Jennie Atcheson Wriston - A Pioneer's Odyssey

Jennie Atcheson Wriston - A Pioneer's Odyssey

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/HNS/domwest/wriston.html

This is a short but significant extract from the travel journal of Jennie Atcheson Wriston. It forms part of the account of her 1873 journey undertaken as a child with her parents and siblings. The entire journey was from Missouri to Colorado. This extract concerns the sector across the prairie lands of Nebraska. Wriston wrote the account from memory in 1943 at the request of her grandchildren.

I choose this extract because within its traditional vignettes of pioneer life, lie traces of key themes associated with the debate about the nature and progress of western expansion. It allows an examination of the harsh living conditions, the influence of Manifest Destiny rhetoric, Frederick Jackson’s frontier ‘process’ and its contribution to American character. There is also the consideration as to how texts such as these, written long after the events and in very different circumstances, may have helped to sustain the mythification of the west.

The detailed description of the wagons, their technology and inventories, the importance of provisioning and the style of the overland meals gives a sense of the challenges faced by pioneers of ‘crossing a continent’ and being ‘at the meeting point between savagery and civilization.’ The prairie land lacked timber and we learn how simple sod houses were fashioned into functional and effective homes. These however, were often isolated and Wriston comments that it took seven days travel to fetch stores. In Turner’s view the traits and skills needed for this kind of survivalist existence gave rise to the American character.

This character was underpinned by a strong sense of mission, of doing God’s will, in the words of John L. O’Sullivan in Manifest Destiny, ‘to overspread and possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us.’ In the words of young Jennie Wriston, she was starting a ‘long journey toward the unknown but promised land.’ Ralph Waldo Emerson's widely known and influential essays had equated the development of the materialism of the west as a rise to the divine and these blessings underpinned American spiritual values.

The family’s departure to ‘win the wilderness’ was celebrated by friends and neighbours greeting them from farms for miles along the road. Jennie observes that they had been part of that community for five years. This makes it likely that they had been beneficiaries of the Homestead Act 1862. This was a Government sponsored scheme to help populate the frontier. The lessee acquired 160 acres of ‘free soil’ which they would own after five years of cultivation. This incentivised the constant onward movement to the west, to sell at a profit and find more new land. Or Mr. Wriston may have just become restless – he had tamed his land and perhaps found the local horizon just too narrow. According to James Truslow Adams, the community may have mourned the loss of one of its valuable members but would have understood the imperative to move on and seek out bigger and better ‘free land.’ This continually advancing frontier line meant that social development was also continually beginning over again. For Turner, this generated the adaptability and fluidity that dominated the American character.

Wriston’s family took the Republican river route towards Nebraska. They were not exactly making a new path into the wilderness. These were the river courses used by Native Americans and subsequently by trackers, hunters and traders. Turner acknowledges this legacy when he writes that ‘the Indian trade pioneered the way for civilization.’ The pioneers would use these same resources of timber, shelter and water to sustain their progress in the wilderness.

A further valuable resource available to the Wristons would have been the knowledge and experience of trail life which had been built up over the last forty years. The Oregon Trail had started in 1843 and as early as 1836 John Mason Peck had published his comprehensive New Guide for Emigrants to the West.

There were also the letters and information sent back home which encouraged the formation  of large caravans of wagons taking the western route.

 Yet in Jennie Wriston’s journal, there is a real sense of an individual family very much on their own – the epitome of the true pioneer.

This could be explained by interrogating the timing of their journey. Until very recently Nebraska had been unorganized, Indian territory. Awareness of its rich grasslands was raised by travelers during the California Gold Rush in 1848. Wriston mentions the homes of these first wave pioneers who had dropped out from that trip to homestead on government land. After 1867 when Nebraska was admitted to the Union there was an increased wave of settlement sponsored by Federal government aid. This could have encouraged Wriston Senior to uproot the family and start over again.

The last section of the journal illustrates another aspect of the ideology of the western expansion. Their destination town of Rock Ridge contains only one other house, a post office, bar and general store. The good soils and lush grasslands have attracted the farmer to the frontier. He will now build the community: ‘plant the orchards, throw bridges over the streams, build mills, schoolhouses and courthouses.’ Mr. Wriston soon has twelve plus children enrolled in the former ranch house school. He has been ‘boilingly busy.’

And finally, what may have caused Jennie Wriston to contemplate writing about these events so much later in her life in 1943? America had entered the Second World War in 1941 and swiftly mobilized its human and material resources for war. Jennie Wriston could not have been unaffected by its impact on the American way of life. There were nationwide campaigns to influence attitudes and behaviours on the Home Front. In particular, the campaigns for rationing and recycling, with their slogans such as “Make it Do or Do Without” and “Do With Less, So They’ll Have More,” could not fail to resonate with the memories of the young girl who had ‘helped transform the Wilderness.’

References

Adams, James, Truslow, The Epic of America p214-221

Peck, John, Mason, A New Guide for Emigrants to the West http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27394/27394-h/27394-h.htm
Turner, Frederick, Jackson, “The significance of the frontier in American history” (1893)

www.legendsofamerica.com/we-settlement.html

http://americasbesthistory.com/abhtimeline1870.html

http://www.over-land.com/diaries.html
https://www.docsteach.org/
http://www.history.com/topics/us-states/nebraska
http://www.historynet.com/oregon-trail
http://nebraskahistory.org/lib-arch/research/photos/highlite/butcher/photos.htm
http://www.nationalww2museum.org/learn/education/for-students/ww2-history/america-goes-to-war.html?referrer=https://www.google.co.uk/