20 Brutal Punishments Used On Wagon Train Journeys

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. A wagon train had no sheriff, no jail, and no court for hundreds of miles, yet it still held trials. In this documentary, we go into the diaries, letters, and memoirs of the people who walked the Oregon and California Trails. We follow what happened when a company of ordinary families had to decide, on open ground, what to do with one of their own. It starts with a sheet of paper signed in Missouri and climbs through the council circle, the night guard, the grave board, and the wagon-tongue gallows. And at the center of it is one woman. On the fifth of October, 1846, at Gravelly Ford on the Humboldt River, Margaret Reed ran between two men. What the company decided that night followed her all the way to the mountains. By the end, you will know why one of the harshest sentences on the trail never drew a drop of blood, and why the woman who carried it never wrote a word about it. Every punishment in this video comes from someone who saw it or wrote it down: a thirteen-year-old girl's letter home, a seventeen-year-old's trail journal, a Wisconsin woman's diary, and an old pioneer's memoir. We also draw on the work of historians who spent their careers proving that emigrants carried their law west with them. Where the record is thin, we say so on screen. Where a woman's name was never kept, we tell you that too. Nothing in this video is invented to fill a silence. Sources and Further Reading Virginia Reed Murphy, "Across the Plains in the Donner Party: A Personal Narrative of the Overland Trip to California," The Century Magazine, Vol. 42 (1891) Virginia Reed, letter to Mary Keyes, May 16, 1847, reprinted in Dale L. Morgan, ed., Overland in 1846: Diaries and Letters of the California-Oregon Trail (1963) John Phillip Reid, Policing the Elephant: Crime, Punishment, and Soc