Hill, Emma Shepard:

$750 · Offered by William Reese Company · No longer available

A DANGEROUS CROSSING AND WHAT HAPPENED ON THE OTHER SIDE. The scarce expanded second edition of Emma Shepard Hill's "modern overland" recounting her experiences when, as a thirteen year-old, she and her family travelled "across the plains during the Indian uprising in the summer of 1864." Hill explains that in the late 1880s she outlined her narrative with the assistance of her father, and also by consulting her sister's diary of the journey (later destroyed). She combined these sources, as well as her letters from the period, to craft this account of their adventures crossing overland from their home in Ohio to Colorado, where they settled. The first forty pages describe the family's experiences as they travelled from Quincy, Illinois, by rail to St. Joseph, and from there by steamer to Atchison. They then went to Fort Kearny and via the South Platte to Denver, eventually settling at Empire City. All along the way, Hill writes, they felt fearful due to the widely-reported uprisings by the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes. She describes burned out ranches and other evidence of raids that led her family to join a larger wagon train, and describes the precautions taken to guard the women and children. She admits that the travellers themselves were courting danger, as she did when "raiding a chief's burial tree, helping herself to ornaments and arrowheads" (Mintz). The rest of the text describes their life in Empire City, Colorado, and combines her letters of the period with

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