Bodie Cemetery “Mother’s grave”
MOTHER- MARY A. MILLER ( 1893-1963)- In Gods Care- BODIE CEMETERY!
The “overland migration” at mid- century (1865) was a major transplanting of young families. If any passion drove the married- at-a-young-age Wives forward, it was the “determination to keep their families together.” After the familiar strategy of sending the men “first” or ahead,” the determined “Overland Women,” set themselves to maintain the family’s coherence.
The decision to go West, was not the wives to make. The wives were reluctant to embark on the journey that meant a complete break with their old stable,“ “conventional city lifestyle.” But if women understood, and responded to any principle, it was “the need to keep the members of thefamily together.”
Thus, the married women and mothers, only choice was to picked up their infants and young children, and traveled that agonizing, treacherous and unknown-road , so the family——the entire family——might be transplanted into the new frontier. (Emigrants sought to travel in company of extended family, friends, neighbors and co-religionists. This single “keep the family together” purpose, above all, made the west-ward-Wagon-train travel hardships bearable
Within the “cycles of childbearing and childrearing,” the young mothers, managed a kind of equity in which they placed their lives. Their “Mother Of” became their “Emigrant Identity.” The overland-women were neither brave adventurers nor “sun-bonneted ladies.”
They were vigorous, and given to Realism, and Stoicism. The long hours- (8-10 hours ) of daily walking presented to them all challenges. The West meant to them- “the challenge of a family and maintaining domestic order against the disordered life of an unknown frontier.”
Once embarked on the overland Western journey, there was “no turning back.” The young wives were determined to complete the Journey, no matter the physical hardships of walking, and wagon-train isolation, traveling to get to the destination their husbands had chosen! Energetic in their daily efforts to survive their “western movement,” and have their entire family living “settled” in the West was the faith that moved them in their hearts.
At the end of the Civil War (1865), 25,000 emigrants had made the “overland crossing to California.” They were among the last Americans to make the journey by mules team-wagon. Migration dwindled after 1868. The Railroad began to replace the over-land by mule team and wagon-travel. Settlers, also began to look to lands of the Middle Mountain Regions, rather than the Pacific Ocean Coast. The hardship and travel time was also lessened by the Railroad expansion to the Pacific Ocean.
It was a time of consolidation and for a different kind of building. No longer “log cabins” this time, but the fabric of social life- ——-Schools and Churches ——-and the reweaving of families separated by the Civil War and broken up by the migration.
It was a time for the “Frontier Women” to redefine their friendship’s, their “family, and their new hearth and home!”