American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail

In her talk, Sarah Keyes will present her new interpretation of the mid-nineteenth century overland migration to the Pacific. 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. As Keyes will illuminate, their graves ultimately became the seeds of U.S. expansion. 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. Dr. Keyes places death at the center of the history of the Overland Trail and, in doing so, offers a sweeping and long overdue reinterpretation of this historic touchstone. 

Sarah Keyes is currently an Associate Professor of history at the University of Nevada, Reno. She earned her B.A. from Pomona College and her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. After earning her PhD, she spent a year as a Postdoctoral Fellow with The Bill Lane Center for the American West. Keyes’s work has been published in multiple scholarly journals including the Journal of American History and the Western Historical Quarterly. She has also written for The Washington Post and been featured on the History Channel. In 2023 Keyes published her first book, American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail, with the University of Pennsylvania Press.