On the Trail
She would not soon forget the morning they left. She bade friends from childhood goodbye, making them promise to come see her at her new home in the West. She hugged her brothers and sisters. She hugged her mother and took the inevitable parting advice. She hugged her father, seeing, for the first time in her life, tears in his eyes.
She took the reins of their heavily loaded 10-foot long and four-foot wide covered wagon, her two babies on the bench beside her. She called two yoke of well-fed oxen to the task before them. Her husband rode his best saddle horse, herding four more oxen, two more saddle horses and a milk cow slowly behind the wagon to spare his family the dust in their wake. She looked over her shoulder, watching her home diminish slowly and then disappear on the road behind them.
A composite of many such women, our young pioneer and her family would join a caravan to the West – a movable village – in the coming days. With the train of wagons, they would travel 10 or 15 miles a day, following a trail scored by the wheels of previous expeditions. She would watch the woodlands melt slowly into prairie lands and then into endless grassy plains, mountain ranges and hot and sandy desert basins. She saw the oxen at her daily command grow thin under their heavy burdens. She knew that her husband and the other men had become increasingly worried about the shortages of water and grazing for the livestock. She struggled to keep her two children well fed and reasonably clean, scolding them when they whined and complained. She gave them trail remedies for bad colds and upset stomachs. She could feel the progressively insistent movement of the new child within her, perhaps a physiological response to her jolting ride. She heard stories of Indian massacres of immigrants and wild animal attacks on children. She sensed, perhaps, that she had become one of the strands in the fabric of America’s pioneering legacy, the great western movement recorded in diaries and chronicles by a number of women who made the journey.
In the February 1, 1847, entry in her diary, Down the Santa Fe Trail and Into Mexico, 18-year-old new bride Susan Shelby Magoffin spoke to the hardship of the trail: “We are almost at the mouth of the Jornada (the long journey without water) [a passage on a desert trail through New Mexico] have been traveling slowly the roads being exceedingly heavy, with two or three severe hills; one we passed this morning, about a half mile in length, and the sand so heavy all the teams doubled and were then just able to get over with resting half a dozen times… …the poor
animals work so hard.”
In her 1849 chronicle, published by Kenneth L. Holmes in his Covered Wagon Women: Diaries & Letters from the Western Trails, 1840-1849, 28-year-old Louisiana Strentzel said of a passage over the trail along southern Arizona’s Gila River: “We found that the only way to get through was to travel slowly in the cool of the day, save the animals as much as possible and stop at every little grass we could find. We soaked corn in water and gave each a small ration every day…
“A great many [people], when their teams began to fail, left their wagons and packed what they could…”
In one stretch of 16 miles, said Strentzel, “I counted 27 dead animals immediately by the road, besides those that wandered off in search of water and died.”
In a quote published by Linda Peavy & Ursula Smith in their Pioneer Women: The Lives of Women on the Frontier, 18-year-old Esther Hanna, a minister’s wife, said, “It is very trying on the patience to cook and bake on a little green wood fire with the smoke blowing in your eyes so as to blind you…”
When they reached the desert in their journey west, the pioneer women, with larders beginning to run low, discovered that prickly pear cactus pads, rich in vitamin C, could be incorporated into their family diets, according to Peavy and Smith. They boiled the pads and the red fruit, making it easier to remove the spines and the skins. The pad fibers, served fried, tasted something like green beans. The fruit fiber, served raw, tasted like a mix of watermelon and cucumbers.
In addition to the hardships of the trail, the pioneer women, imbued with modesty, often had to endure a humiliating lack of privacy. Between campsites, they sometimes used their long skirts to shield a companion from inquiring male eyes. In camps, they sometimes turned to flimsy canvas latrines. At the occasional watering holes, available to men as well as women, they had to wash the rags that had served as sanitary napkins.
As caravans rolled westward through the desert landscape, the women often had to ration their use of the limited water, knowing it first had to answer the thirst of the pioneers and their livestock. Then, should there be a spare tubful, a woman might make it serve multiple purposes—washing dishes, washing clothes and bathing children in the same water.
With the poor sanitation and the punishing environment taking an inevitable toll on the health of the travelers, the women became the principal caregivers, treating the sick, setting broken bones, amputating limbs, delivering babies. Knowing the risks of cholera, typhoid, smallpox, pneumonia and other diseases, they came as prepared as they could. One pioneer woman, according to Peavy and Smith, said, “no one should travel this road without medicine, for they are sure to have the summer complaint. Each family should have a box of physicking pills, a quart of castor oil, a quart of the best rum, and a large vial of peppermint essence.” When the women got sick, they often treated themselves. “…I had an ugly cold…which required two or three nights’ sweating, and onion poltice before I found relief,” said Susan Magoffin.
Even if they never experienced actual Indian “depredations,” the women felt constantly haunted by the shadows of Comanches, Kiowas, Apaches, Navajoes, Utes and other tribes. In El Paso, said Strentzel, “Mules and oxen were not to be had. The Indians [probably Mescalero Apaches] were constantly making incursions on the inhabitants and driving off their stock.” In Santa Cruz, a village of some 300 in southern Arizona, residents were “unprotected and exposed to the mercy of the [Chiricahua or Western] Apache Indians who come in at times and drive off all their stock; kill and make them prisoners…” She knew that the same Apaches loomed as a threat over the wagon trains.
Some women, distraught by the unremitting rigors of the trail, tried to turn back, according to Cathy Luchetti and Carol Olwell in their book, Women of the West. “There are accounts of women setting fire to their wagons, stealing horses and riding east, even threatening their own children…” in a maddened effort to escape their ordeals. Others, thrilling to the adventure, “urged their husbands ever forward…”
A New Home
As our composite young pioneer woman, with her husband and children drew near the end of the journey through the desert, we can envision that she had emerged forever from the sheltering cocoon of her childhood home. She had persevered under a litany of hardships although she had left her prematurely newborn infant in a sheltering grove of oaks beside the trail, resting in a shallow grave, swaddled in a blanket, covered with river cobbles, and marked with a rude cross. They abandoned four of their eight oxen, exhausted, to die beside the trail. She and her husband had learned from discouraged prospectors that the fields of California yielded more disappointment than gold. As their caravan crawled through the desert scrub and grasslands, spirals of dust rising in the distance, she longed for the greenness of home, the richness of the fields, the rains of summer. Most of all, she and her husband yearned to be through with this damnable trail.
They left the wagon train in the desert grasslands, near a spring seep and drainage beside a small mountain range a few miles from neighbors on other lands and from a budding hamlet of Mexican and Anglo people. It would be here, they decided, that they would build their new home. They would buy a few longhorn cows and start a frontier ranch. They would plant a garden. Perhaps they, with future neighbors, might someday build a church and a school. Her husband would do a little prospecting. Who knows? They might yet strike gold. Perhaps she sensed that she was about to become a part of another chapter in our pioneering history, the isolated and self-sufficient lifestyle of the early American settlers.
While the family lived in the shelter of the wagon, she and her husband, like other early settlers of the desert grasslands, shoveled a small dugout into the side of a hill. With small timbers he had cut by hand ax from the flanks of the nearby mountains, they built low and windowless walls around the dugout perimeter. They topped the structure with a roof of logs, grass and mud. At first, she had to carry the family’s water from the spring seep, storing it in the wooden barrels they had used on the trail. A cistern would have to come later. She and her family relieved themselves in a nearby growth of desert shrubs. An outhouse would have to come later. She held back the oppressive darkness of the outhouse with candles she made of tallow. Kerosene lanterns would have to come later. She bedded her family and stored her goods on the dirt floor of the outhouse. Beds, closets and shelving would have to come later. She kept a close watch out for rattlesnakes, scorpions, tarantulas and centipedes. Those would always be there.
She cooked in front of the dugout on an open fire, which sometimes seared the hems of her long dresses and blistered the bare skin of her arms and face. In the early days, before her husband could buy livestock or they could raise a garden, she had to prepare meals from what few vegetables she could buy in the local hamlet, the wild greens she could gather from the nearby drainage, and the game her husband could kill in a hunt.
Buying or weaving her own cloth, she made her family’s clothes, sewing the garments by hand. It came hard for many. One pioneer woman, quoted by Sandra L. Myres in her book Western Women and the Frontier Experience 1800-1915, said, “I never learned how to make dresses or to fit garments, and the result was something like a bag.” Some learned, like Indian women, to tan hides of mule deer and fashion clothes of leather. Our typical young pioneer woman washed her family’s clothes in a wooden barrel. She used water she had carried from the spring and heated over the open fire. She used lye soap she had made from lime, ash and tallow.
Within a year, she gave birth to another child, with no anesthesia, but with a neighboring woman’s help. Pioneer women usually found the event to be a difficult trial, accompanied not only by the pain of the delivery but also the risk of injury, infection and disease, both for her and the infant. “So here I was,” said one Arizona frontier woman, according to Myres, “inexperienced and helpless, alone in bed, with an infant a few days old… I struggled along, fighting against odds…”
As when she was on the trail, coming to the West, our pioneer woman found that her family, and sometimes her neighbors, looked to her for medical assistance. She saw one of every four newborns die of diseases or other causes. “My Babes all snatched from me one by one,” said a pioneer woman quoted by Myres, “it is hard to bear.” Like many others, our pioneer woman turned to folk medicine, home remedies, love and prayer to heal her family and her neighbors. There were no doctors.
As her experience on the frontier grew, she may have advised newly arrived mothers to give their children something like a teaspoonful of Dr. Gunn’s recipe of saffron, sage leaves, tanzy leaves and brandy a couple of times a month. The children, according to Helen Wiser Stewart (quoted by Luchetti and Olwell), “will never be troubled with worms as long as you do this.”
If our pioneer woman lived in dread of sickness and injury, she may have feared Indians and vagrants ever more, especially when her husband had to leave her alone with the children. Alice J. Van Winkel, a desert pioneer interviewed during the Federal Writers’ Project for American Life Histories, recalled that, “To my horror I saw five Indians all dressed up in their blankets and war paint, coming towards the house. I stepped out in the yard to meet them, for the children and I were all alone… …one of the Indians said to me: ‘Indians no hurt white squaw she give Indians something to eat.’” The Indians, probably Comanches or Mescalero Apaches, appropriated bread and half a mutton and left. “I did not say anything for I was only too glad to get rid of them.” Recalling another instance, Van Winkel said, “One night while I was alone with my two children, I heard the dogs barking about midnight. I got up and got the six shooter and I looked out the window and could see three dark objects [apparently vagrants bent on robbery] prowling around the house.” Van Winkel locked the door. They tried to break it down. “I told them that the first person that came through the door would certainly get shot.” They left, but, she said, “I was very much frightened.”
As our pioneer woman and her husband began to get their ranch established, she found that the demands on her time and energies would double then double again. Since she bought supplies perhaps only two or three times a year, she had to plan a shopping list with care. Typically, according to Ruth White Burns’ “Experiences on the H-Bar Ranch,” Roosevelt County History and Heritage, 1975, purchases might include: flour in wooden barrels, bacon slabs in wooden boxes, coffee by the case, dried fruit in wooden boxes, molasses by the keg, navy beans in 50-pound sacks. “Of course,” said Burns, “such things as sugar, salt, soda, tobacco, matches were also brought by the wagons.” Our pioneer ranch woman also now had to cook for the cowhands as well as her family: bacon or beef, navy beans, sourdough biscuits, molasses, dried fruit and coffee—three times a day. In addition, wearing a bonnet, a long dress and high-top shoes, she tended the garden, raised hogs and chickens and canned fruit—all while she kept house, made and mended clothing, saw after her children, healed and comforted the sick and injured, and protected her home. Often, during the roundup season, she herded cattle, doctored sick animals and branded calves. As Olive Ozanne said in Robert L. Hart’s “She’ll Be Coming Around the Mountain,” Southern New Mexico Historical Review, January 1996, I “found that my little white hands could do lots of things besides crochet and play the piano.”
If life came hard, our pioneer woman would also discover new joys. She had made friends during the shared ordeal of the trail. In spite of the distances between neighbors, she made friends at her new home, through her new church and social events. “Quilting bees, barn raisings, even communal butcherings of livestock rose spontaneously from the neighborly desire to help out and see one another. Dances, too, were a reflection of this shared excitement, and were a favorite pastime of nearly all women…” said Luchetti and Olwell
“Weddings were also grand affairs, with chivarees held afterwards that many a newlywed remembers for years to come.
“But even without dances and weddings, some women managed to find occasions for joy in their lives… Such a woman was Frances Clack… ‘She loved the outdoors,’ wrote her daughter Tommie, ‘ and would tell us about trees, the flowers, the rocks, the birds and the animals that lived up and down the creek… At night she would take her astronomy book out into the moonlight and teach us to recognize Ursa Minor and Ursa Major, and how to locate the North Star.’”
Westward to Freedom
While a pioneer woman certainly followed her husband on the difficult journey westward through a sense of duty to him and to her family, many would discover a larger role in life, a new sense of identity and self-worth that became an unexpected dividend of independence and freedom. One immigrant, quoted by Susan G. Butruille in her Women’s Voices from the Western Frontier, said that, when she grew up, “…my folks wouldn’t let me go to dances. They held that the devil was in the fiddle and that if a girl danced, she was dancing her way to hell.” Once they came West, many women danced. They took their places, not only as the heads of their households, but as owners and managers of ranches, operators of mines, proprietors of businesses, teachers in one-room schoolhouses, performers on the stages, madams of bawdy houses, and stakeholders at the gaming tables. They gave new dimension to the meaning of what it could mean to be a woman. An immigrant woman quoted by Butruille said, “At last I understand why the birds sing. …The real life is to be free.”
Footnote
The pioneer lifestyle endured in the Southwest until well into the 20th century. My grandmother, a woman named Minnie Fargier, was born in a dugout on the Rolling Plains in 1893. She lost her father when she was about seven because of the lack of any medical care. She married at 16. She bore five children, including my mother. She lost one child to an early death. She lived in the same small frame wooden farmhouse in an isolated rural area on the plains until the final years of her life. She had few “modern conveniences” before the 1940’s. I remember, during the late 1930’s, that she drew her water from a cistern. She lit her home with kerosene lanterns. She heated it with a cast iron, wood-burning stove. She made lye soap. She washed her clothes in a great iron kettle. She and the family used an outhouse. She cooked three meals a day, on a cast-iron, wood-burning stove, for her family and the day worker cowhands. Working beside my grandfather, she tilled the fields with mule-drawn plows. She hauled newly harvested cotton in mule-drawn wagons. After my grandfather died in 1954, she ran her 1000-acre farm with 100 head of cattle until she reached her late 80’s. She got bitten by a rattlesnake, which had crawled into her living room, when she was 90, and she fetched a butcher knife and separated the rattler from its head before she called for help. She rode horses until her early 90’s. As a young woman, she had gotten herself “churched,” that is, expelled, by her Protestant congregation for dancing. The devil was in the fiddle. I loved my grandmother very much.
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