19th Century Travel Narratives

Exerpts from Across the Plains by Immigrant Wagon in 1865. My Trip to California and What I Saw on the Way

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION While driving a team of horses as part of a wagon train crossing the American west in 1865, Jeremiah Zeamer, aged 23, kept a diary. Thirty-one years later, Zeamer, now the owner and publisher of the American Volunteer in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, published his diaries in serial form in the newspaper. A chapter was presented each week from November of 1896 to June of 1897. As far as staff at the Cumberland County Historical Society has been able to ascertain this work was published only in serial form.

Memories of Frontier Army Life

A paper presented to the Carlisle Fortnightly Club on March 13, 1899 In these days of rapid history making, when one important event follows closely upon another, and since our country has expanded her boundaries so that we not only say "our States and Territories", but we can add "our Colonies", we give a little gasp as we glance backward and realize what changes a few years have wrought.

A Traveller in the County: 1810

Cumberland County and Valley before the 1830s was one of the principal avenues to the American West. A steady procession of naturalists, farmers with their families and flocks, European reporters on American democracy, investors and speculators in land, fortune hunters and ne'er-do-wells came up from Philadelphia, crossed the Susquehanna, and, many of them, passed through Carlisle and Shippensburg over the mountains to Bedford, Pittsburgh, and the fertile lands of Ohio.