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Kara L. McCormack, Sarah Keyes. American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 510–511, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae632
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In the popular mythology that swirls around the expansion of the United States into the far West, the Overland Trail figures heavily in tales of victory: tenacious white pioneers pushing against tremendous odds to settle the land and claim it for the United States. It was a journey of progress, the story goes, one during which, if we are to believe Frederick Jackson Turner, both the emigrants and the land itself became ever more American with each step along the way. But contrary to cultural and even historical depictions of the movement westward through the romantic haze of white triumphalism, “the Trail was a treacherous, often deadly trek that left a string of burials” (2). Rather than seeing this history as one to celebrate, Sarah Keyes sees the story of the Trail as “a story of death” (9).
In her newest book American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail, Keyes offers “a darker portrait of westward migration than we are used to, remembering, and uncovering the cultural significance of the dead” to the appropriation of the territory by the United States (2). Ironically, emigrant deaths and their graves along the Trail, Keyes argues, literally laid the groundwork for the seizure of these lands from Indigenous peoples. In other words, by remaking the Overland Trail into an American burial ground, “[d]ead emigrants eventually became an answer to another problem [they] hadn’t fully grappled with at the start of their journey: how to definitively claim the West for the United States” (5). Calling the failed emigrants who died on their long journey toward Oregon and California “as successful as those who reached” their destination, Keyes asserts that these dead emigrants became “traces of an expanding nation’s presence across the continent and, ultimately, the seeds of later white settlements” (6).
