The Wake of the Prairie Schooner

HERE is a solid and rewarding book packed with new material on the ever fascinating saga of the wagon trains moving westward. Irene D. Paden spent, it is claimed, some twenty years in research and travel before embarking on the writing, and one can well believe it. The worth of the book lies in its rich abundance of tale and incident, from which there emerges a singularly real picture of the confusion, uncertainty, danger, horror, beauty, and thrill of this greatest American adventure.

Happily Mrs. Paden is no sentimentalist. She handles with directness such incidents as the Indians’ “lewd mutilations” of white captives, the heartlessness with which cholera victims were often left to die beside the road, the bodies claimed by the treacherous Platte and washed up on the shore where someone stooping to drink could easily mistake a corpse for a log, the kind of foul-mouthed, snuff-dipping women as well as men who came in bands from Arkansas and Tennessee, and many other sordid and horrifying details of the first western migrations.

Not that the book is by any means all in this vein. It has stories that touch the heart: the husband who traveled back as far as St. Joseph, Missouri, to get a gravestone for his wife and trundled the stone in a wheelbarrow all the way to her resting place on the Platte. There are stories of cinematic glamour, such as Fanny Kelly’s captivity among the Sioux. There is humor: Indians looting abandoned trunks of finery and appearing entirely naked except for a lady’s hat, a high collar, or the steel frame of a hoop skirt, or cherishing umbrellas which they carried carefully under their blankets when it rained.

The book has its faults. It could well have been condensed, but taken in its entirety it is one not to miss. The extensive bibliography alone is invaluable.