20 Disturbing Things That Happened Inside Wagon Trains During Storm

Thanks for watching. If this brought back a memory or taught you something Hollywood never would, subscribe and share it with someone who needs to hear the truth about the real American frontier. What really happened under the canvas when the prairie storms rolled in? The diaries tell a story the old Westerns never showed you. In the spring of 1853, a mother of seven left Iowa for Oregon with a canvas roof, a wagon full of children, and a small diary. Her pages filled with rain, wind, and mud, and yet one thing never made it onto the page. This documentary counts down twenty disturbing truths from inside the wagon trains during storms. It covers leaking covers and stampedes in the dark, cholera camps, graves dug in the mud, and a snowbound winter in the Sierra Nevada. Every truth is drawn from the real diaries, letters, and records of the women who lived it, and from the historians who spent their careers gathering those pages. You will meet several real pioneer women along the way, each holding a piece of a story that history nearly lost. By the end, you will understand what these women endured, and what they chose never to write down. Why did so few trail diaries describe the hardest parts of the journey? Part of the answer lies in the human body. Research on olfactory adaptation shows that the nose stops registering a constant smell within minutes, which helps explain why people living in wet wool, smoke, and sickness rarely described it. Medical history plays a role too. Cholera, the leading killer on the trail in the epidemic years of 1849 to 1852, spreads through contaminated water. That fact was not understood until the mid 1850s, so wet, crowded camps beside shared streams were deadly. Prolonged exposure to cold rain and damp bedding left travelers, especially children, open to illness. On the open plains, a wagon or an ox was often the tallest object for miles, so lightning was a real danger. Demographic studies of the Donner Party also show clear patter