American Burial Ground

A New History of the Overland Trail (America in the Nineteenth Century)

By: Sarah Keyes

Narrated by: Judy A Steffen

In popular mythology, the Overland Trail is typically a triumphant tale, with plucky easterners crossing the Plains in caravans of covered wagons. But not everyone reached Oregon and California. Some 6,600 migrants perished along the way and were buried where they fell, often on Indigenous land.

By the 1850s, cholera epidemics, ordinary diseases, and violence had remade the Trail into an American burial ground. In subsequent decades, U.S. officials and citizens leveraged Trail graves to claim Native ground. Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples pointed to their own sacred burial grounds to dispute these same claims and maintain their land. These efforts built on anti-removal campaigns of the 1820s and 30s, which had established the link between death and territorial claims on which the significance of the Overland Trail came to rest.

American Burial Ground offers a sweeping and long overdue reinterpretation of this historic touchstone. In this telling, westward migration was a harrowing journey weighed down by the demands of caring for the sick and dying. From a tale of triumph comes one of struggle, defined as much by Indigenous peoples’ actions as it was by white expansion. And, finally, from a migration to the Pacific emerges instead a trail of graves. Graves that ultimately undergirded Native dispossession.

The book is published by University of Pennsylvania Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

©2023 University of Pennsylvania Press (P)2025 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"This book is now a marker on the historiographical landscape." (Overland Journal)

"Gives us a fresh and decidedly darker view of life and death on the trails to California and Oregon." (Elliott West, author of The Contested Plains)

"Brilliantly shows how the Overland Trail became a national cemetery that allowed white Americans to claim Indigenous territory for themselves." ( Jeffrey Ostler, author of Surviving Genocide)