloan, Caitlin Rosenthal, and Andrea Sinn helped me navigate research and teaching. Colleen Lye was a great de facto mentor and an even better gym buddy. David Henkin was and is a generous mentor who has sage advice about scholarship and life. Brian DeLay loaned me his office for a year and supported my work through a crucial reimagining and into this final form. The manuscript workshop I organized on his suggestion pushed me to think long and hard about what I wanted this book to be. Thanks to Brian, David, Bill Deverell, Janet Fireman, Margot Minardi, Beth Piatote, Jen Vanore, and Richard White for participating. On the South Plains of Lubbock, Texas, I was welcomed into a department so supportive that they included me in the Early Career Faculty Writing Group before I had even arrived. Sean Cunningham modeled best practices for treating job candidates and led the history department at Texas Tech University with pragmatism and grace. Alan Barenberg and Abby Swingen taught me so much about being a professor. The members of the history department, especially Erin-­Marie Legacey, Emily Skidmore, Jacob Baum, Ben Poole, Justin Hart, Miguel Levario, Matthew Johnson, Paul Bjerk, Karlos Hill, Zachary Brittsan, Ron Milam, Gretchen Adams, Laura Calkins, Patricia Pelley, Richard Verrone, Aliza Wong, Stefano D’Amico, Catharine Franklin, and Barbara Hahn, were fantastic colleagues. The Women Faculty

Acknowledgments

261

Writing Program, conceived by Caroline Bishop and supported by Elizabeth Sharp and Kristin Messuri, enabled me to make progress on my manuscript. Undergraduate and graduate students, especially Kayla Gray, Duncan Knox, Tyler Collins, and Vicki DeLeon, inspired me to become a better teacher and mentor. I found my footing in the classroom and with this book at the foot of the Sierra Nevada. Mentors in the history department at UNR, especially Elizabeth Raymond and Dennis Dworkin, gave me time and space to work. Funding from the College of Liberal Arts (CLA) and the Vice President for Research and Innovation (VPRI) supported my research program. The former dean of CLA, Debra Moddelmog, engaged with faculty research with remarkable commitment. For that I am forever grateful. The staff at the UNR library, especially Jennifer Wykoff, Kim Anderson, Roz Bucy, Donnie Curtis, and Lia Schraeder, supported my work with alacrity and good cheer. I’ve taught too many “favorite” classes at UNR to list here. My students challenged me to be more clear and more engaging. Sometimes they even laughed at my jokes. Special thanks to Michael Block and Christian Filbrun for assisting with fact-­checking. Colleagues in the history department, including Charles Tshimanga-­Kashama, Chris Church, Ned Schoolman, Renata Keller, Cameron Strang, Barbara Walker, Hugh Shapiro, Linda Curcio, Michael Aguirre, Jennifer Ng, Greta de Jong, Emily Hobson, and Meredith Oda, make the department a wonderful place to work. Meredith and Michael played especially important roles in bringing this book to completion. Thank you both. From this project’s inception as a dissertation, I was fortunate to receive extensive financial support. USC’s College Doctoral Fellows Program permitted me to work on my research full-­time. A dissertation fellowship from the USC-­Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute freed me to spend a year in the Huntington archives. Funding from the Charles Redd Center at Brigham Young University, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the Autry National Center, the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Huntington Library, the Newberry Library, the Smithsonian Institution, the Winterthur Museum & Library, the Western Association of Women Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Oregon Historical Society introduced me to people and sources whose labor and words are woven into this book. Among the many generous colleagues I met and worked with, I would like to especially thank Liza Posas, Conrad Wright and Elaine Grublin, Paul Erickson, Jeffrey Ostler, Rayna Green, Scott Daniels, and Eliza Canty-­Jones.

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Funding after I finished my degree allowed me to transform my dissertation into the book you have read. Joint funding from the Bill Lane Center for the American West and the Huntington-­USC Institute on California and the West supported a year of research and writing. A fellowship at the William L. Clements Library expanded my thinking on the project and introduced me to a cadre of delightful people including Barb Bradley, Valerie Proehl, Clayton Peoples, Brian Dunnigan, and Jason Herbert. The American Council of Learned Societies’ New Faculty Fellows program permitted me to gain teaching and professional experience while maintaining my research agenda. At Texas Tech, funding from the Humanities Center helped me to balance research and teaching. Financial support from the university launched my research program. A key research grant from the Wyoming State Historical Society allowed me to complete research for the final chapter. At UNR, funding from CLA, the VPRI, and the history department was critical to completing this book. I cannot imagine a better home for this book than the University of Pennsylvania Press. Brian DeLay and Bob Lockhart made the book immeasurably better. Both Brian and Bob gave sage editorial advice and pushed me to reach higher. Bob also helped me finish. As I revised, he reread each chapter with unparalleled care and encouraged me to keep going. That the book is (in my biased estimation) good and (objectively) done owes much to Bob. Friends within and without the academy sustained this project. Natalie Joy, Courtney Thomas, Jen Vanore, Indy Collado, Courtney Cain, and Michael Block were always just a text or call away. Each year I looked forward to reconnecting with friends at the Western History Association Conference including Erika Perez, Zevi Gutfreund, Paul Conrad, Amanda Hendrix-­ Komoto, Stacey Smith, Mike Green, and Traci Brynne Voyles. Members of my virtual writing group, “Daily Writing with Slackers,” especially founder Manuela Borzone and Dawn Woods, kept me on track. Family weddings, baby showers, and beach meet-­ups drew me home to California to recharge. I am lucky to have so many people in my life who know me. It is a true joy to be a sister to David and an aunt to Parker and Tatum. My parents, Richard and Sally Keyes, deserve my greatest thanks. They supported me every step of the way and have taught me more than anyone else. This book is a piece of their legacy.