Quilts made by pioneers.(Books about antiques)(Book review)

With women's studies now a mainstream offering in institutions of higher learning, long-neglected avenues of research, such as women's letters and diaries, are getting the attention they so richly deserve. One topic that has recently been mined with great success is women pioneers and their substantial contributions to the settlement of the Pacific Northwest. A recently revised and substantially enlarged publication entitled Quilts of the Oregon Trail, written by Mary Bywater Cross, is one such welcome addition to the growing literature in this field.

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In her introduction Cross sets the stage with factual information, informing us, for example, that between 1840 and 1870 more than 350,000 people traveled from points around the United States to destinations in Oregon and California. The author divides the quilts in her study into primarily three categories: "those made before the journey, those made during the journey, and those made afterward." These delineations are further divided into three time periods: 1840-1850, 1851-1855, and 1856-1870. The fourth and largest part of this edition "features quilts made by those women who waited--either for a loved one to return, or to join a loved one in the West after they were established."

Many pioneers moved west to take advantage of the Provisional Government of Oregon's offer in 1848 to give 640 acres of land to every married couple willing to settle on the land and prepare at least a portion of it for farming, the latter a labor-intensive process that usually took between two and five years. Residents of the Mississippi and Missouri River valleys were the first to flock to the Willamette Valley of Oregon. Wagon trains assembled in Independence, Saint Joseph, and Council Bluffs, Missouri, and in Omaha, Nebraska. For those who made it across the continent unscathed, the journey took as much as nine months, traveling between five and twenty miles per day depending on the terrain and the weather. Many perished from disease and starvation, and others were victims of wagon or firearms accidents, stampedes by livestock, attacks by other pioneers, lightning, gunpowder explosions, and suicide. Western migration changed altogether with the establishment of the railroad connecting the East with the West in 1870 and specifically with the Pacific Northwest in 1883.

Bed quilts brought west by settlers were used in transit as bedcovers, to line the inside of the wagons to insulate them from the cold and the damp, and even as burial shrouds for those who died ...