In an era when women were, in the words of Susan B. Anthony, "political slaves," Abigail Scott Duniway (1834-1915) rose from quite ordinary beginnings as an Illinois farm girl to become a nationally famed champion of women's suffrage, as well as a significant author and publisher. Duniway, the best known woman in Oregon history, was a true pioneer, or "path breaker," as she termed herself and her colleagues in the equal rights movement. Her 1852 journey overland to the Pacific Coast by ox-drawn wagon at the age of 17 was a formative experience that she returned to again and again in her writing.

The hardships endured on the trail by the Scott party were proverbial. There were deaths from disease, and deaths from drowning. Cholera was epidemic that year, and before they reached Oregon, both Abigail's mother and youngest brother had perished. Abigail Jane ("Jenny" as she was known by family members) had been appointed scribe by her father, and kept a journal of the Scott's migration under his tutelage. It is an often-eloquent diary, filled with joy and wonder at the magnificent landscapes its writer traversed, as well as with heartfelt sorrow.

In 1859, when Duniway was still a young farm wife burdened by infants and never-ceasing household chores — a decade before her entry into publishing and politics — she penned a fictionalized account of the trip, Captain Gray's Company. This became the first novel to be commercially published in Oregon. It was her first literary work of any length, and was described in a review as "a silly story, comprising the usual quantity of 'yellow covered' love, expressed in bad grammar, and liberally interspersed with slang phrases." Other critics have concurred. And yet, it was a story that the author felt compelled to write, and marks her entry into the larger world beyond that defined by hearthstone and barnyard. Duniway's experiences along the Oregon Trail also surfaced time and again in her many novels serialized in her newspaper, the New Northwest (1871-1887), and received a final treatment in 1905 in another published novel, From the West to the West (i.e., from Illinois to Oregon).

However, to be a pioneer, or "path breaker," meant much more to Duniway than the standard connotations. In her work, the "free, young, elastic West" (and Oregon in particular) would come to represent the land of promise for women, where all could hope to see materialized the kind of freedom that "the women of the older states, crystallized with constitutions hoary with the encrustations of long-vanished years" could only dream of. Duniway longed for Oregon to become "the banner state of the new dispensation" of equal rights for women, and from 1870 on, she would devote her life to making this a reality.

Abigail Scott Duniway's "Journal of a Trip to Oregon" reveals the talent-in-embryo that would later emerge as the editorial voice of the New Northwest. The young Scott sisters, possibly clad in "Bloomer" attire of wide pantaloons and short skirts (quite fashionable on the Oregon Trail in 1852), often raced ahead of the slow-moving ox train to admire the scenery, but were also halted by sorrow when visited by the deaths of those they held most dear.

Abigail thought she was leaving her Illinois home forever, and never imagined how quickly she would be able to retrace her route after the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. The "Journal" has been published in Vol. V of the Covered Wagon Women series.

Abigail Scott Duniway's Captain Gray's Company was the first novel to be commercially published in Oregon. From the West to the West is a later fictionalized rendition of her westward journey. However, along with her many novels reprising the westering experience, Duniway also wrote a number of poems that considered the trip and its significance to her.

Some of these are found in My Musings, a booklet published after her first trip to the East Coast to attend a convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in 1872. This includes "After Twenty Years," a poem written at the site of her mother's grave near Fort Laramie, in which the author contemplates the remarkable difference between a journey by iron horse and one by ox train, and invokes and invokes her mother's spirit to guide her in her fledgling career as an equal rights activist.

Another poem written at the same time, "Oregon: Land of Promise," was published separately in 1907 as a souvenir booklet bearing Duniway's photo and typical signature, "Yours for Liberty." It was written on the train as the author sped west, and the sound of the wheels driving onward over prairie and mountain is echoed in its cadence. Duniway's verses show that, although Oregon was characterized by its "grandeur and beauty," neither its landscape, nor even its commercial potential, was the greatest attraction for those who embarked on the journey west. Rather, the "promise" offered by Oregon was that it provided a home for a newly-nascent liberty for women, a place where their "song could run riot, or fancy go free."