Stephen Aron

Sometimes it includes their first time seeing bison, these great beasts that are in such great numbers still on the Great Plains, or seeing Indians for the first time, both scary but also exciting.

Seeing landscapes and lands that are so unfamiliar and yet fascinating to them, so grand.

For women, though, when you look at women's diaries and journals,

They rarely evince the same degree of excitement about this, the adventure of love, in part because for women, and if you follow that old couplet, you know, men could work from sun to sun because women's work was never done.

That was especially true on the trail, where women's work sort of persisted all day long, all the normal things of life.

keeping households together in a sense, plus all of the difficulties of doing that under these most arduous conditions and continuing then into the evening and night.

So I think that's really critical to sort of fasten on the difference between men's experiences of the Ogle Land Trail and women's experiences.

You know, obviously, like all communities, there's...

Or like all extended families, even.

There are certain times when relations become quite fraught.

There's certainly conflict that occurs on the trail between different people.

But at the same time, oftentimes these contracts and companies and just the shared experience does create bonds between people, sometimes who went in company of their relatives, right?

Sometimes you see extended families going together.

So it's already some bonding going on.

But certainly the experience of the journey, the shared challenges of the journey, the ardors of that six-month crossing create deeper bonds between people.

And oftentimes people get together.

You get marriages coming out of between young people who meet on the trail, for example.

The Oregon Trail Diaries are really fascinating because it's one time where we get a rare glimpse into the lives of kind of ordinary rural people who in their normal experience really rarely had time or inclination to keep these kind of accounts in their lives.

And oftentimes when you read diaries, sometimes they're quite spare.

especially rural diaries, you know, today's weather, very cold, or this is how many acres I plowed today or something like that.