Covered Wagon Women: Diaries & Letters from the Western Trails 1875-1883, Vol. 10, edited by Kenneth L. Holmes

Forty years after the legendary overland travels of Oregon pioneers in the 1840s. Lucy Clark Allen wrote “the excitement continues.” Economic hard times in Minnesota sent Allen and her husband to Montana in hopes of evading the droughts, grasshoppers and failed crops that had plagued their farm. Allen and her compatriots experienced a journey much different than that of their predecessors. Many settlements now awaited those bound for the West, with amenities such as hotels and restauants as well as grain supplier to provide feed for the horses and mules that had replaced the slower oxen. Routes were clearly marked-some had been replaced by railroad tracks. Nevertheless, many of the same dangers, fears, and aspirations contronted these dauntless women who traveled the overland trails.