After four months and four days of living outdoors we are all in the most robust health,” Sarah Herndon exclaimed as she and her family neared Virginia City, Nevada, after traveling overland from Missouri, in 1865. The familiar image of women on the westward journey is one of suffering and sacrifice. Of course, women did suffer and many died. Almost all had to perform hard daily chores and endure bad weather, illness, and all sorts of emergencies. But by their own testimony, some women felt rejuvenated by the trip.

Sarah Herndon was a teen-ager when she made the trip; others whose health improved were older. “Old Mrs. White, a lady of sixty-five years,” for instance, said that she felt almost young again and attributed her improved health to the “buoyancy of the climate.” Sarah Herndon wrote in her diary on August 31: “Mother’s birthday. She is fifty-three years old.… She was looking frail and delicate when we started, but seems to be in perfect health now, and looks at least ten years younger.”

Even women of extreme age could be found happily traveling west. Sarah commented on a ninety-three-year-old woman in a nearby wagon train. “She is cheerful as a lark, sings sometimes and is an incessant talker. She says she is going to Oregon, where she expects to renew her youth. She looks very old and wrinkled in the face, but is very active in her movements, and not at all stooped.”

When one considers that during the Victorian era women were encouraged to think of themselves as fragile ornaments in a masculine world, that they wore tightly laced corsets and took no regular exercise, it is easy to understand how they often felt better with fresh air, strenuous exercise, and new surroundings—at least until the latter difficult stages of the journey. Mary Rich wrote, “I had never had very good health, until I started on that trip.” Middle-aged Harriet Ward suffered at the outset from “a lame limb.” Six weeks into the trip to California in 1853, her family ran into a raging thunderstorm, and their tent blew away. When Harriet and her daughter reached the wagon, “We crept into bed with our clothes completely saturated with water and it did seem that the exposure must kill us; but the next morn when Father called us to breakfast we came out perfectly well, and my lame limb, which had been troubling me very much indeed, had received much benefit from the wet bath. I think after this I shall become a firm advocate of hydropathy.”

The majority of the women who went west during the covered-wagon era were in their twenties and thirties, and some of the healthiest among them were exhilarated by their encounters with nature. “I went into the river to bathe in the evening, but no one would go with me as such a cold wind was blowing, but I enjoyed it very much,” said