Some Futureworkers might be interested in a short extract from "I Dwell in Possibility", by Donna M. Lucey, recently published by National Geographic, showing another aspect of the invasion of the American West by desperate people, often single women, seeking a new livelihood. This doesn't justify the injustices done to American Indians, as we are frequently reminded by Ray, but gives a glimpse of other historical and economic realities that were occurring at that time.
<<<< The West offered unique opportunities. In an era when they did not generally own land, single women could claim 160 acres, free. Wyoming, still only a territory, gave women the right to vote-- the first place in the country to do so. Other western states followed suit. Women went out west -- with or without husbands -- to take part in the American dream. Settling into tiny cabins or tents or dirt-floored sod houses, they made do with very little and built on it; they helped create the mining, ranching and homesteading cultures of the West, contributing immeasurably to its economic and social development, and forging a pioneer spirit that is at the heart of the American experience. Ingenuity and hard work were the hallmarks of the western pioneer woman. Fortunately, many chronicled their journeys in letters and diaries, including the doughty Algenine Ashley: "I write on my lap with the wind rocking the wagon." She was one of the 350,000 people who headed west by wagon -- some 2,400 rugged miles from the Missouri river to Oregon and California -- between 1841 and 1866. The vast majority of the emigrants were young (between 16 and 35) and healthy. Many women, of course, were not eager to be separated from their homes and loved ones, knowing well they would probably never see either again. Others embraced the challenge: "I was possessed with a spirit of adventure and a desire to see what was new and strange," Mirian Thompson, a teenage bride, wrote. Halfway across the country, she and her travelling mates received a dire prediction: a man "gave us the consoling information that the Indians would kill us before we got to Oregon". But the emigrants, according to her, were "indifferent to fear", and she found the Native Americans "better than represented". In fact, women bartered with them, exchanging calico and cash for foods: salmon, mountain trout and buffalo. Yet, as more and more whites poured into Native American lands, the relationship soured. The buffalo herds on which the Indians depended were being thinned and their patterns disrupted; diseases such as cholera, smallpox and measles, against which the native people had no resistance, decimated the tribes. Indians began to brun the grass needed to feed the emigrants' livestock; they attacked the wagon trains. In September 1857 an emigrant reported that traders had found a woman who had been scalped and assumed dead. She survived only to die a year or two later of "melancholy". The same woman chronicler noted that a party ahead of them had made a chilling discovery on the trail: "the body of a nude woman on the bank of the slough . . . a piece of hair rope arouind her neck . . . From appearance, it was thought she had been tortured by being drawn back and forth through the slough by this rope round her neck. The body was given the best burial that was possible under the circumstances". Death was a constant presence, but many more died from diseases and accidents than from attacks by Native Americans. In the mid-19th century, at the height of the gold rush fever then luring adventure seekers to California, cholera swept through the emigrant ranks. Two thirds of some large wagon trains died. In June 1852, Jane Kellog described the devastation in her diary: "All along the road up the Platte River was a grave yard; most any time of day you could see people burying their dead; some places five or six places in a row." >>>> __________________________________________________________ �Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write in order to discover if they have something to say.� John D. Barrow _________________________________________________ Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________
