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Members Contributed Featured Pages
These are some pages created by members and opened to everyone.
This Month's Featured Content
Commentaries of ordinary people on the Old Oregon Trail
This month's featured exhibit is focused on documents recorded by travelers on the Oregon Trail in the 1840s and 1850s. In keeping with the spirit of Emmortality, these are the words written by ordinary people in an extraordinary situation. They are filled with both tedium and high drama, pathos and humor. But most important, they offer insight into the hearts, minds, and lives of the authors. Few of us have such heroic stories in our lives, but we all have stories that are worth telling, worth reading, and therefore worth preserving. Read on here and you will see just how true that is.
McClure Journal of 1853
The first entry is the McClure Journal which was written between Saturday July 23rd 1853 and Thursday October 13th 1853. It is composed largely of daily entries, most of which are similarly plain. However, there are days when astounding entries reveal the harsh reality of the passage. Nowhere is this more evident than in the final pages. This is the kind of material Emmortality was meant to record. We hope you enjoy reading it.
The Oregon Trail Sketches of Francis Parkman, Jr.--1846
The next exhibit is another kind of journal from a few years earlier. It tells the story of a couple of recent college graduates in 1848 who decided to take what was for them equivalent to today's "read trip." The journey took them from Missouri to Pike's Peak and back. It is more literary than most journals written by ordinary emigrants. It is fairly long, but makes a fascinating read.
Journals and Diaries from the Oregon Trail