Catherine Haun — 1849, a Woman’s Gold-Rush Diary

Summary

Early in January of 1849, in a winter of national hard times, Catherine Margaret Haun and her young husband sat in their home near Clinton, Iowa, and decided to go to California. They had been married only a few months and were, in her words, "financially involved in our business interests near Clinton, Iowa" — in debt — and the gold news from the West had made the whole country restless. They reasoned, as thousands did that year, that a season in the diggings might let them "pick up" gold enough to come home and pay off what they owed. By late April they had outfitted their wagons, gathered about twenty-five neighbors into a little band, and rolled out across Iowa toward Council Bluffs and the open plains.

What Catherine Haun left behind is one of the most-quoted women's narratives of the Gold Rush year — but it is important to be clear about what it is. She did not keep a daily field journal in the dust of the trail. Instead, years later, she wrote the story of the crossing as a reminiscence, looking back on 1849 from the distance of an old woman's chair. The account therefore has the shape and polish of a story told and retold, smoothed by memory and by the conventions of late-Victorian recollection. It is a memoir, not a contemporaneous record, and a careful reader weighs its vivid scenes accordingly. It survives today through Lillian Schlissel's anthology Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey, where it appears as "A Woman's Trip Across the Plains in 1849."

Read with that caution, the narrative is extraordinarily rich. Haun set out to explain the whole experience rather than merely log the miles: the contagious "gold fever," the crowded jumping-off settlement at Council Bluffs, the code of regulations her company drew up for "train government and mutual protection," the daily division of labor between men and women, the graves that lined the road through the cholera summer of 1849, the Indigenous nations met along the Platte and across the Great Basin, and the small civilizing rituals that women carried west. "At that time the 'gold fever' was contagious," she wrote, "and few, old or young, escaped the malady."

Her party was, by the standards of that deadly year, fortunate: after nine months and some 2,400 miles they reached Sacramento on November 4, 1849, having suffered only a single death among their own number. Looking back, Haun could write the line that has become her epitaph for the whole experience: "Upon the whole I enjoyed the trip, spite of its hardships and dangers and the fear and dread that hung as a pall over every hour." That double vision — adventure and dread held together — is exactly why her reminiscence endures as a window onto the year the trail belonged to an army of fortune-seekers, among whom a handful of wives quietly insisted on order, decency, and a sense of home.

Timeline

The Departure

The decision came in the depths of winter and was, in Haun's telling, both financial and contagious. "It was a period of National hard times," she recalled, "and we being financially involved in our business interests near Clinton, Iowa, longed to go to the new El Dorado and 'pick up' gold enough with which to return and pay off our debts." The fever was everywhere: "On the streets, in the fields, in the workshops and by the fireside, golden California was the chief topic of conversation." Advice, she noted dryly, "was handed out quite free of charge and often quite free of common sense." They were young enough to feel the romance more than the danger.

Outfitting took more than three months. "Some half dozen families of our neighborhood joined us," she wrote, "and probably about twenty-five persons constituted our little band." On April 24, 1849, "we left our comparatively comfortable homes — and the uncomfortable creditors — for the uncertain and dangerous trip, beyond which loomed up, in our mind's eye, castles of shining gold." They started too early, with snow still on the ground and the roads bad, a haste she later judged a mistake. At the end of the month they reached Council Bluffs — "the last settlement on the route" — having crossed Iowa, about 350 miles, and there they "made ready for the final plunge into the wilderness."

It was at this jumping-off rendezvous that the company did what prudent emigrants of 1849 did: they organized themselves into a self-governing body. "After a sufficient number of wagons and people were collected at this rendezvous," Haun wrote, "we proceeded to draw up and agree upon a code of general regulations for train government and mutual protection — a necessary precaution when so many were to travel together." John Brophy, a veteran of the Black Hawk War, was chosen colonel; weekly captains stood "Grand Duty" guarding the camp at night. Haun was clear-eyed about the value of women and children to the company: their presence slowed the train, but "more attention was paid to cleanliness and sanitation and... the meals were more regular and better cooked thus preventing much sickness."

The Route

Once across the Missouri, the company struck the great highway of the migration — the broad, shallow valley of the Platte, whose waters Haun noted were soon "almost useless to us on account of the Alkali." The land was treeless, and fuel so scarce that the travelers learned to burn dried buffalo dung: "On the barren plains when we were without wood we carried empty bags and each pedestrian 'picked up chips' as he, or she, walked along." She remembered the strange feasts of the plains fondly — after a buffalo cow was killed, "the large bone of the hind leg, after being stripped of the flesh, was buried in coals of buffalo chips and in an hour the baked marrow was served. I have never tasted such a rich, delicious food!"

The plains held terror as well. One day a buffalo herd stampeded straight through the train: "a great black cloud, a threatening moving mountain, advancing towards us very swiftly and with wild snorts." It demolished one wagon and overturned two, dislocating a child's shoulder, "but fortunately no one was killed." The evenings, though, could be sweet. "We did not keep late hours," she wrote, "but when not too engrossed with fear of the red enemy or dread of impending danger we enjoyed the hour around the campfire... We listened to readings, story telling, music and songs and the day often ended in laughter and merrymaking." Her phrase "the red enemy" is the fearful idiom of her era, not a fair account of the peoples she met.

The route carried them to the Laramie River, which they reached on the Fourth of July, its waters "full of myriads of fish," and on into the Black Hills — "the beginning of the Rocky Mountains" — where the steep, slippery roads forced them to lighten their loads and abandon the merchandise they had hoped to sell in California. Beyond the divide the company turned down toward the Humboldt River, the lifeline that drew the California-bound across the Great Basin, its water growing fouler and its grass thinner with every mile that the year's enormous traffic had cropped ahead of them. By the time they neared its sink, the worst of the journey was waiting.

The Crossing

The defining horror of 1849 was disease, and Haun's account records it soberly. "Cholera was prevalent on the plains at this time," she wrote; "the train preceding as well as the one following ours had one or more deaths, but fortunately we had not a single case of the disease. Often several graves together stood as silent proof of smallpox or cholera epidemic." That her own company passed through the worst cholera year of the migration without losing anyone to the disease was — as she well knew — a piece of remarkable good fortune, while all around them the trail was lined with fresh mounds of earth and rough headboards.

The company's one death came in the desert, and it came from childbirth. Crossing "the treeless, alkali region of the Great Basin or Sink of the Humboldt," where the wagons were "badly worn" and "food and stock feed was getting low," they suffered "the greatest privations of the whole trip." There, Haun wrote, "our only death on the journey occurred. The Canadian woman, Mrs. Lamore, suddenly sickened [after childbirth] and died, leaving her two little girls and grief stricken husband. We halted a day to bury her and the infant that had lived but an hour, in this weird, lonely spot on God's footstool away apparently from everywhere and everybody." The desert itself she could only compare to hell: "Surely Inferno can be no more horrible in formation. The pelting sun's rays reflected from the parched ground seemed a furnace heat by day and our campfires, as well as those of the Indians cast grotesque glares and terrifying shadows by night."

Haun is attentive throughout to the Indigenous nations the company met — the peoples of the Platte country and the plains (whom the emigrants lumped together as "Sioux" and "Pawnee"), and the Northern Paiute and other Great Basin peoples near the Humboldt. Her language carries her era's fear and prejudice; she calls Indians "a source of anxiety, we being never sure of their friendship," and records a false-alarm "Indian" drill that threw the camp into panic. Yet by her own account the company "never had occasion" to fight, and her real experience, like that of most overland women, was of wariness and trade rather than the bloodshed the emigrants dreaded. What carried her own company through, in her telling, was the combination of stubborn organization and ordinary decency: the regulations, the shared picket duty, the careful cooking, and the willingness to halt a whole day in a desert to bury a stranger's wife with what dignity the trail allowed.

What Decided It

Arrival & After

After nine months on the road and roughly 2,400 miles, Haun's company came down out of the mountains and reached Sacramento on November 4, 1849 — "just six months and ten days after leaving Clinton, Iowa," she wrote, and "all in pretty good condition." They were exhausted but alive, part of the great wave that would transform California within a single decade. Tired of tent life, they spent Thanksgiving and Christmas in their canvas houses; for Christmas dinner they paid $2.50 for a grizzly-bear steak and a dollar for a cabbage, and the Sacramento River chose that week to flood the whole town.

In mid-January 1850 they reached Marysville, then only a half-dozen houses. When someone called for a lawyer to draw up a will, Haun's husband offered to do it and charged $150 — and on the strength of that fee "he hung out his shingle, abandoning all thought of going to the mines." They had set out to pick up gold enough to pay their debts and go home; like many, they stayed and built a life instead, going housekeeping "in a shed that was built in a day of lumber purchased with the first fee." His profession as a lawyer, so often attached to the start of the story, was in truth made on arrival.

Catherine Haun lived on into old age and, at some remove of years, sat down to compose the recollections that preserve her crossing. That she wrote at all is the reason we have the account; that she wrote so fully — explaining the code of regulations, the cholera, the desert death, the women's work, and the encounters with Native nations — is the reason it became a classic. Anthologized as "A Woman's Trip Across the Plains in 1849," it remains a touchstone for understanding how ordinary people, and ordinary women in particular, experienced and made sense of the most famous gold rush in American history. Her own verdict still stands as its epigraph: "Upon the whole I enjoyed the trip, spite of its hardships and dangers."

Lessons

References

• Catherine Haun, 'A Pioneer Woman's Westward Journey' (1849) W. W. Norton (primary source)
• Analysis: 'A Woman's Trip Across the Plains' EBSCO Research Starters
• Women on the California Trail California Trail Interpretive Center
• California Gold Rush Wikipedia
• California Trail Wikipedia