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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€9 456 Major Problems in the History of the American West the diary). The account in the 1863 diary reports on only four days over this period, July 7~8 and July 20-21, when Indlans are either met or sighted. In fact, the diary notes when Indians are not present. On July 9, for example, . Sanders wrote: “Kept guard last night but were not troubled by the Indians. On July 14, making light of the monotony of the travel, she noted: ‘Nothing of interest has transpired thus far today. We have killed neither Indian nor buffalo."* Sanders also made an Indian disappear in her memolr. The diary contains a description of a nearly disastrous crossing of the Snake River on September 7. In-this account, an Indian on his pony carried Harriet Sanders’s maid, Almaretta (Amerette) Geer, safely to the far shore. The helpful Indian is absent in the memoir, despite an elaborate retelling of “the narrowest escape that we had thus far experienced." The memoir concludes one page after this Indianless episode with Harriet Sanders maintaining that their party during the entire journey “*... had been continually in danger of attacts {sic] from the Indians." Both the letters. that Mary Edgerton wrote during the trip and Lucila Dates ert hea that the 2dgerton-Sanders emigrant party had no difficulties with the Indians. « ¢ " By nekieg the Indians a greater danger in her memoir, Harriet Sanders did what many other pioneers had done. In his massive study of the oner: landers on the Callfornla and Oregon trails, John D. Unruh, Jr., notes: “Encounters with hostile Indians—often much embellished—are far more conspicuous in latter-day reminiscent accounts.”’ As Unrvh explains, letters home that summarized the trip “tended to give Indian affairs much more prominence” than did the same people's daily journals and diaries, It seems that some retrospective reference to the “Indian threat” became a way to certify a pioneer’s overland Journey. It was expected to be part of the story, but It served a greater purpose than merely tefling an exciting tale. These accounts of the Indian danger created a shared memory and, therefore, a shared Identity for the ploneers. If Harriet Sanders had wanted to tell an exciting story, she could have stressed the sickness, storms, and at she recounted more frequently in her dlary than in her gba Harriet Sanders could make a grand statement about the destiny of the pioneers if she emphasized the Indians rather than other problems. Her memoir provided ample opportunity for such a grand, i rospective pronouncement. Early in her memolr, she paused In her description of travel along the Platte River to assert: ndless country had belonged to the Indians and the buffato from ine Senos F 7 The emigrants who passed through the country previous to 1868 did so at the peril of thelr Ives, The Indians becoming Jealous at the appearance of the whites, lay in ambush for the unsuspecting victims, and many a scalp-dance was danced and war-songs chanted over the forms of those who aspired to plant an empire in the unknown west, But In the end, however, the ploneers conquered the wilderness and transformed It Into a fand of peace and pfenty. . istorical raAs revealed in this statement, Harriet Sanders created a h Hanalientinn af the ninneer experience in her memoir, Sanders declared ~ that by surviving the Indian danger of the overtand Journey, the pioneers eventually conquered the “wilderness” and transformed Indian lands into a new and “‘civilized’* order, The pioneers ultimately became new natives tn what they considered a new land. If the old natives had not been prominent enough on the original journey, they could be made more prominent in the memory of it. In this way, the shared identity of ploneer coutd be maintained along with the fdea of cultural and even physical conquest. Such selfserving, ethnocentric bias permitted the pioneers, and those who followed them, to justify their own emigration and settlement, Many scholars have looked closely at the diaries and letters of overlanders. Historian Glenda Riley has found that rumors and alarmism about Indians did create anxieties during the trip, especially for women. Yet, what they feared rarely became reality. In her examination of 150 primary accounts from all the major overland trails between 1830 and 1900, Riley discovered ‘ that in only 15 were major troubles with the Indlans reported and in none were claims made about extensive loss of life. Historian Lillian Schlisset studied ninety-six overland diaries written by women, She found that only 7 per cent contained accounts of attacks by Indians and these reported the deaths of only two families, two men, and one woman. Unruh's analysts of the California/Oregon trail demonstrates that fewer than four hundred emigrants were killed by Indlans from 1840 to 1860, when approximately two hundred and fifty thousand people took this overland route. Yet, rumors of ralds and massacres spread beyond the overland trails, and newspapers occasionally published vivid accounts of what proved to be fictitlous attacks. The trails to Montana’s gold camps during the 1860s saw roughly 10 per cent of the number of emigrants that traveled to California and Oregon between 1840 and 1860. Yet, this smaller migration may have been subject to greater Indian hostility, especially when crossing the bison ranges of the Teton Sioux and Northern Cheyenne. Certainly the record of warfare on the northern plains between the army and the native peoples was far greater during the 1860s than during the 1840s and 1880s, How direct and deadly such hostilities proved to be for emigrant trains to Montana needs careful analysis. The personal accounts from elght emigrant trains that traveled across the northern plains from Minnesota between 1862 and 867, for example, reveal that only the 1864 expedition suffered a serious Indian attack, ; : Whatever the reality, the description of an Indian threat became a dramatic element in many Montanans’ memotrs, Perhaps the most excessively dramatized report of an Indian attack appeared in David J. Balley's lengthy 1906 reminiscence. Bailey, who grew up in Georgia, Alabama, and Kentucky, decided to travel west to the Montana goldfields In 1865 at age twenty-oneafter working as a clerk In Evansville, Indiana, His account of the overland journey, which began after he took a steamboat to Leavenworth, Kansas,’ contains descriptions of four Indian attacks. After the fargest of these battles, he confessed: The story that one hundred men withstood the furlous onslaught of three hundred wild, fiendish savages without serfous Injury seems almost incredible.