ABSTRACT
This chapter uses manuscript diaries and diverse personal artefacts left behind by migrants and cowboys journeying in the nineteenth century trans-Mississippi West to illuminate the complex interrelation between rootedness and mobility, between accepted sacredness and spirited resistance. It argues that the mobile men and women did not become up-rooted and spatially detached as they departed the familiar environment of their previous home-place for an extended period of mobility. This sacred state seems to depend on the individual's continued, sedentarist inhabitation of a particular location - a birthplace, a long-familiar house, region or landscape. The manuscript diaries clearly highlight the changing scenery and the complex, arduous experience of the Overland passage. A series of systematic entries in distinct places, the individual diaries gradually created personal maps of the complex Western space through which their owners travelled. The nineteenth century Western journeys thus suggest that rootedness is not a once-bestowed, static position which is pure, fragile and absolute.
