The University of Arizona Press

Sarah Bayliss Royce, along with her husband, Josiah, and their daughter, Mary, left her home in 1849 and headed for California in a covered wagon. Along the way, she kept a diary which, nearly thirty years later, served as the basis for a memoir she titled Across the Plains. Jennifer Dawes Adkison is an associate professor of English at Idaho State University. She has published essays on depictions of western women in contemporary novels and on the nineteenth-century nature writer Susan Fenimore Cooper. She received her Ph.D. in 2001 from University of Nevada, Reno, where she studied in the Literature and Environment Program.