Notes From The Frontier

The mortality rate of westering pioneers was very high. Perhaps the greatest cause of death was pioneers not knowing the basics of survival.

As early as the 1400s in Europe, creating hair art to memorialize the dead began, especially because epidemic and plagues took a high toll.

In the 1800s, Victorians were intimately acquainted with death. The Civil War, the bloodiest war in America's history, touched every family.

The cogs of the Industrial Revolution loomed grinding and monstrous over the individual worker and killed workers at spectacular rate.

The Oregon Trail has been called a 2,000-mile-long graveyard.

Today, all of us know of pioneer graveyards. They are lonely plots overgrown on random roadsides, with crumbling gravestones.