American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail by Sarah Keyes (review)

Reviewed by: American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail by Sarah Keyes Courtney Buchkoski (bio) American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail. By Sarah Keyes. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023. Pp. 272. Cloth, 39. 95. ) In American Burial Ground, Sarah Keyes examines the many facets of death, burial, and memorialization on the Overland Trail from the 1830s into the twenty-first century, showing how emigrant burials planted the seed of white possession and became "a symbolic and physical tool of territorial appropriation" (2). Keyes offers a much-needed revision to Overland Trails historiography. While the shift to the New Western History was essential, Keyes's work demonstrates how crucial it is that scholars reexamine topics left in the past by the field. Using travel narratives, memoirs, ethnohistory, and anthropology, Keyes provides an important corrective to histories of settler colonialism that overemphasize the state. Her work reminds us that the building of the American empire required more than bureaucracy and the army. Settlers needed to cross the plains, and some needed to die and be buried there to complete the transformation of dispossession. It was these bodies that linked the nation together in the American mind. The Overland Trail became a burial ground, and in its subsequent memorialization the land became American, rather than Indigenous. This transformation was not without resistance, as Native peoples continually inserted their voices into the conversation, using their own dead as a reminder of the violence of colonization. Beginning her narrative in the 1830s, in chapter 1 Keyes adeptly recounts the ways in which antiremoval advocates, both Indigenous and white, used separation from burial sites in their arguments against deportation. She argues that by the time the Donner party met its terrible fate in 1846, the cultural discussion linking homeland graves to territorial expansion had already been in the works for decades, both in the resistance to removal and in the rise of Anglo sentimentality in the rural cemetery movement. End Page 406 The following chapters recount the ways in which settlers and Native peoples died and were buried on the trails. Chapter 2 reports the many gruesome ways that settlers and Native peoples alike succumbed to the midcentury cholera epidemic. Keyes argues that when emigrants discovered that Native peoples were not nearly the threat they imagined, cholera replaced them in the mythology of the trail. As men upended gender roles to nurse one another, they also "preserved the colonial story of white victimhood" (78). She then turns in chapter 3 to the varied processes and techniques used to bury the emigrant dead. "Every body buried on the Trail, " Keyes argues, "represented the location of a relative—a node of family geography—for the dead's survivors" (110). This created a shared sense of identity and couched overlanders' deaths in nationalistic terms, cementing the trails in American memory as a place of heroic emigrant sacrifice. In her fourth chapter, Keyes pushes into territory that most scholars of the Overland Trail sidestep, that of the Civil War. Keyes asserts that the war with Native America during the 1860s must be considered in equal measure with the violence of the Civil War, noting that total war policies were tested out in western contexts. She recounts the U. S. Army's war with multiple Indigenous groups, as they resisted the incursions of overland migration. In recounting the stories of Spotted Tail, Chief Joseph, and Standing Bear, among others, Keyes demonstrates that while the Union army fought valiantly to end slavery, it simultaneously committed grievous assaults on the legal inhabitants of the West, justified by the army's desire to secure the Overland Trail. Keyes discusses memory making in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, arguing that dispersed burial grounds became the way in which white communities linked themselves to the "narrative arc of American history. " Keyes traces how memory makers, from emigrants who published their reminiscences of the trail to railroad corporations and historical societies, all worked to solidify the route as the "foundational spine of settlement across the continent" (173). Keyes traces the memory of the trail into the twentieth century, noting how filmmaking continued the process of Native erasure. . .