The ranch where my LDS mission last summer was based didn’t get “wired” electricity until 1970, although they did have gas powered electric generators before then, I don’t know how early.

As for traveling west by wagon, it was posh compared to pulling handcarts!
(The companies did have a complement of support wagons for the food and heavy items.)

My mother’s family moved by covered wagon in the 1920s in the same area, Kansas/Oklahoma. In fact, my grandparents on my mother’s side may have met during the Oklahoma land rush — there is a story of wagon with an organ and my grandfather and his sisters dancing. He would have been around six years old.

When I was growing up I saw a picture of a couple riding in a horse drawn wagon. These were my great grandparents. I asked my mother where did her grandfather farm, “That’s just how people got around “. My mother’s family lived in Queens.

My grandfather’s father was a carpenter with a full set of tools. He could build a house, a barn or furniture – whatever was needed. They traveled by wagon around Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota in the late 1800s.

They ended up in Oklahoma in the early 1900s where my maternal grandparents met and married. They moved to Denver where my grandfather learned to be an electrician. He was hired by F. O. Stanley to help build the Stanley hotel in Estes Park. After the hotel was finished, he worked for Mr. Stanley in building a hydro-electric plant that provided electricity to the hotel and then the town. They lived in Estes Park the rest of their lo lives.

He told me many stories about his youth and traveling by wagon as his father traveled to wherever he got work. I wish I had written it all down. But I was young and didn’t recognize the value of that history he was relating.

Both my grandparents were excellent with horses. It was what they had learned while traveling by wagon as youngsters.

They both lived to fly in a jet airliner too. And they thought it was just a dandy way to travel.

The Sager orphans (sometimes referred to as the Sager children) were the children of Henry and Naomi Sager. In April 1844 the Sager family took part in the great westward migration, taking the Oregon Trail. During the journey both Henry and Naomi died, leaving their seven children orphaned. Later adopted by Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, missionaries in what is now Washington, they were orphaned a second time, when both their new parents, as well as brothers John and Francis Sager, were killed during the Whitman massacre in November 1847. About 1860 Catherine, the oldest daughter, wrote a first-hand account of their journey across the plains and their life with the Whitmans. Today it is regarded as one of the most authentic accounts of the American westward migration.”

The whole bitter story

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sager_orphans

* See https://www.youtube.com/shorts/M6k22BpJvyw

Senate Bill 2 was passed by the Texas Senate on Thursday.

The bill would allow public money to be used for private or homeschooling.

https://www.fox4news.com/news/school-choice-passes-texas

Will allow approximately 100,000 families to receive funding to send their children to private schools.

Oh, Mary, I have not wrote half of the trouble we’ve had, but I have you wrote you enough to let you know what trouble is is. But thank God, we are the only family which did not eat human flesh…

–Virginia Reed, of the Donner Party, later advising a relative coming West
–Joan Didion, “Where I Was From”
_____________________________

Words to live by.

I’m reading Joan Didion in French and thinking about her. She was old California stock. Didion’s great-great-great-grandmother, Nancy Hardin Cornwall, was part of the Donner Party but left the group before they reached the Sierra Nevada.

Didion was fascinated by the Donner Party from the time she was a child. I wonder if this was a factor in that breathless sense of disaster near at hand which haunts her writing.