About Wagon Wheel Diaries
Wagon Wheel Diaries retells the overland migration west the way the emigrants lived it — one family, one company, one wagon at a time. Each entry follows real people who loaded everything they owned and walked beside an ox team for two thousand miles, drawn from the diaries, letters, and reminiscences they left behind.
What you'll find here
- Families who set out for Oregon and California on the great overland trails
- The first wagon companies to break a new route — and the ones who got lost trying
- Trail diaries kept by women, children, and orphans along the way
- River crossings, cholera, the desert, and the last mountains before the valley
- What became of them once the wheels finally stopped
Every entry follows the same shape: a summary, a dated timeline, "The Departure," "The Route," and "The Crossing," then the factors that decided their fate, "Arrival & After," and the lessons — sourced from real diaries, county histories, and trail archives.
The trail was the same for everyone and yet never the same twice. Telling these crossings one diary at a time is how you feel both at once.
Sister sites
Wagon Wheel Diaries is part of Frontier Diaries — a family of sites about the people who went west: