A Kansas Memory Podcast

The Rocky Road to Kansas, Part Three: The Letters of Joseph Trego, "...my boots were so tight on my feet after the first day's walk in the mud that I was afraid to pull them off lest I couldn't get them on again..."

The documents used in the Joseph Trego podcast are available on Earlier Kansas Memory podcasts used documents from Territorial Kansas Online: A Virtual Repository for Territorial Kansas History, 1854-1861.

• Letter, J.H. Trego to an unidentified recipient [probably his wife, Alice Trego]
  September 10, 1857
  Trego was in St. Louis, Missouri awaiting a boat trip to Kansas City. He describes his trip to that point as well as the weather. Trego was a doctor and he wrote about trying to locate his medicine chest for the second part of the journey. He also described his activities as he waited. It is not clear whether he had been to Kansas Territory before but he knew he was going to Sugar Mound in Linn County, Kansas Territory.
• Letter, J.[Joseph H. Trego] to Dear Alice[Alice Trego]
  September, 1857
  Joseph H. Trego, en route via steamboat to Kansas City, wrote to his wife Alice in Rock Island, Illinois. Trego commented on the unpredictable and perilous conditions of steamboat travel on the Missouri River due to snags and sandbars, but despite these, admitted that the journey itself had "little to claim his attention." He feared that his wife might have an accident in his absence, and asked her to wait until he returned to "indulge her spirit." Trego, though he missed his family, was comforted by their miniatures (small portraits).
• Letter, [Joseph H. Trego] to My Dear Wife [Alice Trego]
  October 16, 1857
  Joseph H. Trego wrote from his cabin in Sugar Mound, Kansas Territory, to his wife Alice in Rock Island, Illinois, about his journey from Kansas City to Sugar Mound. His friends, Thomas Ellwood Smith (Ell) and his brother Edwin (Ed), and himself were poorly prepared as they expected to stay in public houses during the journey, not camp outside as their wagon transportation preferred. As the road they took went right down the Missouri state line, Trego contrasted the well-established farms to the East with the "open, wild prairie" to the West. He and his brother, upon arriving at their cabin, found that they had "Hoosier" neighbors (from Indiana), who were pleasant but proslavery. Trego recounted the difficulty they had acquiring home furnishings and food, fighting adverse weather at every turn. He spoke at length of how he was comforted by writing to his wife, as he and his friends greatly missed their families.