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"Like a Roaring Lion": The Overland

Trail as a Sonic Conquest

Sarah Keyes

In the opening paragraph o Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883), the
Paiute leader Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins compared the coming of the whites into her
homeland to "a lion, yes, . . . a roaring lion." A small child when Euro-Americans first
invaded her people's land near present-day Humboldt Lake in Nevada in the 1840s,
Hopkins never forgot the onslaught. In her narrative and on-stage presentations to north-
eastern reformers during the mid-1880s, Hopkins detailed the environmental and social
devastation wrought by Euro-American conquerors, including the depletion of game,
homicides, sexual assaults, and other physical violence. Yet her opening observation sug-
gests that indigenous peoples also experienced invasion as a sonic conquest. The phrase
"roaring lion" alludes not only to the aural volume of conquest but also to the biblical
passage that describes the devil as a roaring lion. Mary Peabody Mann, the book's edi-
tor and a leading Christian reformer, may even have selected the phrase herself to evoke
the sinfulness of the Euro-American invasion. Although arguably none of the Euro-
American emigrants on the Overland Trail, commonly referred to as overlanders, who
traveled through the Paiutes' land would have described their trek or America's expan-
sion as diabolical, many did liken their invasion to a roar. In their diaries, journals, and
reminiscences, overlanders speculated about the aural impact of their wagon trains on
the indigenous peoples and animals of the western "wilderness"; they portrayed their
sounds as having the power to subdue the savage wilds and help transform the West into
American territory.'
S.irah Keyes i.s a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Southern California. This essay received the 2008
Louis Pelzcr Memorial Award. The author is especially grateful to Richard Fox, who provided extremely valuable
encouragement and support early on. She would also like to thank her adviser, William Deverell, as well as Peter
Maiicalt and Vanessa Schwartz for their comments and help. Ed Linenthal, Susan Armeny, and Kevin Marsh gave
generously of their time and expertise. This article would nor have been possible without financial support from the
University of Southern California and the Roberta Persinger Foulke Fund.
Readers may contact Keyes at skeyes@usc.edu.

' In this article, I define rhe Overland Trail a.s the main corridor to Oregon and California. Travelers began their
overland trip in Missouri then ourneyed through parts of Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, and Nevada until they
reached their final destination in Oregon or California. While some travelers, such as John James Audubon, took
alternate routes through Mexico or unintentional detours through other parts of the West, most traversed the two
main corridors. The accounts cited in this article span from the late l8.Os through the early 1860s. Sarah Win-
nemucca Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, ed. Mrs. Horace Mann (Boston, 1883), 5; Gae
Whitney Caiifield, Sarah Winnemucca of the Northern Paiutes (Norman, 1983), 36-43, 199, 208-16. The phrase
"like a roaring lion" derives from the biblical proverb Peter 5:8. A search for "roaring lion" on the American Periodi-
cal Series Online, a collection of early American magazines and journals available by subscription, yielded nearly
80 hits for the period 1840-1885, almost all of which used the phrase as a metaphor for the devil. Fora discussion
of Christian reformers who became leading advocates for Indian rights in the late nineteenth century, see Francis
Paul Prucha, 'Ihe Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln, 1986), 198-210.
For a discussion of the authorship of Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins's autobiography and the strong likelihood that

June 2009 The Journal of American History 19


20 The Journal of American History June 2009

Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins gave this portrait, signed, "your loving sister Sarah Win-
nemucca," to her brother Natchez, probably in late 1879 or early 1880. Winnemucca was
very young when Euro-American overlanders first started passing through her people's
land in present-day Nevada In the 1840s, but she remembered the emigrants' invasion as
"a roaring lion" for her entire life. Courtesy Nevada Historical Society, Reno. Nevada.

From the moment European powers first stepped foot in the New World, they wielded
sound to establish territorial dominion and cultural control. Of all the aspiring coloniz-
ers, the Spanish relied perhaps most heavily on sound. Speakingsometimes from miles
offshoreto indigenous peoples or to their empty villages in an incomprehensible lan-
guage, aspiring Spanish colonizers recited the text of el requerimiento, which required
Amerindians to accept Catholicism or become the targets of Spanish military power.
Although Anglo settlers placed more emphasis on "improvement" of the land as justifi-
cation for territorial control, Richard Cullen Rath and Bruce R. Smith have shown that
English efforts to remodel the landscape after Old World Anglo settlements also included
transforming the soundscape, or aural landscape, to resemble that of the English country-
side. Building fences, felling trees, and effecting other physical improvements went hand
in hand with transforming the "howling wilderness" into a civilized soundscape of ringing
Mary Peabody Mann atrempted, as much as possible, to preserve Hopkins's voice in the narrative, see Katharine
Rodier, "Authorizing Sarah Winnemucca? Elirabeth Peabody and Mary Peabody Mann," in Reinventing the Peabody
Sisters, ed. Monika M. Elbert, Julie E. Hall, and Katharine Rodier {Iowa City, 2006), 113-17.
The Overland Trail as a Sonic Conquest 21

axes, lowing cattle, and tinkling bells. Indians reacted against this physical and aural en-
croachment, and the sounds of ritualized speech, whoops, shouts, and drum beats became
crucial in the battles between the English and Native Americans for territorial control.
In the nineteenth-century French countryside the sonic reach of the village bell defined
the community's geographic boundaries and therefore the residents' territorial identity.
Across the Atlantic, sectional conflicts manifested in disputes over whether the American
soundscape should resemble that of the industrial North or southern slave plantations. By
violating their master's restrictions on the volume and types of sounds they could make,
enslaved peoples wielded sound to undermine the slavcocracy. As scholars have shown,
the aural is inextricably intertwined with struggles for dominion and power.^
The absence of a dominant order on the Overland Trail perhaps ftirther elevated the
importance of aural struggles. In that power vacuum natives and Euro-Americans had to
articulate constantly their extant and presumed claims to cultural and territorial space.
Invading wagon trains rolled into what Ned Blackhawk has described as "undetermined
lands" overlain with webs of shifting indigenous alliances and punctuated by periodic
outbursts of war and violence. Once overlandcrs crossed from American territory into
whac they referred to as Indian territory or simply the "wilderness," they found themselves
alienated and vulnerable. This voluntary dislocation forcibly compounded the liminal
condition of Native Americans of the plains and Great Basin. Liminal entities, as anthro-
pologists and religious scholars have defined them, are people and places "betwixt and
between," in transition from one state of being to another and regarded as on the margins
of their respective cultures and societies. Overlanders and their accompanying retinue of
forts, traders, and military companies, further destabilized an already contentious region.
As on other frontiers, hostilities did not always cleave cleanly along racial and ethnic lines.
Some Indians, such as the Cheyenne and Arapaho, saw Euro-Americans as a source of
trade, while non-equestrian Paiutes and Shoshones initially welcomed emigrant protec-
tion from the slave raids of the Utes and other mounted bands. However, as trail traffic
increasedfirst spiking with the California gold rush in the late 1840s and then continu-
ing heavily through the 1850sthe road that cut directly through the Shoshone, Ban-
nock, and Paiute homelands became the most violent stretch of the highway. Emigrant
trains and their sounds became interwoven into the fabric of many Indians' lives, when,
during peak years of travel, peoples such as the Sioux might experience a wagon train pass
daily. While scholars have explored the environmental and social effects of this penetra-
tion, this study seeks to explicate how overlanders' self-described aural penetration helped
advance American expansion.^

Sensory history, or the study of the role of the senses in shaping people's experiences,
has the potential to cause significant rvaluations of historical methodologies and inter-
pretations. A 200^ Journal of American History round table highlighted some of these pos-

' Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 492-1640 (Cambridge, Eng.,
1995), 69-73, 38-40; Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded {IIAC. 2003), 145-72; Bruce R. Smith,
The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago, 1999}, 288-334; Alain Corbin.
Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the !9th-Century French Countryside (New York, 1998), 95-100; Mark M.
Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America {Chapel Hi]|, 2001 ), 67-92.
' Ned Biackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West {Cambridge, Mass.,
2006), esp. 234, 184. 250; Victor W.Turner, The Riiu/il Process: Structure and Anti-strucrure(i^cw York, 1969). 9 3 -
97, 102, 125; Pekka Hmlainen, 7he Comanche Empire {New Haven, 2008), 3-6; Pekb Hnilinen, "'Tht- Rise
and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cukurcs," Journal of American History. 90 {Dec. 2003), 833-62; Michael L Tte.
Indian and Emigrants: Encounters on the Overland Trails (Norman, 2006), 124.
22 The Journal of American History June 2009

sibilities, particularly as they pertain to the communication of knowledge and expressions


of power and identity. In this article I use "sonic" to describe phenomena made by sound
waves within the audible range; aural and "aurality" encompass all phenomena, both
audible and inaudible, that can potentially be interpreted by the ear. The soundscape is
the autal landscape, which includes silences as well as the sounds made by nonhuman
forces such as thunder, wind, and water, and the sounds that humans makeboth ver-
bal and nonverbalin the course of shaping their environments, such as playing musi-
cal instruments, tolling bells, or shooting firearms. Although this essay focuses priniarily
on hearing, I attempt whenever possible to heed the anthropologist David Howes's call
for examining "intersensory relationships," an approach that treats the senses as interde-
pendent parts of a whole and therefore more closely approximates the lived experiences
of historical subjects. At the same time, by focusing on sound this investigation provides
further evidence of the importance of the aural in the post-Enlightenment period, there-
by strengthening contentions made by other sound scholars that tbe meteoric rise of mass
print culture did not produce a corresponding dramatic decline in aurality. Contrary to
what tides of Overland Trail accounts such as Pen Pictures of Early Western Days. Scenes of
Earlier Days in Crossing the Plains to Oregon, and What I saw in California suggest, Euro-
American travelers placed perhaps as much importance on their aural experiences as on
their visual ones.*
The Overland Trailsecond only to the Civil War as the subject of nineteenth-century
personal reminiscencesinspired many emigrants to write diaries, journals, and mem-
oirs, which provide a wealth of data on overlanders' individual and collective experiences.
Three quarters of the overlanders came from overlanders' agricultural villages in what are
today midwestern states such as Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri. On the trail, these
middle-class farmers and their families, who were headed for economic opportunity in
Oregon and California, mingled with traders, government surveyors, and pleasure seek-
ers, many of whom undertook the journey to celebrate and document American expan-
sion. Although numerous overlanders had already made the move to earlier frontiers, the
incredible length of the journey to the far West, the distinctive plains environment, and,
for later reminiscencers, the trail's historical status as the final overland migration pro-
pelled by animal, primarily oxen, rather than mechanical power, inspired many to record
their experiences and contributions to American expansion. As in other American con-
quest narratives, Indians, as emblems of savagery to be overcome, figured prominently
in these stories. However, the historian John D. Unruh, in his 1979 seminal work The
Plains Across, demonstrated that emigrants embellished or wholly fabricated the accounts
of some of the most violent Indian attacks. He showed that disease, followed by acciden-
tal drowning and gunshot wounds, not Indians, were the leading causes of emigrant fa-
talities on the trail. In fact, cooperation between emigrants and Indians as well as among
emigrants proved crucial to successful trail crossings, particularly through the 1840s, be-
fore increasing traffic aggravated emigrant-Indian relations. Although Unruh attempted
to identify emigrant exaggerations and myths to ferret out false stories, these emigrant
* Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (Bcrkcle)', 2007),
4-5; Mark M. Smith, "Still Coming to 'Our' Senses: An Introduction," Journal of American History, 95 (Sept.
2008), 378-80; Richard Cuilen Rath, "Hearing American History." ibid.A\7-?>\- David Howes, Sensual Relations:
Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Iheory (Ann Arbor, 2003). xx-xxi. Virginia Wilcox Ivins, Pen Pictures of
Early Western Days (Keokuk, 1905); Charles Howard Crawfotd, Scenes of Earlier Days in Crossing the Plains to Or-
egon, and Experiences of Western Life (Petaluma, 1898); Edwin Bryant. What I saw in California: Its Soil, Climate.
Productions, and GoU Mines. With Routes, And Advice to Intending Emigrants {London, 1849).
Hie Overland Trail as a Sonic Conquest 23

accounts nevertheless helped shape national understandings of the transformation of the


West into American territory.''
Recovering the sonic dimension of the Overland Trail restores a part of American his-
tory more often commemorated than analyzed to a central place in our understanding of
the process of conquest. In the liminal space of the Overland Trail, sounds and silences
possessed the power to comfort and distress, to unite and divide Native and Euro-Amer-
icans, and to assert and defend territorial claims. Familiar sounds of tinkling cowbells,
banjo music, and campfite chatter broke the silence of the plains and helped sustain Euro-
Americans on their way west. Unfamiliar and threatening noises of whooping Indians and
howling wolves, roaring storms and rushing rivers terrified those same weary travelers.
Such wild noises particularly afflicted emigrants because the sounds were often set against
the backdrop of awesome silences that evoked the aesthetic of the sublime. Those noises
also defined the West as a region to be mastered, lest it master them. Because evidence of
Indians' aural experiences of the trail is tantalizingly sparse, this article focuses primar-
ily on Euro-American representations of indigenous sounds and indigenous responses to
Euro-American sounds as opposed to Native American renderings of their own aural ex-
periences.
Documents left by the overlanders suggest that their westward treks could be under-
stood as sonic assaults that wreaked violence on Indians. I argue that the violence of the
trail, both actual and imagined, cannot be accurately measured or understood without
considering these assaults. Sound does not have to be associated with physical blows to
constitute violence. Noise, or sound out of place, is, like violence, by definition disruptive
and disturbing. Sound is particularly well suited to assault because, as R. Murray Schfer,
a Canadian environmentalist and the founding father of sound studies, has asserted, we
can refuse to touch or taste, we can plug our noses and close our eyes, but our ears have no
such impenetrable lids. Although overlanders did not personally aspire ro dispossess the
Indians of the plains violently, the emigrants' physical and aural presence heralded Ameri-
can dominion. In aural confrontations with Native Americans and through their written
accounts, overlanders articulated Americas expansionist aspirations/'

To understand the aural processes on the Overland Trail and their consequences it is first
necessary to examine how sound worked within native and Euro-American communi-
ties in the mid-nineteenth century. The daily ringing of bells roused Euro-Americans to
work and worship and helped communicate to the entire village significant moments
in the lives of individuals, such as births, marriages, and deaths. Town criers served a
similar function in some Indian communities, awakening residents and signaling the
start of political and social ceremonies. Sound, therefore, helped situate Native and Euro-

' John Mack Farmer, Women arta Men on the Overland Trail {New H2.ven, 2001), 16-19, 20-22; John D. Un-
ruh Jr., The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-60 (\}A>Z\A, 19791,380-90,
408-13.
' Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting, 825-1875 (New York, 1980). 4-20,
35-40; Roderick Nash, V^ildemess and the American Mind {New Hsven, 2001), 60-66. For a definition of noise as
disturbing, see the Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v., "Noise," hrrp://dictionai7.oed.com (Aug. 11, 2008). On
thementalandphysiologicaldamagescausedby noise, see Lucy Kavaler.Aitfw.' The New Menace {New York. 1975),
4-6, 25-31. For a declaration that noise is an "immaceria! weapon of death," see Jacques Actali, Noise: The Political
Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi {Minneapolis, 1985), 26-29. R. Murray Schafer. The Tuning of the World
(NewYork, 1977), U .
24 The Journal of American History June 2009

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Americans temporally and spatially. The cadences of nature, such as the bark cracking
on trees during the freezing winters of the northern plains and sounds of work, such as
the ringing axes of Euro-American farmers chopping wood for winter, similarly com-
municated geographical and seasonal locations to their listeners. Such aural stimuli also
helped construct collective identities, enclosing Native and Euro-Americans within what
t h e Overland Trail as a Sonic Conquest 25

the historian Alain Corbin has termed distinctive "acoustemologies" or acoustic com-
munities.''
Although many Euro-Americans emphasized the cultural and technological distinc-
tions between Indian aurality and their own, Indians and overlanders in fact operated
in overlapping acoustemologies. For centuries the colonizers and colonized had moved
within and between each other's communities, creating a certain level of familiarity with
the sounds of both cultures. The proliferation of firearms is one example of how the
acoustemologies of natives and Euro-Americans became increasingly similar. Many over-
landers, armed with preconceptions of ignorant Indians awed by the sight and sounds of
Euro-American technologies, believed that Indians would scatter at the sounds of guns.
In their journals of their western explorations, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark re-
peatedly reported that the sounds of their guns "surprised and astonished" the indigenous
people they encountered. Thus, when a group of Sioux Indians complained to Lewis and
Clark that the presents they had received were inadequate, "Lewis tried to intimidate the
Indians by firing an air gun 'several times.'" The Sioux nonetheless continued to protest
and later that day prevented the explorers from leaving via the Bad River in South Da-
kota. Hie Overiand Trail artist A. J. Miller attributed similar sonic fears to Plains Indians,
declaring them to have "'a mortal horror of the "big gun,""' the cannon at Fort Laramie,
and "'its loud "talk."'" In what would become one of the most popular accounts of over-
iand travel in 1849, Life On the Plains And Among the Diggings, the writer Alonzo Delano
described his party's attempts to capitalize on Indians' supposed fear of loud guns. After
hearing rumors of Indians robbing livestock from other argonauts, Delano's company de-
cided to periodically fire their weapons into the air to intimidate the would-be robbers.
When this proved ineffective, the men pursued the Indians. During the ensuing alterca-
rion, "it was found that instead of being frightened at the sound of a gun, they would of-
ten stand and fight man to man with the most desperate courage." Just as overlanders car-
ried preconceptions of how Indians would react to certain sounds, so too did they carry
preconceptions of what their own aural experiences would be."

Wiiile the trans-Mississippi West that the overlanders traversed differed in both its in-
habitants and environment from previous American frontiers, nineteenth-century colo-
nists recorded aural experiences that corresponded to those of eariier pioneers. Long be-
fore Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show entertained audiences with the "whoop of the
Cowboy and the Indian, the crack of the prairie pistol . . . and the thunder of rifles,"
printed material represented sounds of the West to American readers. Descriptions of
alternately shrieking and treacherously stealthy Indians; of howling and silent wilder-
ness; and of wailing wolves resounded through the pages of western adventure tales by
James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving. In such works, American colonial my-

' Smkh, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America. 52, 31: A. J. Allen, Ten Years in Oregon. Travels And Adventures
Of Doctor E. White And Lady West 0/7C Rocky Mountains; With Incidents Of Two Sea Voyages Via. Sandwich Islands
Around Cape Horn: Containing Also A Brief History Of The Missions And Settlement Of Vie CountryOngin Of The
Provisional GovernmemNumber And Customs Of The IndiansIncidents Witnessed While Traversing And Residing
n 'The TerritoryDescription Of The Soil. Production And Climate Of The Country (Ithaca, 1848), 306; Corbin WV-
lage Belts. 95-100.
" Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. ColonialismfromLewis and Clark to Wounded Knee {New York, 2004),
20; Gary E. Moukon, ed., liefournals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, vol. Ill: August 25, 804-April 6. 1805
(Lincoln, 1987), 209; A. J. Miller quoted in LeRoyR. Haien and Francis M3.on Young, Fort [jtramie and the Pag-
eant of the West. 1834-1890 (Lincoln, 1938), 40; Alonzo Dekno, Life On V>e PLiins And Among Vie Diggings; Being
Scenes And Adventures Of An Overland foumey To California: With Particular Lncidents Of The Route. Mistakes And
Suffering Qf The Emigranu, The Lndian Tribes, The Present and Future Of The Great West {Anhmn, 1854), 168-69.
26 The Journal of American History June 2009

thology converged with romantic ideas of nature and wilderness to shape overlanders'
aural expectations of their western experience. Emigrant guidebooks, overland travel ac-
counts published serially in newspapers for the entertainment and edification of the pub-
lic, and, to a lesser extent, private letters, similarly reinforced preconceptions of western
soundscapes. By reciting these established wilderness soundmarks (sonic landmarks) of
"whooping Indians," "howling wolves," and "vast solitudes" and comparing their experi-
ence more generally to those of other overlanders and earlier pioneers, emigrants situated
themselves within the lineage of the American pioneer experience. In drawing these aural
continuities between their own and earlier pioneer experiences, they also helped not only
legitimate their trek but also make it recognizable as part of the civilizing enterprise. At
the same time, the perceived erasure of wilderness sounds from earlier American frontiers
lent an added sense of inevitability to emigrants' proclamations that Americans would
eliminate these sounds from the far West.**
When overlanders came west they imposed a new regime of hearing on the western
landscape. Euro-Americans interpreted environmental sounds and silences to render un-
familiar territory recognizable, knowable, and therefore capable of being possessed. By
giving aural curiosities names such as Bellowing Rock (which reportedly bellowed like a
buffalo when the wind rushed through its hoUowed-out center). Echo Canyon (which re-
warded passing travelers who shouted into it with answering reverberations), and Steam-
boat Springs (whose bubbling and hissing waters reminded travelers of the sound of a
steamboat) overlanders broke the monotony of the journey, reassured emigrants they
were headed on the right path, and helped wagon companies situate themselves on the
seemingly endless plains. At the same time, landmarks named for their aural properties
also effectively marked the trail as part of the American national and cultural domain.
These sonic landmarks demonstrate how sound helped shape overlanders' perception of
the West and craft the common cultural language Euro-Americans used to identify and
lay claim to new lands.'"
On the surface, Euro-American names appear purely descriptive, but they harbored la-
tent political motives. The appellation "Steamboat Springs" exemplifies how religious and
cultural differences between overlanders and Native Americans revealed themselves in
aural interpretations of the environment. Emigrants bestowed that name on at least two
hot springs on the trail, in present-day Idaho and Wyoming. Although the first person to
name the Idaho spring is unknown, John Charles Fremont popularized the appellation
' "Ihe Wild Wesr Show Open: Generals and Soldiers Attend Buffido Bill's Congress of Rough Riders in the
Madison Square Carden," New York Times, April 27. 1897, p. 7; james Fenimnre Cooper, The Pioneers, or the Sources
of the Susquehanna; A Descriptive Tale (London, 1832); Washington Irving, Astoria: or, Anecdotes of an Enterprise
beyond the Rocky Mountains (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1836); and Washington Irving, Adventures of Captain Bonneville,
Or Scenes Beyond the Rocky Mountains of the Far West O vo\s., London, 1837). For an example of overlanders com-
paring western sounds and scenes to James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irvings fictional descriptions, see
Thomas J. Fainham. Travels Tn The Great Western Prairies. The Anahuac And Rocky Mountains, And In TJC Oregon
7fTnMf7 (Poughkcepsie, 1841), 196. For a detailed discu.wion of how literature shaped perceptions of the West, see
Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890^ (New
York, 1994). For the role of .sound in shaping constructions of nature, see Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden:
Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, 2000), 3-32. On "soiindmarks," see Barry Truax, The World
Soundscape Ihvject's Handbook for Acoustic Ecology (Vancouver 1978), 119.
'" Merrill J. Mattes. "Behind the Legend of Colter's Hell: The Early Exploration of Yellowstone National Park,"
Mississippi Valley Historical Review, .36 (Sept. 1949), 251-82, esp. 281-82. For an account of a traveler listening for
Bellowing Rock to hellow. see Jesse A. Applegate. A Day with the Cow Column in 1843: Recollections of my Boyhood^
(Chicago, 1934), 57. On naming as an act of caking possession, see Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's
Conijuest of the New World, 492-1640 (New York, 1995), 163-65, 189-190; and Alan Trachtenberg. Reading
American Photographs: Images as History, Matthew Brady to Walker Evans {NevJ York, 1989), 119-63.
The Overland Trail as a Sonic Conquest 27

in his famous guidebook. Narrative Of The Exploring Expedition To The Rocky Mountains
In 1842. Fremont christened the spring aft:er observing a geyser erupt at regular intervals,
"accompanied by a subterranean noise, which, together with the motion of the water,
makes very much the impression of a steamboat in motion." Other travelers put their own
spin on his descriptionseveral likened the sound of the geyser to air escaping through
a steamboat's pipe, while the forry-niner J. Coldsborough BrufF argued that tbe "bub-
bling and jetting clear water" made the same noises as waters churned by a "steamboats
paddles"few, if any, questioned tbe appropriateness of the appellation. Euro-Americans
thus drew on their common industrial cultural lexicon to transform the landscape into a
recognizable entity."
The overlanders' name for the spring also attempted to erase Native Americans' un-
derstandings of the aural phenomenon. The indigenous inhabitants of the territory sur-
rounding what Euro-Amer i cans referred to as "Steamboat Springs," along the Shoshone
River in present-day Wyoming, likened the sounds to spiritual rather than mechanical
forces. According to the Jesuit missionary Father Pierre-Jean de Smet's published letters
describing his 1851 trip across the plains, Indians believed that evil spirits warring under
the earth produced the hissing and blowing sounds of the spring. While this interpreta-
tion failed to appeal to de Smet, who dismissed it as "superstitious," explanations like
these formed the basis of Amerindians' "sacred geographies," or holy lands. Thus, when
Euro-Americans reinterpreted the aural phenomena of the spring they helped obliterate
indigenous geography. Moreover, while perhaps not consciously political, Euro-Ameri-
cans' decision to relate the phenomena of the two springs to one of the reigning symbols
of northern industrial culture signaled their desire to establish dominion over the western
landscape. Native Americans' response to the sound of steamboats, as with their reaction
to firearms, served as one of the tropes of indigenous navet and lack of technological
know-how. In his narrative, de Smet also recounted the awe Euro-American technologies
inspired in his Indian companions. After de Smet performed the sounds and motions of
a steamboat for them, they voiced a "general cry of wonder." By christening the springs
after a recent human invention, overlanders erased Native American understanding of
the sounds and imposed their own industrial ctilturea culture that they believed to be
incogruous with indigenous habitation.'^
Native Americans similarly sought to identify and claim territory when naming their
environment for its aural properties. The Sioux, for instance, adjusted their interpreta-
tions of environmental sounds in response to changing political imperatives. The fur
trader Edwin Denig reported that in 1833 the Sioux attributed the volcanic noises ema-
nating from the Black Hills to "the Big White Man" or "the Great White Ciant." Accord-

' ' John Charles Fremont, Narrative Of The Exploring Expedition To 'he Rocky Mountains In 1842. And To Or-
egon And North California In The Years 184S-'44 {Washington, 1845), 120; Farnham, Traveb In The Great West-
ern Prairies, 130; Abigail Dunlway, Captain Gray's Company; or Crossing the Pkins and Living in Oregon (Portland,
1859), 135; and Georgia Willis Read and Ruth Gaines, ed.. Gold Rush: The Journals. Drawing, and Other Papen of
J. Goldsborotigh Bruff, Captain. Washington City and California Mining Association, April 2, 849--Juh 20, 1851 il
vols.. New York, 1944), I, 92.
'- Hiram Martin Chittendcn and Alfred Talbot Richardson, eds., Eather de Smet's Life and Travels Among the
North American Indians (4 vols.. New York, 1905), I, 395; J. de Smet, Western Missions And Missionaries: A Series
Of Letters (Nc\v^York, 1859), 87. For a widely reprinted account of the Mandans description of a steamboat as a "big
thunder canoe," see George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners. Customs, and Condition of the North American
Indians: Written During Eight Years' Travel Amon^t the Wildest Tribes of Indians in North America In 1832, 33. 34,
35.36.37, 38, and 39 {2 vols., London, 1841), I, 20. Jared Farmer, On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the
American Landscape (Cambridge, Mass., 2008), 246-47.
28 The Journal of American History June 2009

ing to Denig, the Sioux believed the sounds "to be the moans of the Great White Giant,
when pressed upon by rocks as a punishment for being the first aggressor in their terri-
tory . . . He is condemned to perpetual incarceration under the mountain as an example
to all whites to leave the Indians in quiet possession of their hunting grounds." Whether
or not the Sioux actually attributed the sound to "the Great White Giant," the story al-
lowed them to assert their territorial claims to Denig. The name and the tale explaining
its origins also possibly provided assurance for the Sioux as they faced increasing threats
from white aggressors.'^
Overlanders also ritually asserted their claims to the land through aural ceremonies.
Listening to a cannon salute memorializing George Washington's birthday in San Fran-
cisco in 1847, Edwin Bryant, the newly appointed alcalde of the city, described how the
reports "bounded from hill to hill, and were echoed and reechoed until the sound died
away. . . . This was a voice from the soul of WASHINGTON, speaking in majestic and thun-
der-tones to the . . . valley . . . hills and lofty mountains of California, and consecrat-
ing them as the future abode of millions upon millions of the sons of liberty." Although
wagon trains could not match the sonic strength of booming cannons, overlanders simi-
larly employed the noisy revelry of Fourth of July celebrations to announce their nation's
pretensions to rule. Trail celebrations, like those in established antebellum communities,
mingled ceremonial songs and speeches with loud, destructive behavior. Many emigrants
compensated for the shortage of fireworks, bells, and other traditional noisemakers by
pushing abandoned wagons off cliffs, shoving lighted kegs of powder down prairie dog
or wolf holes, and shooting guns in salutes. The few parties who had brought small can-
nons for protection also turned those to celebratory uses. In their joint diary, the forty-
niners Vincent Geiger and Wakeman Bryarly described their company's celebration on
the Green River in present-day Wyoming: "The first dawn was ushered in by a noise from
our six pounder, which reverberated, echoed & reechoed from hillock to hill, until the
very earth itself seemed to tremble in fear at such strange noises." The land was not the
only audience cowed by these types of revelries. Edward Mcllhany, one of Geiger and
Bryarly's traveling companions, described how every time one drunken reveler "would
say anything patriotic [he] would touch the little cannon off, and the echo would bellow
up and down the valley. The Indians, when they heard that cannon, would not come any-
where near us." Though social and legal strictures in antebellum communities attempted
to limit overly raucous celebrations, overlanders operated outside of such normal bounds.
As another forty-niner put it, he and his company had a perfect right in the wilderness
"to be as noisy as we pleased." Only in the wilderness could Euro-Americans so noisily
celebrate the Fourth, and only in this supposedly unclaimed land did Euro-Americans
need to express so vociferously their claim to rule. "The trail was a space where they lacked
territorial control and thus the power to prevent indigenous and environmental sounds
from continually infringing on their cultural space, in celebrating their nation's birthday,
emigrants ritually claimed a day and a space, pressing their sonic imprint on the wilder-
ness in an attempt to give birch to a new American domain.'^
'^ Edwin Thompson Denig, Five Indian Tribes of the Upper Missouri: Sioux, Arickaras, Assiniboines, Crees. Crows
(Norman, 1961), 6.
'* Bryant, What saw in California, 113; David Morris Potter, ed.. Trail to California: The Overland Journal of
Vincent Geiger and Wakeman Bryarly (New Haven, 1945), 134-35ii6; Fxlward Washington Mclthany, Recolkctions
of a '49er. A Quaint and Thrilling Narrative of a Trip Across the Plains, and Life in the California Gold Fields Dur-^
ing the Stirring Days folbwing the Discovery of Gold in the Far West {Y^t\&3s City, 1908), 23. On attempts to control
Fourth of July celebrations, see Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in
The Overland Trail as a Sonic Conquest 29

Even as overlanders aurally asserted their right to rule, deafening thunderstorms re-
minded them that the environment, not humans, ruled the West. On the plains, the aes-
thetic philosophy of the suhlime merged with environmental factors to make thunder-
storms one of the most dangerous and threatening of sounds. Anxious travelers contrasted
the unpredictable paroxysms of the West with the tamer squalls of the East. Reporting on
his 1850 overland trek in Indiana's New Harmony Times, James Bennett described how he
and his party barely had rime to clear away their "supper things when a storm such as is
only known on the plains, burst upon tis with all its fury." Other travelers heard storms
building for hours before the onslaught of driving rain, roaring winds, and booming
thunder broke overhead. Soon after leaving St. Joseph, Missouri, for a Pawnee village on
the Platte River in 1844, Lt. James Henry Carletons cavalry company listened in silent
trepidation to the "unceasing roar" of approaching thunder and the "screaming" of prai-
rie hawks flying through the air "half-crazed" by the impending storm. With the barrage
of rain, many emigrant encampments erupted into pandemonium. Cattle stampeded
through the center of camp or fell headlong into rivers while their frightened caretakers
ran for cover, only to have winds and driving rain wrench tents from their stakes, drench
bedding, and hurl the occupants to the ground. Even wagons provided little safety as pelt-
ing rain and hail ripped through cloth tops as if they were "wet paper." Whereas forested
lands would have afforded some physical and aural protection, the open plains amplified
thunderous sounds and denied overlanders shelter. Raging storms further threatened trav-
elers by deafening and blinding them to other sounds and sights. Lavinia Porter found the
sensory deprivation caused by thunderstorms particularly disturbing. A few hours after
an unsettling tussle with several Indians in the Great Basin in 1860, a storm broke over
her party. Porter found herself in "darkness . . . so complete that we might have been sur-
rounded by hundreds of the demons [Indians] and yet been none the wiser, and the up-
roar of the storm was so loud that hearing was as useless as sight." As if the aural rampage
of thunderstorms was not enough, those tempests could also block even more dangerous
noises.'''

While some overlanders evaded the worst of the storms, every traveler still had to con-
tend with the daily loss of sight as day turned to night. The absence of light made night
a particularly fearftil time for Euro-Americans traversing an unknown and sometimes-
hostile territory. By stealing travelers' vision, darkness increased the importance of hear-
ing. Huddled in her wagon in 1853, Helen Stewart recorded by the light of a lantern,
"wolves howling . . . makes me feel very eary." Tie threatening aural nighttime world of
oppressive silences punctuated by wolf howls and other wilderness noises made travelers
the Early Republic (Amherst, 997), 128-35. Charles W. Martin Jr. and Charles W. Martin, "The Fourth of July: A
Holiday on the Trail," Overlandfourmil. 10 (Summer 1992), 2-20, esp. 7-10. 1 would like to thank Charles Mar-
tiu for bringing ro my attention the quotation, "to be as noisy as we pleased," from Cephas Arm.s, The Long Road to
California: 'Ihe fournal of Cephas Arms Supplemented with Letters by Traveling Companions on the Overland Trail in
1849. ed. John Cumming (Mount Pleasant, 1985), 51. On the sounds of the Fourth strengthening national iden-
tity, see Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America. 21, 95-96.
" James Bennert, Overland fourney to California, fournal of fames Bennett Whose Party Left New Hannony in
850 and Crossed the Plains and Mountains until the Golden West was Reached {Hvj Harmony, 1906), 19; J. Henry
Carleton, The Prairie Logbooks: Dragoon Campaigns to the Pawnee Villages in 844. and to the Rocky Mountains in
845. ed. Louis Pelzer (Chicago. 1943), 27; William Kelly, An Excursion to California over the Prairie. Rocky Moun-
tains, and Great Sierra Nevada (2 vols.. New York, 1973), 1, 144. On frightened livestock wreaking havoc, see Bry-
ant, What I saw in California. 79-80; and Gwinn Harris Heap. CentralRoute To The Pacific, From The Valley Of'ihe
Mississippi To California: fournal Of'the Expedition OfE. E Beale, Superintendent Of Indian Akirs In California. And
Gwinn Harris Heap. From Missouri To California, In 853 (Philadelphia, 1854), 15. Lavinia Honeyman Porter, By
Ox Team to California: A Narrative of Crossing the Plains in 860 (Oakland, 1910), 80.
30 The Journal of American History June 2009

Although the artist William Henry Jackson titled this 1866 ink drawing Mormon Party
in a Snow Storm, he described the tempest as a thunderstotm in his autobiography. The
Pioneer Photographer (Yonkers-on-Hudson, 1929). The stotm, which btoke over present-
day Nebraska, shattered the telegraph pole on the left with what Jackson described as "a
blinding flash and a deafening roar." Courtesy William Henry Jackson Collection, Scotts Bluff
National Monument, Gering, Nebraska.

increasingly aware of their physical vulnerability. At the same time, however, emigrants'
aural abilities could lead them to safety and help them reconnect with loved ones. By fol-
lowing the sounds of cowbells, lost emigrants reentered the folds of civilization. Unable to
see through the darkness to the other side of a stream, Edwin Bryant followed the sound
of a trader's voice from the opposite bank to a point where he and his party could forge
across. Paralyzed with dread after her husband failed to return from a daytime hunting
trip, a young mother named Virginia Wilcox Ivins found herself unable to sleep. Alone in
her wagon with her "baby boy," Ivins sobbed while a "fearilU storm" pounded overhead.
Yet her sharpened aural abilities saved her from total distress: "My senses were unusually
acute and about two o'clock I thought I heard a faint hello." Hearing the call repeated,
Ivins recalled that she "sprang to the front of my wagon, dashed up the curtain and shout-
ed with all the strength of my not weak lungs." In the wilderness, Ivins heard better than
she ever had before, detecting the first call of her husband, which she would otherwise
have missed. Ivins was not alone in discovering that the menacing western environment
amplified the importance of hearing. Traveling to Oregon in 1839 for health and plea-
sure, the Illinois lawyer Thomas J. Farnham wrote simply, the West "opens the ear.""'
Yet even with their amplified awareness of the aural world, overlanders believed they
could not compete with Indians' purported exceptional ability to manipulate sound and
evade aural detection. According to nineteenth-century mythology perpetuated in folk-
'^ On the dangers of night in European and Euro American cultures and the increased importance of hearing,
see A. Roger Ekirch, At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (New York, 2005), 6-10, 132-33; Helen Stewart Love,
"Diary of a Journey from Pennsylvania to Oregon, via South Pass, ending near Fort Hall," May 17, 1853. FAC 592
{Henry E. Hunrington Library, San Marino, Calif.), courtesy o" the Lane County Historical Society and Museum;
Mai^aret Frink, foumal of the Adventures of a Party of California Gold-Seekers under the Guidance of Mr. Ledyard
Frink during a Journey across the Plainsfrom Martinsville. Indiana, to Sacramento, California, from March 30. 850. to
September?. /S5 (Oakland, 1897), 116; Bryant. What I Saw in California. 56; Wins. Pen Pictures of Early Western
Days. 79; and Farnham, Travels In The Great Western Prairies. 68.
The Overland Trail as a Sonic Conquest 31

lore and the novels of Cooper and Irving, the Indians' stealth and exceptional hearing
posed an especial threat to Euro-Americans outside the bounds of civilization. In the Ad-
ventures of Captain Bonneville (1837), Irving described the fearful reaction of the Bonn-
eville party to the cry of "'Indians! Indians!'" Soon after the cry rang out, a group of
Crows arrived "whooping and yelling like maniacs" but oifered their friendship instead
of attacking the party. The Crows then revealed that unbeknownst to Bonneville and the
others they had been quietly following the caravan for days as it had travelled along the
Platte River. While these Crows had friendly intentions, this story and others made emi-
grants believe that hostile Indians would be able to shadow wagon trains silently or slip
into camps unheard. Reports of Indians glimpsed gliding noiselessly through the bushes
and grasses alongside the trail fill overland journals. In a description typical of this fear,
Charles Preuss, the cartographer for Fremont's party, recorded in his 1844 journal how
Paiutes used rocks to hide themselves from view. As Preuss described the sensation, "One
hears nothing, yet one is watched by a hundred eyes." While the obscurity of night may
have helped ameliorate the feat of Indian surveillance, darkness also gave Indians the free-
dom to venture out of their hiding places. Night deprived emigrants of their sight, but
it did not hide vulnerable travelers from Indians when the softest crack of a twig might
bring a horde of warriors rushing down on their camp. Euro-Americans believed Indians'
double aural advantagenamely, that they made less noise and had better hearinggave
their enemy a powerful edge in the contest between civilization and wilderness.'^
Stories of Indians' aural prowess that titillated back home proved too much for many to
handle on the trail. In The California and Oregon 7ra/7(1849), the future historian Fran-
cis Parkman described the effect produced by a campfire tale told by the veteran French-
Canadian trapper Boisverd, whom Parker had employed to assist his party on their jour-
ney. Encamped not far west of St. Joseph, Missouri, on the Oregon Trail, Parkman and
his travelling companions listened to Boisverd's tale of a nighttime Indian attack "on the
skirts of the Blackfoot Country" (most likely southern Canada). One night while Boisverd
and his party were resting, the camp guard detected a "dark, crouching figure, stealing
noiselessly into the circle of the light." Certain that he had the advantage over the intruder,
the guard carefully cocked his rifle. The soft click of the hammer alerted the trespassing
Blackfoot that he had been detected, and in a lightning flash the Indian raised his bow,
already strung with an arrow, and shot it straight through the guard's throat. His victim si-
lenced, the victorious Blackfoot bounded "with a loud yell" from the camp. Glancing over
at his own sentinel, Parkman began to doubt the man's ability to vanquish approaching
aggressors. Such stories convinced many overlanders that the threat of death at the hands
of a silent Indian lurked just beyond the circle of light thrown by the warming fire.'"
Unlike in popular myth, sound, of course, did not always shield Native Americans and
endanger emigrants. Headed to Oregon in 1850, Solomon Zumwalts company proved

'^ Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America, 50; Irving. Adventures of Captain Bonneville. I, 73-74;
Charles Preuss quoted in Martha C. Knack, Boundaries Between: The Southern Paiutes, 1775-1995 (Lincoln, 2001),
42; and Heap, Central Route To Ihe ''acific, 101. Erwin G. Guddc and Elisabeth K. Guddc, cds.. Exploring with
Frhnojii: Vie Private Diaries of Charles Preuss, Cartographer for John C Fremont On His First. Second, and Fourth
Expeditions to the Far West (Norman, 1958). Wagon trains in fact experienced more Indian attacks while strung out
during the day than when corralled at night. Unruh, Plains Across, 192.
'" Tte, Indians and Emigrants, 18; Glenda Riley, "The Specter of a Savage: Rumors and Alarmism on the Over-
land Trail," Western Historical Quarterly, i 5 (Oct. 1984), 427-44, esp. 428; Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail, ed.
E. N. Feltskog (Madison, 1969), 60-61. Francis Parlunan, The California and Oregon Trail: Being Sketches of"rairie
and Rocky Mountain Life (New York, 1849).
32 The Journal of American History June 2009

that bearing could help detect approaching Indians. After an altercation with some Indi-
ans near the Snake River in present-day Idaho, Zumwalt and his traveling companions
corralled their livestock for the night and posted their usual three pickets. A little after
dark one of the pickets fired into the night and came running back to camp scared. Zum-
walt ordered him to return to his post. Shortly thereafter, a second shot broke the still-
ness. The light of day revealed that the picket had killed an Indian, whose companions
had taken him across the river. Another overlander, Sarah Larimer, described a similar
incident involving her husband in the Utah Valley of Little Box Elder in 1864. William
J. Larimer was hiding from a band of Indians who had just attacked his wagon party
when "the cracking of a twig, that seemed to have yielded to the weight of a footstep"
alerted him to the presence of an Indian intruder. Larimer was able to draw his revolver
and shoot the Indian through his chest. Despite popular conceptions, Indians cotild not
always evade aural detection.''
At the same time that Euro-Americans mythologized Indian stealth, tales such as Bois-
verd's also made Indians and their sounds exist everywhere in the imaginations of over-
landers. Upon reaching the supposed location of an Indian encampment in 1853, the
emigrant Virginia Ivins saw no signs of Indians but "heard several shots not far off." Al-
though Ivins had no reason to think that those shots had been made by Indians, other
than a statement in a dated guidebook, she and her party "knew that the redskins were
haunting us." Euro-Americans' cultural preconceptions of violent Indian activities not
only tuned Ivins into the noises but also provided a plausible explanation for their cause.
While Ivins noted the presence of Indians relatively calmly in her reminiscence, other
travelers reacted more fearftilly. In her compilation of Dr. Elijah White's journal of bis
overland return from Oregon in 1845, A. J. Allen described the apprehensive reactions of
one of the party's hunters to imagined Indian sounds. When a herd of buffalo awakened
the company at their camp near the Black Hills, Chapman insisted that he also heard
Indians. The next morning Chapman followed the sounds until he detected "dogs bark-
ing," "children talking," and Indians "making medicines." Too frightened to continue,
he returned for reinforcements. Yet when his companions arrived at the spot they heard
nothing except the "wind sighing through the trees." Allen ended her description of the
incident with a cautionary note on the fancies of "impression men, and tinnid believers in
dreams." Tales of violent Indians, then, led to stereotypes of skittish overlanders continu-
ally besieged by fictitious savages. Despite the dismissal of such stories by Allen and oth-
ers, there remained a grain of truth in these tales of Indians briefiy heard but never seen.
Many Indians living along the trail deemed it safer to disappear than to confront larger,
more heavily armed, and potentially violent groups of emigrants. On his way through the
Great Basin in 1849, the argonaut William Manly heard a pounding noise, but the mo-
ment he approached its source the sound ceased. Traces of pinecones, animal bones, and
other food remains confirmed that it had been the site of an Indian encampment. Indian
sounds, both imagined and real, provided near-constant accompaniment to the overland-
ers' journey.^**
'' I would like to thank Conevery Bolton Valencius for bringing the Solomon Zumwalc incident to my atten-
tion. Soiomon Zumwalt, "The Biographa of Adam Zumwalt," !887, p. 22, FAC 598 (Huntington Library) courtesy
of the Lane County Historical Society and Museum; Sarah L. Larimer, The Capture and Escape; Or, Life Among the
Sioux (Philadelphia, 1870), 48. 53. Gregory Michno and Susan Michno. A Fate Worse than Death: Indian Captives
in the West, 1830-1885 (Caldwel!, 2007), 130.
-" Ivins, Pen Pictures of Early Western Days. 96; Allen, Ten Years in Oregon. 290-91. While Indians' strategy of
avoidance is better documented for the Great Basin than for the plains, it possibly occurred iti tbis region as well.
The Overland Trail as a Sonic Conquest 33

While Indian sounds and silences represented mortal threats to Euro-American travel-
ers, the absence of familiar sounds such as tolling bells constantly reminded Euro-Ameri-
cans of their liminal physical and cultural condition. For the several long months that the
emigrants traveled, the absence of such bells disoriented overlanders and reminded them
that they existed outside of Christian rhythms and recognizable landscapes. Bells main-
tained the Christian social order of antebellum America: their tolling marked the begin-
ning and end of each work day and proclaimed the commencenrient of church services,
helping define the sabbath as a unique day of the week. The lack of bells thus made Sun-
day a particularly trying time for emigrants."'
As other scholars have noted, women especially suffered from the changed rhythms
and sounds of the sabbath on the trail. The often-heated debates within companies over
whether or not to rest on Sunday frequently divided along gender lines. Early in her jour-
ney in 1852, Esther Hanna declared: "We have no Sabbath bell, nor have we a sanctuary
to worship in, but we can enjoy the Sabbath even in the wilderness." As a missionary's
wife, Hanna particularly valued time for religious observance. But the following week,
Hanna's day of religious observance was not so free, as she found herself "obliged to do
many things I was loth to do on the Sabbath"a trend that continued throughout her
journey. Hanna consoled herself by reflecting that although it was the first time she had
to perform such mundane chores as drying clothes and baking biscuits on the sabbath, it
was also "the first time these wood and streams resounded with a song of praise to God."
While Hanna's belief that she had introduced civilized sounds to a savage environment
provided some comfort, not all travelers experienced similar solace. Forced to spend Sun-
day washing and baking, Ellen Hewitt expressed her disconnect from civilization by hum-
ming William Cowper's description of Robinson Crusoe's lament for "the sound of the
church-going bell." On her way to Oregon with her father and extended family in 1862,
Hewitt had little in common with a solitary castaway, but because she existed in a liminal
space where the sabbath was neither a day of rest nor sacralized by a cburch bell she felt
estranged from civilization. Hewitt's identification with Crusoe demonstrates the extent
to which the disruption of famili;ir routine, symbolized by the aural absence of the bell,
disturbed overlanders.^^
National commentators confirmed the fears of Hewitt and other emigrants that they
existed outside of civilization. Assessing the progress of American civilization in Califor-
nia in 1859, the New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley declared that the long distances
between cattle ranches would create a population "to whom 'the sound of the church-
going bell' will be a stranger" thus "half barbariz[ing] . . . the next generation." Although
Greeley proved one of the more consistently vocal critics in his condemnation of western
emigration and settlement, his assertion that Euro-American communities sans bells were
not civilized reflects a dominant cultural ideology of the period. The lack of bells, along
with other aural absences, threatened to transform overlanders. Emigrants found not only
their physical beings but also their cultural status teetering on the brink of savagery."

William Manly quoted in Knack, Boundaries Between, 39.


' Corbin, Village Bells, 95-96; Rath. How Early America Sounded, 43-53. 66-68.
" Eleanor Allen, ed., Canvas Caravans (Portland, 1946), 24-25, 28, 33; Randall H. Hewitt. Across the Plains
and Over the Divide: A Mule Train Journey From East to West in 1862, and Tncidents Connected Therewith, with Map
and Jlluitracions [New York, 1906), 127.
-' Horace Greeley. An Overland Journey, From New York To San Francisco, In The Summer Of 1859 (New York,
1860), 298; Unruh, Plains Across. 36-40.
34 The Journal of American History June 2009

The argonaut J. Goidborough Bruff drew this sketch while traveling to California In
1848. BrufTs drawing encapsulates emigrants' fears of burying their deceased in the
western wilderness. Courtesy Yale Collection of Western Americana. Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Library. Yale University.

This aural dislocation proved as prohlematic in death as it was in life. Iti antebellum
Protestant towns the coded tolling of hells communicated the age and gender of the de-
ceased to the village, and funeral dirges accompanied both the procession and burial cer-
emony. The lack of bells and other instruments on the trail prevented overlanders from
conducting appropriate funeral ceremonies. Stringent travel demands compounded the
lack of conventional funeral sounds as oftentimes when someone died only two or three
emigrants were able to stay behind to hastily bury the body while the rest traveled on-
ward. After one of Alonzo Delano s traveling companions died of cholera on the way to
the California gold fields, Delano and his party "dug his grave . . . with no toiling bell
to mark the sad requiem." These silent ceremonies prompted many overlanders to quote
from a popular Charles Wolfe poem: "Not a drum was heard, nor a funeral note." But,
in keeping with the overall overland experience, funerals were not only marked hy ati ab-
sence of traditional sounds but also by the presence of alien notes. Like Delano's party, the
California-bound train guided by David Cartwright in 1852 arranged for a dead com-
panion the most elaborate funeral ceremony they could manage in the wilderness. After
one member preached a "funeral sermon," the entire company buried the deceased boy
"away in the best box we could make." The mourners covered the grave with a stone in
an attempt to keep coyotes from digging up the body, but the sounds of coyotes, "fight-
ing and howling so dismally that it was difficult to hear the preacher," had already ruined
the ceremony.^^

" Gary Laderman, 'The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes toward Death. 7795^/553 (New Haven, 1996), 22 -
24; Delano, Life On The Plains And Among The Diggings. 18. For references ro Charles Wolfe's poem "The Burial of
Sir John Moore after Corunna," see James Audubon, Illustrated Notes Of An Expedition Ihrough Mexico and Califor-
nia (New York, 1852), 18; and Bryant, What I saw in California. 73. I would like to thank Merrill Mattes for bring-
ing to my attention tJiis quote by David W. Cartwright. David W. Cartwright, "A Tramp to California in 1852," in
The Overland Trail as a Sonic Conquest 35

Yet the most dramatic aural consequences of these burials along the trail became evi-
dent only after the overlanders left their dead alone in the wilderness. Emigrants' con-
cern for the aural dislocation of the deceased demonstrates as much about the process of
conquest as it does about individual grief. Family members bemoaned leaving the dead
alone and exposed to the sounds of the wilderness. Instead of the traditional civilized
soundscapes, the deceased wotild hear a song "sung by the whistling blasts" of the prairie
and the eerie wailing of wolves. Observing a hastily dug gravesite along the trail in 1852,
Mrs. Benjamin Ferris lamented the isolation of the grave, "its future guardian, the roving
red manits fiiture requiem, the howling of the wolf." Euro-Americans helieved that to
make the graves of the overlanders and the surrounding land part of the American do-
main, the whole area needed to be subdued and order brought to the savage wilderness.
The replacement of howling wolves with the proper, civilized sounds of tolling bells sym-
bolized American mastery over nature. Expressions of aural concern over graves therefore
reveal not only apprehension about the fate of the individual deceased but also about the
tenuousness of American dominion. The wild soundscape of the West would remind the
living, if not the dead, that the American empire had not yet conquered the plains.-^
Even as overlanders bemoaned the abandonment of the deceased to threatening wil-
derness sounds, wagon trains inflicted new, threatening noises on indigenous people and
places. In a reminiscence published in 1903, George Washington Thissell recounted In-
dians' response to an 1849 nighttime wedding on the plains. The morning after the wed-
ding party, at which forty-odd guests had played music and danced until "the small hours
of the morning," "six big Indians came to the camp." Frightened, the new groom reached
for his gun, but the "chief. . . congratulated them on their big war-dance. The truth is,
every Indian for five miles around had heard the racket, and could think of nothing but a
war-dance. It struck terror to the redskins, and they troubled the train no more." Whereas
Thissell credited a raucous wedding party for intimidating Indians, the fear of Indian at-
tacks produced some of the loudest emigrant noises. In responding to imagined Indian
attacks, overlanders perpetrated still more aural aggression on the western soundscape.
The cry of "Indians! Indians!" caused instant tumult in the camps. Women and children
dived into wagons, dashing rattling pots and pans to the ground. Men seized their rifles
and shot blindly at what they thought were approaching Indians, often killing their own
livestock. In his diary from the early 1850s, the overlander Byron McKinstry described
his party's reaction to a false Indian alarm along the Loup River in Nebraska in 1850:
"the firing was so rapid, and the screaming of the women and children, and yelling of the
men so incessant that I really believed that an attack was made on the camp. . . . If there
had been Indians within hearing they certainly would have fled!" In McKinstry's telling,
Euro-Americans' reactions to perceived Indian threats intimidated Native Americans. In
hoth of these episodes, in which Euro-Americans claimed to frighten Indians with their

Natural History Of Western Wild Animals And Guidefor Hunters, Trappers, and Sportsmen; Embracing Observations on
the Art of Hunting and Trapping, a description of the physical structure, homes, and habits of Fur-bearing Animals and
others of North America, with general and specific rules for their capture; also, narratives of personal adventure, cd. Mary
F. Bailey (Toledo, 1875), 190.
'"' Franklin Langwortby, Scenery Of The Plains, Mountains and Mines: Or, A Diary Kept Upon The Overland
Route To California. By Way of the Great Salt Lake: Travels in the Cities. Mines, and Agricultural DistrictsEmbracing
'Ihe Return By The Pacific Ocean and Central America, In the Years 1850, 51. 52. and '53 (Ogdensburgh, 1855),
csp. 33; Larimer, Capture and Escape. 54; Mrs. B. G. Ferris, The Mormons At Home: With some Incidents of Travel
From Missouri To California, 1852-3. In A Series Of Letters (New York, 1856), 56; Ladcrman, Sacred Remains. 38,
67-69.
36 The Journal of American History June 2009

sounds, the overlanders characterized their aural aggression as both unintentional and ef-
fect i ve."^""
While these stories reveal more about Euro-American understandings of their sonic
penetrations than about the actual reactions of Native Americans, there is some evidence
that Euro-American noises violently disturbed indigenous peoples. In Indian boarding
schools, Euro-Americans used bells to impose American rule and order on indigenous
children. Bells ordered students' lives, dictating when to sleep, rise, learn, pray, and eat.
On their way to the dining hall, students marched in time to the sound of a bell. Upon
their arrival, two bells rang; one to direct students to pull out their chairs and the other
to indicate that they could sit down. For Native American students such as Jim White-
wolf and Zitkala-Sa at boarding schools in the 1880s and 1890s, the harsh clanging of
the bells created an unceasing and inescapable "bedlam." In his 1836 autobiography, the
Sauk warrior Black Hawk expressed a similar reaction to the sounds of Euro-Americans.
While relating his life-story to a government interpreter in 1833, the famous Sauk "chief"
paused to apologize for the poor quality of his memory, attributing his confusion to his
"late visit to the white people. I have still a buzzing in my ears, from the noise-and may
give some parts of my story out of place." Among its other effects, Euro-American sounds
compromised Native Americans' abilities co orient themselves.^'^
Such noises also marked the imposition of a new order. Forts, trading posts, and other
stationary outposts compounded the aural inflictions of the passing wagon trains. As emi-
grant traffic increased and whites began to establish more permanent settlements along
the route, many indigenous peoples experienced a corresponding increase in Euro-Amer-
ican sonic encroachments. Luther Standing Bear recalled that after whites "came among"
his people on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, Lakota mothers who had once
frightened their children into silence by admonishing, "Be quiet, a witch might hear you,"
now threatened, "Be quiet, child, a white man may be neat." As they took control of Indi-
an country, Euto-Americans changed the sounds Indians heard as well as the sounds they
could make. American conquest not only affected Indians directly but also potentially
upset their relations with the supernattiral. Black Hawk, for example, found the noise of
the whites not only personally disorienting but also disruptive of the spirit world. Accord-
ing to his autobiography. Black Hawk and his people had always observed a level of quiet
on Rock Island, for example, so as not to disturb the good spirit that inhabited the place.
He remarked later, however, that after the whites came, "the noise of the[ir] fort has since
driven him away, and no doubt a bad spirit has taken his place!" While Black Hawk cred-
ited white noises for bringing a bad spirit into his homeland, Sau-ta-nee, of the Paiutes
nation, equated Euro-American technology with a new form of malevolent power. For
Sau-ta-nee, the belching "monster" of the Montezuma Smelting Works in Nevada was
worse than the animals of traditional Paiute tales that "ate children and knocked down

" G. W. Tliissell. Crossing the Plains in '49 (Oakland, 1903), 110; Bruce L. McKinstry, ed.. The California Gold
Rush Diary of Byron N. McKinstry 8501852, with a biographical sketch and comment on a modern tracing of his
overland travel {Gkndaie, 1975), 101.
^^ T-itiiAa-S, American Indian Stories (Lincoln, 1985), 5253; David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction:
American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, J875928 (Lawrence, 1995), 117-21; J. B. Parterson, ed..
Life Of Black Hawk, Or Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak. Embracing the Tradition of his nationIndian Wars in which
he has been engagedCause of joining the British in their Ute War With America, and its HistoryDescription of the
Rock-River VillageManners and CustomsEncroachments by the Whites, Contrary to TreatyRemoval from his Vil-
lage in 83 : With an Account of the Cause and General History Of the Late War. His Surrender and Confinement at
Jefferson Barracks, And Travels Through the United States (London, 1836), 29.
The Overland Trail as a Sonic Conquest 37

William Henry Jackson's Crossing the South Platte, c. 1930, is notable for its depiction of the
proximity oF overlatiders and Native Americans. The trains of cattle, unfurled whips, fording
wagons, and campfire cooking all attest to the myriad of sounds that accompanied this scene.
Jackson created this watercolor from a sketch he made on his 1866 trip across the plains. Courtesy
William Henry Jackson Collection, Scotts Bluff National Monument, Gering, Nebraska.

trees." According to the army wife Margaret Carrington, permanent industrial noises
also disturbed Crows hving in Wyoming. In a reminiscence of het titne spent stationed
with her army officer husband in Wyoming in the 1860s, Carrington cited the "rattle of
the mower, the whistle of the steam saw-mill" and the erection of forts and stockades as
reasons for the Crows' increasing anger at the whites' presence. While overlanders could
cope with their exposure to Indian sounds as a temporary consequence of passing through
foreign territory, Native Americans had to come to terms with Euro-American noises that
seemed to be permanently altering the sound of Indian country."^
On their journey, Euro-American emigrant trains tipped through the soundscape
of the West with a veritable arsenal of sonic weaponry. Loaded with as much as 2,500
pounds and pulled by four to six tramping oxen, wagons slowly creaked, groaned, rum-
bled, and squeaked across the continent. The constant, mingling tones of grinding, lum-
bering wagons, their bolts grating and iron-encased wheels jolting sharply over rocks, the
crack and thwap of whips, and the whistling, hallooing, and hollering of men driving
braying mules, lowing cattle, and oxen resounded across Indian country. Wagon com-
panies did not just pass slowly over the West, they broadcast themselves through it. One
''' On the massive developments along the trail by the 18'iOs, see Unruh, Plains Across. 281-84; Luther Stand-
ing Bear, Land of the Spotted agle (Lincoln, 1933), 9; Patterson, ed.. Life Of Black Hawk, 72-73; Lalla Scott, ed.,
Kamee: A Piute Nairative {Keno, 1966), 37; and Margaret Irvin Carrington, Ab-Sa-Rii-Kti Home Of'he Crows: Be-
ing Tije Experience Of An Officer's Wife On The Plains, And Marking The Vicissitudes Of Peril And Pleasure During The
Occupation Of The New Route To Virginia City, Montana. 1866-7, And The Indian Hostility 'Thereto With Outlines Of
Vw Natural Features And Resources Of Ihe Land, Tables Of Distances, Maps. And Other Aids To Tlie Traveler; Gathered
Erom Observation And Other Reliable Sources {]?\i\\zc\^\\3, 1869).
38 The Journal of American History June 2009

wagon caravan could stretch out for up to six miles and take two hours to pass a single
point. Although contemporary memory associates the overland routes with rough trails,
nineteenth-century observers often described the path as a highway. Spanning over two
thousand miles and broadening to three miles wide at some points, the thoroughfare of
hard-packed dirt attested to the massive numbers of overland travelers. The sheer physical
volume of trail traffic brought a corresponding increase in aural volume."**
Euro-Americans characterized the initial American westward invasion as a mobile son-
ic explosion. In a particularly evocative passage, the Illinois preacher Franklin Langwor-
thy described the din of the wagon trains with which he traveled in 1850 as akin to pass-
ing along a road as noisy and "crowded like Pearl Street or Broadway." "We hear on all
sides the lowing of cattle, the neighing of horses, the braying of mules, and barking of
dogs, mingled with the clack of human voices. To this added the sound of the viol, bugle,
tambourine and clarionette. To fill up the chorus, rifles and pistols are almost constant-
ly cracking, responsive to the rumbling, grinding music of carriage-wheel s still passing
along." Langworthy concluded: the mountain sheep looked "down in astonishment upon
the noisy multitude . . . breaking in upon the eternal solitude of their domain." The ar-
gonaut Elijah Farnham similarly interpreted the reaction of several Sioux Indians to the
noises of the wagon trains. To ford the South Platte River, Farnham and a caravan of over
two thousand emigrants traversed directly through a Sioux village. Farnham recorded in
his diary that "Indians old and young stood . . . wonder struck at the crowds agoing past
on these plains that never was untill late years ever disturbed by the rumbling of a wag-
gon wheel," but now the white man had "disturbed the monotony of this natural wild."
Yet Native Americans were not alone in being disturbed by the sound of the trains. Some
emigrants, for example, complained of the noisiness of their fellow travelers. Stock driv-
ers, whose retinues of lowing cattle and oxen caused a deafening ruckus, particularly irked
overlanders, many of whom also bemoaned the difficulties of finding a quiet place to
camp. IFthese sounds disrupted other emigrants they must have been even more aggravat-
ing for listening Native Americans, many of whom would have liked nothing better than
to ensure that another wagon train never passed through their territory.'"
At night the cadences of camp life continued to impose sound on Indian country. The
thunk of axes chopping firewood and the ring of hammers pounding tent stakes echoed
throughout the "wilderness." Bubbling kettles, hissing frying pans, crackling fires, low
conversations, and raucous drunken revelry similarly alerted Indians to the presence of
foreigners. These familiar sounds comforted overlanders, prompting the Oregon-bound
emigrant Elizabeth Dixon Smith to declare, "Every night we encamp we locate quite a vil-
lage." These noises also potentially interfered with Indians' ability to orient themselves at
night. The Cheyenne, for example, relied on barking dogs, drum beats, and other sounds
to locate camps and relay information. Emigrant noises would have interfered with those
signals, compromising Indians' power to purposely move through their territory. Because

^^ Tte, Indians and Emigrants, 124. Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail, 23. Michael A.
"Wheels in the West: The Overland W^on," Overland Journal, 8 (no. 4, 1990), 5-6, 9. De Smet, Western Missions
and Missionaries, 59.
^ Langworthy, Scenery of the Plains, esp. 59, 73. I would like to thank Michael Tte for bringing FJijah Farn-
ham's description to my attention. See Merrill J. Mattes and Esley J. Kirk, eds., "From Ohio to California in 1849:
The Gold Rush Journal of Elijah Bryan Farnham," Indiana Magazine of History, 46 (Sept. 1950), 297-318, esp.
308. On the tensions between stock drivers and emigrants and the diffictilty of finding a quiet place to camp, see
Unruh, Plains Across, 392, 120.
The Overland Trail as a Sonic Conquest 39

darktiess increased the importance of hearing, camp sounds possibly proved more disrup-
tive to Indians than the wagons' daytime travel.^'
Yet, the nighttime sounds of emigrant camps could also bring natives and Euro-Amer-
icans together. Music was a primary source of entertainment and leisure during the emi-
grants' journey. I h e pleasure derived from music could wash away the day's troubles
and transport emigrants back to the familiar comforts of home. Listening to the strains
of a violin, William Smedley and his companions felt themselves carried "back to other
scenes; presented to our dreamy imaginations visions of happy homes far away in the re-
gion of civilization." Violins, flutes, fiddles, accordions, and other instruments allowed
overlanders to re-create, if only temporarily, the aural communities of the East. Music not
only forged connections between people from different companies but also brought Indi-
ans into emigrant camps. Euro-Americans and Indians performed for each other, enact-
ing what historians have described as instances of friendship on the trail. In anticipation
of such encounters, William Johnston's party brought a bag full of "tin horns . . . jews-
harps, harmonicums" and other instruments for native visitors. Johnstons foresight paid
of when, after showing a group of Sioux guests how to use the tnusical toys, Johnston
handed the instruments over to "several of the old chiefs" who, when they found that they
too "could occasion such exquisite harmonies to float on the air . . . danced about in great
glee." In a similar episode in 1854 Mary Burrell played her melodeon for Indian men and
women gathered at her family's camp near Fort Laramie. The Indians began to dance to
her tunes, inviting Burrell's brother to join them. After serving dinner to a group of Pai-
utes who had come to his camp to trade, William Woodhams recounted how he took his
"accordon out to pass away a few minutes and was speedily surrounded with a wild look-
ing audience, red and white, more than I wanted . . . the half naked Piotes squatting by
the edge of the thicket as close to the fire as they could get; the bearded whites all armed,
most of us ragged and our clothes as dirty as only a tramp over the desert can make them."
However fleetingly, music created multicultural comtnunities.'^

Even during such peaceful moments, however, many emigrants, such as the men in
Woodhams's party who remained "all armed," declined to trade their pistols and rifies for
violins and fiddles. The violent sounds of cracking firearms drowned out the softer sounds
of peace. The emigrants' "constant isiliae" signaled the aggressive nature of their expe-
ditions. Although often unfamiliar with firearms, emigrants-^aided by a congressional
subsidy that allowed them to purchase weapons and ammunition at cost through 1849
and 1850armed themselves to the teeth. A patty led by Col. W. H. Russell packed an
arsenal of 155 guns, most of them rifles, 104 pistols, 2,672 pounds of lead, and 1,100
pounds of powder in seventy-two wagons. Hunting rifles, pistols, revolvers, and even can-
nons added their roar to the sonic conquest. The congressional subsidy combined with
the young male demographic of gold rush travelers may have made the forty-niner period
the peak of firearm sounds. The volume was loud enough that the argonaut Charles Hos-

" Elizabeth Dixon Smith, '"The Diary of Elizabeth Dixon Smith," in Covered Wagon Women: Diaries and Let-
ters -om the Western Trails. 840-S49. ed. Kenneth L. Holmes (Ciendale, 1983). 120; George Bird Grlnnell. The
Fighting Cheyennes {Norman, 1956), 90-91, 169.
'- William Smcd\cy, Across the plains in '62 (Denver, 1916), 17; William Johnston, Overland to California (Oak-
land, 1948), 65; Mary Burrell, "Council Blufs to California, 1854," in Covered Wagon Women, ed. Holmes, 236;
Charles W. Martin, ed., "Tlie Diary of William H. Woodhams, 18521854: The Great DeserLs or Around and
Across," Nebraska History, 61 (no. 1, 1980), 1-101, e.sp. 85. On che importance of music on the trail, see Ruth An-
derson, "Music on the Move: Instruments on the Western Frontier," Overlandfournal. 5 (1987), 27-34; and Sandra
M. Carson, "Music: A Softer Pleasure along the Oregon-California Trail," ibieL, 4 (1986), 36-38.
'T'

40 Thejournal of American History June 2009

mer declared: "All emigrants are armed to the teeth. It is like one continual glorious 4th
of July." But what sounded like a continuous celebration to Hosmer signaled violence and
aggression to listening Native Americans. Not only did cracking firearms scare Indians'
game av^ay, but they also revealed America's antagonistic nationalist presumptions.^^
Euro-Americans also employed sonic threats in face-to-face confrontations with Na-
tive Americans. Such confrontations became more frequent during the 1850s when in-
creased traffic significantly reduced the resources available to the indigenous inhabitants
of the country surrounding the trail. While crossing the plains in 1855, Lydia Milner Wa-
ters described how rumored Indian hostilities produced growing anxiety among her party.
When a "war party of the Sioux" approached their wagon train near the Sweetwater River
in present-day Wyoming, "The men of the train made as great a display as they could,
clanking their firearms and walking by their wagons." Waters and her party expressed a
sigh of relief when the Sioux rode ofl^ after peacefully acquiring some provisions. While
plains Indians such as the Sioux suffered, Indians of the Great Basin, including the Utes,
suffered even more. Whereas the men of the Waters party made noise to defend them-
selves from a perceived Indian threat, other travelers instigated violence by refusing to
honor indigenous peoples' request for compensation for passing through their territory.
Angered at the refusal of Edward F. Beale {who had recently heen appointed superinten-
dent of Indian affairs in California by President Millard Fillmore) to present his people
with compensation for passing through their territory, one of the Utes charged at the emi-
grants' guide, Felipe Archilete. The Ute grasped the muzzle end of Felipe's rifle, but the
guide held on tightly to the butt-end of the piece. The Ute called for his friends to join
him but the click of the rifles of the watching Euro-Americans dissuaded them from join-
ing the fray. The standoff stretched on until Felipe "deliberately placed his thumb on the
hammer, and raising it slowly, gave warning to the young chief, by two ominous clicks,
that his life was in danger." The Ute, apparently weighing his odds, pushed the gun from
him and rode away. In this instance, the sonic threat of force helped extricate overlanders
from a potentially deadly situation of their own making.^'*
The overlanders' often-superior weaponry and greater numbers convinced many Indi-
ans that they were better served by avoiding such confrontations. But keeping out of sight
of the Euro-American invaders did not mean letting the emigrants pass through their ter-
ritory unopposed. After an exhausting night watching for Indians, Gwinn Harris Heap
(who was traveling with his cousin Edward Beale) and his party resumed their march
through the Southwest. Soon, "a torrent of yells and abuse poured upon [them] from ev-
ery side." The hidden Indians continued their verbal assault, which Heap assumedhe
did not understand the languageto consist of "insults" and "billingsgate." While the
translator later confirmed Heap's assumption, it was not necessary to understand the lan-
guage to feel the full force of the Indians' aural assaults. By concealing themselves from

" Heap, Central Route To Vje Pacific, esp. 27; Unruh, Plains Across. 410-12; Frank McLynn, Wagons West: VH
Epic Story of America's Overland Trails (New York, 2002), 18^, 283; J. Quinn Thornton, Oregon and California in
848 (2 vols.. New York, 1849), 1, 20-21 ; Charles Hosmer quoted in J. S. HoUiday and William Swain, The WorU
Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience (New York, 1981), 123; Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century
America. 52, 282nl6.
'* Lydia Milner Waters quoted in Robert L. Munkres, "Tlie Plains Indians Threat on the Oregon Trail before
i S60r Annals of Wyoming. 40 (1968), 193-221, esp. 195; Heap, Central Route To The Pacific. 74. For another ex-
ample of Euro-Americans using gun clicks to frighten Indians and extricate themselves from standofif, see Irving,
Astoria, il, 205.
The Overland Trail as a Sonic Conquest 41

Heap and his company, the Indians decreased the emigrants' ability to locate and Identify
their attackers, thereby successftilly intimidating the unwelcome visitors."
No Indian sound terrified overlanders more than the "war whoop." Indian dramas,
such as the popular Metamora; or, the Last of the Wampanoags, written and first performed
in 1829, exposed eastern audiences to Euro-American renditions of Indian war yells
long before the Overland Trail opened. For some travelers the threat of the mythical war
whoop produced as much fear as heating the actual sound. The ubiquity of descriptions
of the "whoop-ah-hooh" of Indian yells in Overland Trail literature may thus be as much
a symptom of Euro-American preoccupation with the whoops as it is an indication of
the frequency with which Indians actually made the sound. Some travelers such as Fran-
cis Parkman attempted to dissuade emigrants of their presuppositions about whoops,
advising emigrants he met on his way "not to trouble themselves about war-whoops in
the future, since they would be apt to feel an Indian s arrow before they heard his voice."
John Charles Fremont similarly dismissed the Indians' battle cry as nothing more than
their "usual yell," but the sound nonetheless sent many emigrants running terrified for
cover. Indians, such as Washington Irving's fictional "half-breeds" who enjoyed tetrotiz-
ing Euro-American frontier settlements with "Indian yells and war-whoops," no doubt
recognized the effect of their vocalizations. Yells and whoops spooked not only emigrants
but also their livestock, accomplishing the dual objectives of intimidation and sabotage.
NX^en yelling and whooping Indians rushed through emigrant camps they dispersed
horses and cattle, costing the travelers hours of precious time and significantly reducing
their food supply. The effects of the whoop could also linger long after the journey was
over. In her reminiscences published in 1892 of an attack by Indians on the trail, Emeline
Fuller declared that "I can never hear a shrill yell without shrinking" with much the same
feelings as she had had on the trail thirty years earlier. Charles Young, in his narrative pub-
lished in 1912, informed his audience that the "warwhoop of anger" sent up by the "red
devils" who attacked his train in 1865 still "rings in my ears at times to this very day.""^'
Although overlanders could do little on the trail to shield themselves from these threat-
ening vocalizations, in their writings they successfully transformed the whoop into a sym-
bol of a passing era. By represetiting whoops and other Indian sounds as fading with the
arrival of the sounds of settler civilization, Euro-Americans pushed Indians into the past
and paved the way for the imposition of their own soundscape. Despite the reality that
Native Americans still populated and exercised control over the region, travelers described
native sounds as already gone. Stepping into Indian Territory for the first time in 1839,
Thomas Farnham purposefully used the past tense to describe the sounds of native cer-
emonies that "had" occurred on the plains. Placing these sounds in the past, overlanders
" Heap, Central Route To The Pacific, 1034. On noise as a weapon of the weak, see Derek Vaillant, "Peddling
Noise: Contesting the Civic Soundscape of Chicago, \9Q-\9\?>" Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 96
(Autumn 2003), 257-87.
**' John Augustus Scone, Metamora; or, the Last of the Wampanoags, an Indian Tragedy in Five Acts (1829; Prince-
ton, 1941). Parkman, California and Oregon Trail, 438; Jill Lepore, T}}e Name of War: King Philip's War and the
Origins of American Identity (New York, 1998), 192-200; Fremont, Narrative Of Ihe Exploring Expedition To The
Rocky Mountains in 842. esp. 110; Irving, Adventures of Captain Bonneville. AA: and Henry J. Coke, A Ride Over
T})e Rocky Mountains To Oregon And Califi)rnia With A Glance At Some Of Vie Tropical Islanls, Including The West
Indies And Jfje Sandwich Isles (London, 1852), 307. For a description of the Cheyenne using this tactic, see Grin-
neli. The Fighting Gheyennes. A1. Emclinc Fuller, Leji by the Indians Or Rapine, Massacre And Cannibalism On Ihe
Overland Trail In 860 The Personal Narrative of Emeline L. Fuller of the ll-Fated Utter-Meyers Party Detailing Ihe
Trip Across Tlie Plains From Wisconsin to Oregon, The Ambush of the Company by Indians near Ft. Boise. Ihe Ensuing
Butchery, &c. (M[. Vernon, Iowa, 1892), 15; Charles E. Young, Dangers of the Trail in 1865: A Narrative of Actual
Events {GenevA, N.Y., 1912), 127.
42 The Journal of American History June 2009

marked the present and future as the modern American aural era. According to emigrants,
this "vast solitude" would soon become "thronged with inhabitants," the sounds of "the
axe and hammer will echo through the wilderness," and businessmen would subdue the
roar of wild rivers into an industrious hum. In foretelling this aural transformation, over-
landers helped call American rule into being.^''
Yet nostalgia for the wild soundscape tempered the celebratory pronouncement of this
aural transformation. Lamenting the passing of this soundscape, some overlanders even
imagined that they understood and shared the natives' longing for the past world of "vast
solitudes." In so doing. Euro-American s claimed a pre-American past as their own. In
presuming to speak for Native Americans, these overlanders inscribed their own inter-
pretations of preconquest soundscapes over indigenous understandings of their acoustic
environment. Euro-Americans therefore effected a doubled dispossession on indigenous
peoples by both imposing their aural hierarchy on the West and enfolding a pre-Euro-
American West into the white American past. This nostalgia not only expressed sadness
for the loss of the past soundscape but also acknowledged the permanence of its passing.
By sighing over sounds and silences that could no longer be heard, Euro-Americans pre-
maturely represented their rule as complete.^"*
While the whoop remained the aural marker of Indian country, the triumphant sounds
of American civilization shifted as Euro-Americans introduced new technologies to the
West. According to nineteenth-century historians and other cultural commentators it
was the "'shriek of the locomotive,'" that permanently supplanted the "'whoop of the red
man'" in frontier regions across the country Despite overlanders' efforts to underscore
their own contributions to the aural transformation of the West, Parkman, in the preface
to the 1872 edition of The Oregon Trail (originally published in 1849) credited the final
dissolution of "despairing savagery" to "the disenchanting screech of the locomotive" that
broke "the spell of weird mysterious mountains."-^^
Of course, the sounds of neither the screeching locomotive whistle nor the grinding
wagons had the power by themselves to subdue and supplant the indigenous inhabit-
ants. Rather, phenomena such as these established a corridor for migration that opened
the plains and the far West to Euro-American travelers, migrants, and military men who
slaughtered buffalo, destroyed indigenous resources, brought diseases such as cholera, and
augmented the physical violence of the region.^" Nonetheless, the trope of the shrieking
locomotive extends beyond mere rhetoric. Euro-Americans defined civilized places not
only by who populated them and what economic activities transpired there but also by
the soundscape. Sounds signaled the nature of a community. In the stories Euro-Amer-
icans told about the Overland Trail, sounds made by the emigrants had the power to
comfort and to frighten. At the same time that sounds could re-create the soundscapes of
Euro-American civilization for lonely, isolated travelers, they could also be wielded as a
' Farnham, Traveb In The Great Western dairies, 12; Chittenden and Richardson, eds., Eather de Smet's Life
and Travels Among the North American Indians, II, 645; Dimiway, Captain Gray's Company 166; Smith, Listening to
Nineteenth-Century America, 9-10, 31, 107-9.
'" Alien, Ten Years in Oregon. 58. On a simiiax phenomenon in Australia, see Paul Carter, The Sound in Bettveen:
Voice, Space, Performance (Kensington, 1992), 29-32. On the meaning of nostalgia and its growth in nineteenth-
century Europe and America, see Peter Fritzsche, "Specters of History; On Nostalgia, Exile, and Modernity," Ameri-
can Historical Review. 106 (Dec. 2001 ), 1587-1618.
^^ D o n H . Doy{e, Nashville in the New South. /SS0-/93(Knoxville, 1985), 13-14; Francis Parkman, The Or-
e^n Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life {Boscon, 1872), viit.
'"' TTiis argument has also been made in William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New
York, 1991), 97.
The Overland Trail as a Sonic Conquest 43

weapon because of their presumed effects on Native Americans. While sounds and silenc-
es in the liminal space of the trail provided openings for both cross-cultural antagonism
and sociability, the overall tenor remained one of violence.
Well before Parkman credited the locomotive with creating the aural break between
savagery and civilization on the trail, the wagon trains began the necessary aural trans-
formation of conquest. The cadences of the emigrant wagon trainscracking pistols and
rifles that rent the air, punctuating the chorus of hallooing men, lowing oxen, braying
mules, and rumbling, grinding wagonsmarked a pivotal moment in the process of
transforming the western "wilderness" into American civilization. Exploring these sounds
has augmented our understanding of the rich complexity of encounters in the antebellum
West as well as the process by which Americans transformed their country into a conti-
nental empire.

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