Last week I posted about diaries I've read that have made me a better person, but also about women, their thoughts and what they were experiencing; good bad or indifferent.
When I was a little girl, I lived in a small town called Connell, WA. I believe in 1976, the population was 1979. I remember this because everyone wanted three people to move so we could be 76 in '76, the year of the United States of America Bicentennial. In elementary school, we watched the historical fiction movie Seven Alone (1974) in the theater which made me think about the Sagar family and moving West. I actually obsessed about the Sagar children, who were real and their experiences as they lost their parents on the Oregon Trail and moved in with the Whitman family. As a child, for school field trips, girl scouts, family trips I visited Fort Walla Walla and the Whitman Mission or Waiilatpu often. This and some other experiences that I will share later made me start thinking about westward movement, church history and the importance of women in that story. For example, what what it like to lose a child in a creek for Narcissa Whitman? What was it like to leave New York in a wagon or have to marry a man so you could participate in mission work?
On the flip side, I then asked myself questions about the Native Americans. What was it like to have children die from measles? How did they respond to the loss of the young Cayuse men who were hung? These women's stories are important!
On my bookshelf in my office is The Shallow Grave at Waiilatpu: The Sagers' West by Ewin N Thompson (1973), one of the first books I had to help me find answers to my questions.
Photo by Grianghraf on Unsplash
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