"A New History of the Overland Trail" by Sarah Keyes: Mondays at Beinecke 10/27/25

Beinecke curator Sarah Keyes discusses her book, "American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail" (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), and its relation to the Yale Collection of Western Americana.

"American Burial Ground" is a 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 illuminates, 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.

Sarah Keyes joined Beinecke Library from the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) where she was an associate professor. At UNR, she collaborated with Special Collections and University Archives and worked with K-12 educators and students across the state. She holds a doctorate from the University of Southern California and a B.A. from Pomona College. She previously held faculty positions at Texas Tech University and the University of California, Berkeley, and has experience in museums, including the National Museum of American History. Her work has been supported by numerous institutions including the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Mondays at Beinecke online talks focus on materials from the collections and include an opening presentation at 4pm followed by conversation and Q & A beginning about 4:30pm until 5pm.