American Burial Ground - (America in the Nineteenth Century) by Sarah Keyes (Hardcover)

About the Book

"This book reinterprets the historic touchstone of the Overland Trail as a story of death and Native activism. Emigrant graves became seeds of U.S. possession across the West. In response Native peoples defended their homelands by pointing to their graves as proofs of Indigenous persistence and enduring territorial claims"--

Book Synopsis

In popular mythology, the Overland Trail is typically a triumphant tale, with plucky easterners crossing the Plains in caravans of covered wagons. But not everyone reached Oregon and California. Some 6,600 migrants perished along the way and were buried where they fell, often on Indigenous land. As historian Sarah Keyes illuminates, their graves ultimately became the seeds of U.S. expansion.

By the 1850s, cholera epidemics, ordinary diseases, and violence had remade the Trail into an American burial ground that imbued migrant deaths with symbolic power. In subsequent decades, U.S. officials and citizens leveraged Trail graves to claim Native ground. Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples pointed to their own sacred burial grounds to dispute these same claims and maintain their land. These efforts built on anti-removal campaigns of the 1820s and 30s, which had established the link between death and territorial claims on which the significance of the Overland Trail came to rest.

In placing death at the center of the history of the Overland Trail, American Burial Ground offers a sweeping and long overdue reinterpretation of this historic touchstone. In this telling, westward migration was a harrowing journey weighed down by the demands of caring for the sick and dying. From a tale of triumph comes one of struggle, defined as much by Indigenous peoples' actions as it was by white expansion. And, finally, from a migration to the Pacific emerges instead a trail of graves. Graves that ultimately undergirded Native dispossession.

Review Quotes

"Using travel narratives, memoirs, ethnohistory, and anthropology, Keyes provides an important corrective to histories of settler colonialism that overemphasize the state. . . . American Burial Ground is a compelling history of the Overland Trails that weaves together environmental, intellectual, and cultural history in a concise narrative. . . . Keyes's impressive research and broad topical coverage will interest any scholar of the nineteenth century."-- "The Journal of the Civil War Era"

"Sarah Keyes's debut book, American Burial Ground, will intrigue, inform, and move readers. In a new telling of an old story, Keyes reintroduces and reevaluates the history of what she collectively calls the Overland Trail..Keyes's rich knowledge of Native people and the depth of her research is impressive. It is a landmark of cultural study and falls perfectly into the wing of history revealing the scope of colonialism in nineteenth-century America and the impact of 'settlers' in the American West."-- "H-Environment"

"American Burial Ground offers a new history of the overland migration to Oregon and California, centered on the impact of death on the emigrants and its subsequent memorialization...Mourning the dead may express innocent and common human sentiments, but Keyes shows that the dead of the Overland Trail became the objects of national myths that were everything but innocent or affirmative of a shared humanity. The book does important deconstruction work. The recounted myths of suffering and death were clearly central elements in the ensemble of ideologies that legitimized the settler-colonial takeover of the U.S. West."-- "Pacific Historical Review"

"Historiographically speaking, this is the first major work on the overland trails in nearly forty years, as Keyes notes in her introduction. In this fact alone, it is a significant contribution. It is also, however, a compelling read, thanks to the fact that Keyes is an excellent writer, making good use of the exceptionally rich, evocative, and at times quite graphic source material about the trails and their aftermath. As she does this, she deftly manages to walk the line between critical scholarly analysis of aggressive settler colonialism and basic compassion for people - Indigenous and emigrant alike - caught up in such terrible circumstances. American Burial Ground will make good (if often grim) reading for scholars, students, and the broader public. It speaks to the consequences of colonialism for all those whom it touches and is a powerful accounting of the violence of being wrenched from your home - and your dead - and the struggle to find another place, and to make meaning, amid and after the tumult of the nineteenth century."-- "Oregon Historical Quarterly"

"In light of the growing modern awareness of past wrongs and Native challenges to the triumphalist narrative, Keyes wonders how much longer the pioneer narrative will remain the dominant interpretation. It's a fair question. Whatever the answer, no future work on the Overland Trail should ignore this book. Like the graves--both white and Native-- that play so important a role here, this book is now a marker on the historiographical landscape."-- "Overland Journal"

"American Burial Ground reminds us how much we can learn when a wise-eyed historian takes a new approach to the classic story of westward migration. Sarah Keyes deftly shifts the focus from the heroic pioneers who crossed the continent on the Overland Trail to the bodies of those they buried along the way. The dead, she tells us, bolstered white claims to the West, helping to turn Native places into an American place. But the Native dead have served their communities too, registering the costs of conquest and helping to fuel resistance to white settlement."-- "Ann Fabian, author of The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America's Unburied Dead"

"Anyone who thought there was nothing left to say about the Overland Trail is wrong. By focusing on death, Sarah Keyes brilliantly shows how the Overland Trail became a national cemetery that allowed white Americans to claim Indigenous territory for themselves. Against this erasure, Keyes also provides a deep engagement with Indigenous history, giving voice to Indigenous counternarratives opposing separation from their ancestors' bones, revealing how their removals were marked by graves as well as tears, and registering how Indigenous people engaged with white nationalist politics in an effort to retain and regain their homelands. A sobering look at western history and a profound meditation on how deaths are remembered and forgotten."-- "Jeffrey Ostler, author of Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas"

"The great overland migration was one of the true epics of American history. In American Burial Ground, Sarah Keyes gives us a fresh and decidedly darker view of life and death on the trails to California and Oregon--what one traveler called this 'boundless city of the dead.' The story was as well a struggle between newcomers and Natives for the possession of sacred lands in the West."-- "Elliott West, author of The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado"

About the Author

Sarah Keyes is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Reno.