Martha Gay Masterson (November 8, 1837 – December 12, 1916) was an American

settler A settler is a person who has human migration, migrated to an area and established a permanent residence there, often to colonize the area. A settler who migrates to an area previously uninhabited or sparsely inhabited may be described as a ...

who kept a diary throughout her life, beginning with her family's journey west on the

Oregon Trail The Oregon Trail was a east–west, large-wheeled wagon route and Westward Expansion Trails, emigrant trail in the United States that connected the Missouri River to valleys in Oregon. The eastern part of the Oregon Trail spanned part of what ...

when she was just 13. First published three-quarters of a century after her death, it offers a firsthand view of life for girls and women in the

Pacific Northwest The Pacific Northwest (sometimes Cascadia, or simply abbreviated as PNW) is a geographic region in western North America bounded by its coastal waters of the Pacific Ocean to the west and, loosely, by the Rocky Mountains to the east. Though ...

during the second half of the 19th century.

Biography

Martha Ann "Mattie" Gay was born in 1837, the sixth of 12 children of Johan "Ann" Stewart (Evans) Gay and Martin Baker Gay, a farmer. Her father moved the family around several southern states before, in 1851, deciding to emigrate from Springfield, Missouri, to Oregon along the Oregon Trail. The crossing took five months, and the family eventually settled in

Lane County, Oregon Lane County is one of the 36 counties in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2020 census, the population was 382,971, making it the fourth-most populous county in Oregon. The county seat is Eugene. It is named in honor of Joseph Lane, Orego ...

. During the trip, Martha kept a diary of the family's trials and adventures, and she continued keeping this diary afterwards, right up until her death. In 1871, she married widower James Alfred Masterson. They had three children together, two of whom died young. The couple moved around a good deal and separated after twenty years, and Martha spent her later years with her only surviving child, her daughter Frances. Masterson died in Eugene, Oregon, at the end of 1916.

Publications and legacy

In 1990, historian Lois Barton published Masterson's diary-cum-reminiscences with explanatory notes under the title ''One Woman's West: Recollections of the Oregon Trail and Settling of the Northwest Country''. This passage gives a sense of her style and subject matter: :If there were any graves near camp we would visit them and read the inscriptions. Sometimes we would see where wolves had dug into the graves after the dead bodies, and we saw long braids of golden hair telling of some young girl's burying place. In 1995, writer Rebecca Stetoff based a nonfiction book for young readers, ''Children of the Westward Trail'', on Masterson's diary. Illustrated with period photographs and drawings, it has been used as reading for Oregon schoolchildren in courses about the settlement of the American West and Oregon history. In 2014, poet Jana Harris published ''You Haven't Asked About My Wedding or What I Wore'', a book of poems based on writings by

American pioneer American pioneers were European American and African American settlers who migrated westward from the Thirteen Colonies and later United States to settle in and develop areas of North America that had previously been inhabited or used by Nati ...

women. One of her poems, "The Stove", was based on Masterson's diary and includes these lines: :If we found graves, we'd read their inscriptions. :If wolves had broken in :we'd look for the ropey yellow braids :of young girls like ourselves.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Masterson, Martha Gay 1837 births 1916 deaths American pioneers People of the American Old West American diarists American women non-fiction writers Women diarists