Margaret Ross and Lois Miller travel diary : manuscript.

Tennessee ; Arkansas ; Texas ; New Mexico ; Arizona ; California, 1921-1922.

1 volume (176 pages)

English

Purchased from William Reese Co. (Female Factor January 2022: 26) on the Frederick W. and Carrie S. Beinecke Fund for Western Americana, 2022.

This material is open for research.

Margaret Ross and Lois Miller were American women and traveling companions who traveled in the western United States in 1921.

Autograph manuscript travel diary in the hands of Margaret Ross and Lois Miller primarily documenting their travels in the western United States in 1921. Entries begin when Ross and Miller were in Tennessee, though there are references to earlier trips in Florida, Alabama, North Carolina, and Cuba. The women describe their travels by car, train, and hitchhiking in Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Most entries describe their daily life, including meals, recreational activities like roller skating, tours of a mine and ranch, the weather, sandstorms, road conditions, and car troubles, including an engine fire. Ross and Miller also kept a detailed accounting of their living costs, including instances when they sold their jewelry to pay for food and borrowed money from their parents. On one occasion, they were traveling with two men who were arrested for unspecified crimes, and the car in which they were traveling was confiscated. The trip concluded when Ross and Miller reunited with Ross's mother in California on December 19, 1921. A few later entries document the beginning of a trip to Memphis Ross took with her mother in 1922, in which Ross reminisces about the 1921 trip with Miller.

May 03, 2023

Margaret Ross and Lois Miller Travel Diary. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Margaret Ross and Lois Miller Travel Diary. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.