On Monday, October 27, 2025, Yale University and the Beinecke Library hosted an online presentation as part of the Mondays at Beinecke series, featuring Beinecke curator Sarah Keyes, who discussed her book American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail and its relation to the Yale Collection of Western Americana. Over Zoom, Michael Moran, Director of Community Engagement at the Beinecke Library, introduced Keyes, outlining her background and the talk’s focus on how the graves of roughly 6,600 overland migrants reshaped U.S. claims to Indigenous lands and vice versa.

Opening Remarks and Speaker Introduction

Michael Moran welcomed attendees with an Indigenous land acknowledgment, honoring the Mohegan, Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic–Narragansett, Quinnipiac, and other Algonquian-speaking nations that stewarded what is now Connecticut. He then introduced Sarah Keyes as a new Beinecke curator who joined Yale from the University of Nevada, Reno, where she was an associate professor collaborating with special collections, university archives, and K–12 programs. Keyes, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California and a B.A. from Pomona College, framed today’s talk around her first book, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2023.

Reframing a Well-Trodden Migration

Keyes began by noting that popular mythology portrays the Overland Trail as a triumphant caravan of covered wagons, yet it was also a landscape of suffering and sacrifice. She highlighted that the migration spanned over 2,000 miles from the mid-1830s into the 1860s, continued to influence public history in classrooms and at historic sites, and endured in popular culture—from the 1930 film The Big Trail to today’s Oregon Trail video games.

The Centrality of Death and Burial

Drawing on diary entries, sketches, and maps, Keyes argued that death was not a side note but a defining feature of the trail experience. She displayed an 1849 sketch by cartographer Joseph J. Bruff, showing emigrants lovingly burying Charles Bishop of Washington, D.C., who died of cholera at age 25. Such careful burials—choosing elevated sites, piling protective stones, and marking graves with inscriptions—turned fatal tragedies into assertions of white claims on the land.

Indigenous Graves as Sites of Resistance

Keyes traced a cross-cultural discourse on graves and territorial claims that predated overland migration. She contrasted settler burials with Indigenous strategies of marking and protecting ancestral graves during forced removals. A letter from Cherokee woman Eliza Jane Ross (1842) lamented that her people’s graves lay “strewn many hundreds of miles along the roads and banks of the rivers…without one friend to watch over their bones.” Such appeals to the sacredness of burial grounds fueled resistance to the 1830 Indian Removal Act and echoed across both voluntary and coerced westward movements.

Archival Foundations at the Beinecke

Key to Keyes’ research were the Beinecke’s rich Western Americana holdings—over 200 diaries and memoirs dating from the 1830s to the late nineteenth century. She highlighted the Benjamin F. Adams papers, which document 1849 burials on the California Trail; Philip F. Castleman’s diary, with vivid nursing accounts during cholera outbreaks; and correspondence like the Henry Harding Patrick letters, in which a migrant’s mother cajoles him to record his journey. These collections, begun with William Robertson Co.’s 1940 donation and expanded by curators such as Dale L. Morgan and Archie Hanna, form a “mosaic in words” of Overland Trail experiences.

Memorialization and Memory Today

In closing, Keyes reflected on how railroads and settlers in the late nineteenth century repurposed immigrant graves—erecting crosses and monuments like the lucinda duncan memorial in eastern Nevada—to legitimize U.S. expansion on Indigenous homelands. She called for broader recognition of Indigenous burial grounds and their own acts of place-making, urging public history sites and scholars to integrate these dual narratives of dispossession and remembrance.

Q&A Highlights

During the Q&A, Keyes addressed the experiences of enslaved migrants on the trail, noting that some were brought by enslavers under promises of freedom in free states like California, which intensified sectional tensions. She affirmed the use of environmental history methods in her research, emphasizing place-making as a unifying framework. On expanding the Beinecke’s collections, Keyes underlined ethical acquisition practices and a commitment to diversifying Western Americana materials to support new scholarship.

The session underscored how death, graves, and the archival record together reveal the Overland Trail not as a simple story of triumph but as a contested landscape shaped by migration, removal, and remembrance.

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