Edith
In a so-far untitled work that I will call Untitled (Edith), 2019, Shafer hones in on the only female name carved into stone. Importantly, as Nathan Stormer argues in an analysis of Ansel Adams’s most well known images of western landscapes,
embedded in these images, as in so many anthropological images of primal wilderness, is the Western version of the hunt as a self-making journey, updated through the substitution of the camera for the gun. ‘Now nature—tamed, endangered, mortal—needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid, we shoot. When we are nostalgic, we take pictures’ (Sontag, 1977, 15; see also Haraway, 1989).
Though it is well documented that women also used the Oregon Trail to journey west, the rare carving of a woman’s name on the rock façade is striking on the one hand because of the well known physical demands of the trek, and on the other hand because of the hyper masculinization of the site on which the name is carved. Edith’s name appears adjacent to a foreboding marker–Independence Rock which was named by emigrés who had survived the journey and arrived in California or Oregon, who then advised future travelers that if they made it to this particular site by July 4th, they should have adequate time to traverse through the Rocky Mountains before the snow fall. Parties that risked continuing forward having arrived at Independence Rock later than the 4th, such as the Donner party, often met dire fates. Presumably, those that were fortunate enough to set off in time to reach Wyoming by July would find freedom. Many women made the journey successfully, although the national memory finds it difficult to understand how they were capable. Shafer’s insistent work in such historic sites of trouble pushes back against such sexist tropes and questions why it is so difficult to understand a woman freed.
Lillian Schlissel's Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey offers an extensive consideration, based on first-hand diurnal accounts, of women's experiences on the trail. Schlissel astutely argues that the 2700 mile long journey across the continent was the journey of young people, and of families, rather than that of the solitary muscle-bound hero so many enduring photographs, advertisements, and films perpetually imagine. Furthermore, Schlissel’s research indicates that the women who journeyed west were most often forced, either by grim circumstance or the brute will of husbands and fathers. While on the trail, women often forged deep bonds with each other as they became the veritable glue that held things together. Their diary entries are often meticulously kept accounts of grave sightings, the miles journeyed in any given day, the births and deaths of those whom they traveled with, as well as the stamina and fixed of purpose that the journey persistently demanded.