NARRATIVE: Over the last thirteen years, I've spent a lot of time obtaining reference for my westward migration pieces. I've visited most of the Oregon Trail and stood in the tracks of the emigrants. During one of my photo shoots at a private property in central Wyoming, I had quite a large group of people portraying emigrants, including several children. After I had told them to take a break and relax, I noticed these two girls had climbed onto the wagon and were playing with dolls. On the 1840s trail, and in our modern lives, children will be children and they play. I love capturing these fleeting moments when people are being themselves.
Living out of a wagon with children had to be a trying experience. There are journal entries speaking of toddlers who had fallen out of moving wagons, children getting lost in the mass of wagons all traveling at the same time, and women being pregnant and giving birth on the trail. Not to mention the cholera and mountain fevers that caused sickness and death. In 1853, Amelia Knight traveled with her husband and seven children while pregnant. She often wrote of having "the sick headache," which on some days kept her in her wagon while the men took on her cooking chores. She wrote of rainy cold days and struggling to find warm dry places for her children to sleep, washing and scrubbing those children, feeding them and all the men each day, reminding her teenagers to do their chores, and giving birth on the trail. They all arrived in Oregon safely, although her two-year-old son, Chatfield, had a close call with a wagon wheel. Reading the words written by the emigrants as they traveled the trails is the best way to begin understanding their experiences.
"July 22nd...Chat had a very narrow escape, from being run over, Just as we were all getting ready to start Chatfield the rascal came round the forward wheel to get into the wagon, and at that moment the cattle started, and he fell under the wagon, somehow he kept from under the wheels, and escaped with only a good, or I should say a bad scare, I never was so much frightened in my life, I was in the wagon at the time putting things in order, and supposed Frances was taken care of him."
