Overland Trails

Activity #5: Clothing

Materials

• Excerpt from The Prairie Traveler by Randolph B. Marcy 1859
• Photographs of men, women and children from 1800s
• Journals

Curriculum Objectives

4th grade – Kansas History Standard, Benchmark 1, Indicator 5: The student compares and contrasts the purposes of the Santa Fe and Oregon-California Trail (e.g. commercial vs. migration).
4th grade – Kansas History Standard, Benchmark 1, Indicator 6: The student describes life on the Santa Fe and Oregon-California Trails e.g. interactions between different cultural groups, hardships such as lack of water, mountains and rivers to cross, weather, the need for medical care, size of wagon)
4th and 5th grade – Kansas Writing Standard 1, Benchmark 1 – The student writes narrative text using the writing process. The student writes narrative text using the writing process.

Instructions:

1. Discuss the types of clothing used on the trails and why this type of clothing would be used. Note that children would have dressed very much like their parents. Each person traveling needed two or three changes of clothing. Begin by looking at the list for men's clothing from The Prairie Traveler. Men on the trails generally wore flannel shirts and wool pants. Wool pants were considered to be good for both hot and cold weather because the sun could not penetrate the heavy cloth and it was warm in winter. Men often topped their shirts and pants with vests and coats in colder weather. Men also wore hats to shade their eyes and to keep them cool. If the day was dusty, men tied handkerchiefs around their noses and mouths to keep the dust out.

   Long skirts or dresses, long sleeves, and high necklines were common for women on the trails. Although these long skirts seem impractical to us today, they did provide women on the trail protection from the extreme heat and insects of the prairie. A danger to women was working around open fires in long skirts. Shifting winds often caused skirts to blow into the fires, so women pinned or tied back their skirts to avoid this danger.

   Women's clothing also included sturdy shoes, an apron, and a sunbonnet. Sturdy shoes were important because women walked much of the way to their destination. The apron was useful for keeping a woman's dress clean, for acting as a potholder when lifting pots from the fire, a towel for drying hands, and a basket for any number of things. Sunbonnets provided protection from the sun, but also made it difficult for women to see what was beside or behind them.

2. Have students write a journal entry which describes how their clothing on the trail helped or hindered them in a daily activity. This may be as simple as describing needing a coat in cool weather, to having a dress catch fire while cooking.

3. Have a Dress-for-the-Trail Day. Have students choose clothing from their closets which would be most suitable for traveling on the trail. Or, as an alternative, have students design a trails outfit on paper using their knowledge of life on the trails. Use the pre-selected photographs or do a search on www.jocohistory.net to get ideas.

   Note: Few photographs of people on the trails in Johnson County exist. Most of the photographs on www.jocohistory.net were taken in the 1860s and later. It was rare for people to have their photographs taken in the mid-1800s and, when they did, they had formal portraits taken. Most of the photographs identified for this lesson are studio photographs of people in their best clothing. Trail travelers would not have been as formally dressed for their travels.

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