reading on a snowy day

This is what I am reading today. this is a library book if you think your lot in life is hard read what these women experienced on the Oregon trail.

After the depression of 1837, the prospect of "free land" and gold prompted more than 250,000 people to emigrate to Oregon and California between 1840 and 1870. History, relying predominantly on men's writings, often presents this journey in terms of mythic adventure. But what was it like for women? After studying the writings of 103 women, Lillian Schlissel determined that "If ever there was a time when men and women turned their psychic energies toward opposite visions, the overland journey was that time." In Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey, she explores her findings, quoting at length from her sources and including a selection of diaries and reminiscences at the end. Although unmarried adolescents were often exuberant about their experience, for the married women, particularly those with young children, the trip was fraught with danger and fear. Children could fall under wagon wheels or be left behind in the confusion of traveling with as many as one hundred other wagons. There were buffalo stampedes, Indian attacks, snakebites, dysentery, starvation, and cholera - many women note individual graves, sometimes one per mile. In addition, one of every five women was pregnant when the journey began or became so in the course of a trip that guidebooks said would take three to four months, but often took six to eight. Through Lillian Schlissel's fascinating and extremely readable account, we gain a fuller understanding of the journey few of these women wanted to take