Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 92

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Popular Culture Review

diaries, letters and memoirs we know much about life on the trail — the realities of
a six month journey. Many, as they had on earlier frontiers, turned around and
returned home; others, several thousands, died of cholera, measles, camp fever,
drowning, poisonous water, the bite of a rattlesnake, an occasional deliberate ar
row or accidental gunshot, or under wagon wheels. Somewhere on the plains in
1847, a semi-literate diarist recorded this: “Mr. Harvey’s little boy Richard 8 years
old went to get in the waggon and fel...the wheals run over him and mashed his
head and kil him ston dead he never moved.
Reading these journals and letters today helps one gain a sense of the commit
ment, endurance and luck needed when traversing our continent in the mid 1800s.
But a century and a half later, I wanted to try and experience, as best as one can
today, the physical side of what it must have been like to make this crossing. Dur
ing my trip while pedaling up hills and mountains and across long stretches of
empty landscape, while sweating and cursing at my daytime labors and waking at
night with aching knees, I kept having flashbacks to the collective 19“’ century
experiences I had read about. These emigrants had written about fatigue, wind,
smells, the cold, the heat, the landscape — indeed, the wonder of it all. When
passing the landmarks they had described 150 years earlier, I too marveled. And I
kept contrasting my relatively tame experiences to theirs while trying to imagine
what they felt as they traveled over the same land with much more uncertainty and
less confidence about what lay ahead. Today one has a reliable map that shows the
distance to the next town and rarely is shelter from the elements and a chance to
fill up water bottles, guzzle cokes and devour burgers more than a couple of hours
away. As I recorded in my own journal after a particularly arduous day: “I would
have made a lousy pioneer: thank goodness for a shower and a beer!” But there
was commonality in our experiences. The trek west, then and now, tested one’s
equipment, body and mind. And the trip taught them and me about strengths we
didn’t know we had.
Most emigrants commenced their trip west from somewhere east of the Mis
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