When my grandfather Roger Adams passed away in 2019, I received a large, dusty box. My grandfather had a voracious mind, and one of his intellectual passions was the Oregon Trail, which ancestors on my mother’s side had traversed in 1846. Like thousands of others, the Buell family traveled roughly 2,000 miles of land in their quest west, their footsteps falling on prairie grass, forest paths, muddy riverbanks, and mountain passes. My grandfather collected everything he could find to better understand this journey. As the resident family historian, he passed this collection on to me.
As I combed through his haphazard research, I felt closer to him than ever before. Through years of painstaking research, starting in the 1970s, he compiled papers and records chronicling the stories of our ancestors. My grandfather was a professor of marine science, and it turns out that marine scientists are not always the best historians, so his eclectic collecting often wandered off-course, including research on beekeeping and plant biology. Eventually, life got in the way, and these papers sat in a box in his office. His questionable methodology, however, did not impact the quality of the relevant sources he gathered, and within those pages, he collected a series of voices calling out across time.
One of the members of that Oregon Trail party, Caroline Buell, described the 1846 journey as moving “on through heat, and dust, that could hardly be endured; the dust… caused by previous travel.”1 One hundred seventy years later, I too found myself in the dust of previous travel, albeit the dust of paper: handwritten accounts, newspaper interviews, and genealogical records. And instead of obscuring my vision, the dusty documents brought clarity. At its root, history is an exercise in collective memory, and this tiny collection of memory served as a window into a distant, yet deeply personal past. This is the story of my family, but it is also the story of what we choose to preserve, what we prescribe importance to, and how we want ourselves to be remembered.