01Biography
Amelia Stewart Knight kept a diary as she, her husband Joel, a doctor, and their seven children traveled from south-central Iowa to Oregon in 1853. She was pregnant the whole way. The family left home on April 9 and crossed the Missouri at Kanesville on a steamboat.
Her entries are short and practical. She wrote about sick children and the dead cattle along the road, and she noted Chimney Rock, Fort Laramie, Independence Rock and Soda Springs as they passed. In September the family crossed the Cascades on the Barlow Road, where she said Big Laurel Hill was like a train of wagons and cattle "passing through a crooked chimney." Her eighth child was born a few days after they reached the farms near Milwaukie. The family then crossed the Columbia to a farm near present-day Camas, Washington.
02Why they matter
Her day-by-day diary shows the 1853 crossing through the eyes of a mother caring for seven children while expecting an eighth.
03How they died
Joel Knight served in the Washington territorial legislature and died in 1867. Amelia died at Vancouver, Washington, in January 1898, aged 81, and was buried on the family farm.
04Legacy
Her diary was printed in the Transactions of the Oregon Pioneer Association for 1928. The original, with the homemade wooden lap desk she wrote it on, went to the University of Washington Library in the 1930s, and the diary has been reprinted many times since, including as the picture book The Way West (1993).