Family life and gender roles on the Overland Trail

¶ … Women and Men on the Overland Trail by John Mack Fargher. Specifically it will discuss the author's thesis and provide a basic overview of the book. The author's thesis for this book is to study the relationship between married men and women as they traveled the Overland Trail. He wanted to see how people traveled and lived as families, and what prompted them to set out on the trail and leave their homes and loved ones behind. His main goal was to recreate family life on the trail, and show why this event was so monumental in families' lives.

The author uses a wide variety of research materials to give the reader a glimpse of family life on the Overland Trail. He uses diaries, letters, personal memoirs, and many other items to reconstruct life on the Trail and how men and women suffered, worked together, and argued as they traveled across the country. After reading this book, the reader gets an excellent idea of how hard it was to travel over the Trail, and how families suffered. They faced disease, accidents, lack of food and water, Indian attack, and many other obstacles. Many of the emigrants simply could not cope with all the problems and turned back to their homes. Many others managed to overcome the obstacles and reach California or Oregon. Fargher uses real families as examples of what was encountered on the Trail, and how people reacted to the difficulties. He shows how groups of wagons traveled together, how often many different family members traveled together, and how most of the emigrants were farmers looking for a new start in a new, untouched land. He shows how work was divided at home and on the Trail, and what was expected of men and women.