Collection: Directories and Documents > Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection

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Title: The Shared Memories of Pioneers by Clyde A. Milner Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection # of Pages: 5 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2024-09-03 15:24:51 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 05:53:19 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 05:53:19

Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

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co A@ LNTdde OL “TAd YALVALNV OL NHAID NOISSINYAd ANLL ANO ALAIOOS TVORIOLSIH VNV.LNOW ‘000 SHL via “ZO/TT7eT"™ AG PT6LT « “ATAIOS"IVOTSOLSINVNVINOW AG OL BET © TYBAdog mre rr T 18) SYAANO!d AO XAOWAWN TIIVAS FAL AYOLSIA NITLSAM AO ANIZVOVW VNVINOM 44 Mayor Provrerma tt tite esanwty uy tote stsmamate tees of Louls L'Amour's novels, the western novel is today In demise. In the third essay, they contend that a shift In natlonal mood may resurrect broad Interest fn western stories. May we assume that the Virginian, Oeorge Armstrong Custer, and John Wayne have not breathed thelr fast In the popular Imagination and the « shared memory of Americans? The Shared Memory of Pioneers CLYDE A. MILNER II In the beginning there was no Montana, but Harriet Sanders was already there. By arriving in the gold camp of Bannack in 1863, well before the 1864 creation of Montana Territory, Harriet Sanders and thoisands of others could lay claim to being Montana ploneers. But Sanders's claim had more substance than merely being present before the creation. She and her immediate family played prominent roles In the new society. Her husband, Wilbur Fisk Sanders, who gained early fame as the prosecutor who alded the vigilantes In their campaign against the “road agents” and other outlaws, later served as a territorial delegate to Congress and eventually became & U.S: Senator. Her older son, James, itke his father practiced law and also served as secretary of the Soclety of Montana Ploneers. The younger son, Wilbur, became a mining engineer and for a term was libraridn of the Montana Historical Soclety. The elder Wilbur Sanders served as president of that same organization from 1865 through 1890. When Harriet Sanders wrote her memoir In 1897, she, her husband, and her two sons had not only lived through more than thirty years of Montana's history, but they also had helped promote and preserve that history. Nonetheless, despite her long-standing prominence and her recent electlon as the first president of the Montana Women's Suffrage Association. Harriet Sanders did not write a full-scale autoblography. Nor did she write a family history. Instead, she focused on only sixteen years of her life In what she called her “Reminiscences of My Trip across the Plains and My Early Life in Montana, 1863-1879," More than half of this memoir described the three earliest years, 1863 through 1865, when Harriet Sanders and her family traveled overland to the goldfields and settled in the mining camps of Bannack and Virginia City, Many other ploneers who wrote memoirs also concentrated on the same story—the overland trip and the early days in the mining camps—and Sanders recognized that her readers may have heard pioneer accounts like ‘her own. In the second paragraph of her memolr, she modestly wrote: "Our experiences across the plains were, 1 presume, similar In many respects to those of others... .'" Later, when she described her family’s arrival in the Clyde A. Milner 11, °The Shared Memory of Montens's Pioneers," Montana the Megasine of Western History, 37 (Winter 1987), 2-13, Reprinted Sy permission of the Montena Hlitoriea! « ‘octety. ‘Committee. .. ."" The Popular Imagination 455 gold camps and she began to discuss “the relgn of terror by the rondagents,” she assumed that ‘You have all heard of those dark and terrible days when Justice was meted out at the hands of the Vigilance With these words as important signposts, Harriet Sanders's memolr Indicates that at least by the 1890s a patter of shared memory about the overland experience and the early days of the gold camps had emerged among many Montanans, This shared memory allowed many Montanans to consider themselves pioneers, but It also altered thelr personal memories. In his scholarly effort to explain how People remember the past, David Lowenthal asserts, “we need other people's memories both to confirm our own and to glve them endurance. ... In the process of knitting our own discontinuous recollections into narratives, we revise personal components to fit the collectively remembered past, and gradually cease to distinguish between them.” Memotrs of life in early Montana seem to follow this process. Some elements of these memofrs, regardless of their accuracy, ., take on great emblematic significance in confirming the narrator's status as a “ploneer”’ and thus seem to represent a collectively remembered past. © The Indian threat during the overfand Journey was one such element; anothers was the activities of the vigilantes In the early mining camps. The first may ~ well apply to other overland pioneers wHo settled elsewhere fn the West:? the second has clearer thes to the history of early Montana, Each is at potential altering of elther factuaf recefl or personal memory in order to participate fn the collective memory of a pioneer history. Diarles, letters, and memotrs often may discuss the same overfand? Journey. For example, three women in addition to Harriet Sanders who traveled from Omaha to Bannack with the Sanders family wrote of theirs experiences, Sidney Edgerton, Wilbur Fisk Sanders’s uncle, made this trip, ser President Abraham Lincoln had appointed him Chief Justice of the newly organized territory of Idaho. Sidney's wife, Mary, was part of the! group, and she wrote a series of letters home to her sisters In Tallmadge, = Ohlo. The Edgertons’ twenty-three-year-old nlece, Lucia Darling, kept a” diary during the trip, and thelr thirteen-yeer-old daughter, Martha, later included an account of the Joumey tn her tengthy, unpublished autoblography, Each of these women wrote only oné account of the same trip. Harriet Sanders wrote two. During the overland Journey In 1863, she kept a dally dlary; thirty-four years later, she composed her memolr. These two documents show iow one woman transformed her dally Journal into an example of ploneer history. Internal evidence clearly demonstrates that Sanders used her original dlary when she wrote the first part of her larger memoir. At one polnt, she asked that readers “Refer to my remarks in the Journal,"* Yet, despite having her diary at hand, Sanders created a memolr that differed in significant ways ‘trom her original account and from the accounts of her fellow overfanders, Sanders made Indians appear in her memolr, In 1897, Sanders clalmed that the party saw Indians “every day” or, on the next page, "daily" between Port Keatny and Fort Laramie (between June 29 and July 22 In $89020380%) eusjucy JO NOISSINEEd HUM Gainteny