Covered Wagon Women
Kenneth L. Holmes, et al
(Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
2002 Beverly's Ltd.
ISBN: 0967188539 Amazon's price is: $18.00
Diaries and Letters from the Western Trails of the 1800s. The female experience of the migration west across America.
These diaries are of women watching the weather, sewing up the injured, midwifing the babies, cooking meals, gathering fruit from the land & always, looking at a new world unfolding before their eyes.
This is one in the “Living Voices of the Past” series, drawn from the diaries & letters of Lucia Williams, with an epilogue of Esther Lockhart, on their way from Ohio to Oregon Territory, & Jean Rio Baker, a Mormon crossing the ocean from Liverpool on her way to Salt Lake City.
In these diaries & letters home, these women on the journeys of their lifetime, record their trek west into the sun; across oceans, through towns, over rivers, beside farms, into forests, down ravines, over prairies, up & down mountains, across deserts; into friendly & hostile Indian territories until, at journeys' end, they set up their new homes.
As you listen to actors Georgia Goodwin & Jane Merrifield-Beecher read the thoughts, observations & feelings of these three mother ancestors, you catch glimpses of how we used to live, back when the night was for sleeping & Sunday was a day of rest, literally, & proceeding to travel on that day, caused trouble among travelers.
These diaries take us through springs of ground-level thunderstorms & sudden powerful floods, summers of dust, mosquitos & enervating heat, & autumns of mild beauty & the biggest harvests they'd ever seen. As these intrepid travelers pen their unique records of life along the trail--who they met, how they are greeted, the local Indian tribes, fellow travelers, herds of buffalo & the plentiful game, as well as the fate of those who have passed before, we know how those left behind, must have felt upon receiving these letters, months later.
Along the way, babies are born, people die & are buried, wheels break, oxen fall dead in their tracks, women & children are run over by wagons, or kicked by milking cows, men are crushed or maimed by oxen, carts & chains. The drama of each life & death struggle the more dramatic as the women's voices speak simply & without affectation.
We learn of broken wagons, dying companions, days of endless trudging & nights of immense beauty. Over mountains, through rivers & down defiles, these intrepid women take us there with their simple, evocative words.
What is missing from this two tape presentation is biographical information of both the diarists & the actors: who they were, where they came from & how; who & what they were traveling with. The map of the trail on the inside, is so unfinished as to be hardly worth the inclusion. Rather than showing the shapes of all the modern states--it should have shown what the territories were at the time these women made their way across America to their versions of the Promised Land.
Another thing that's missing are sound effects. For an assignment, when I was studying at a community college, I created a reading of one of my nostalgic best-ever reads, Tapioca for Tea: Memories of a Kentish childhood. My professor was blind & I was a radio child. I spent hours in the college's sound lab cobbling together dogs barking in the distance, children at play nearby, wagons creaking along, clinking teacups & such. Had Covered Wagon Women had similar sounds to open & close portions of the readings or at the ends of each tape sides, as many audio books do, it would have been so much more memorable.
Nothing, however, takes away from the power of these women's words--Covered Wagon Women is truly a fascinating record of a history that shaped both our nation & our psyche.
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