Sarah Raymond Herndon

Born in 1840, Sarah Raymond Herndon is best known for Days on the Road: Crossing the Plains in 1865, a memoir drawn from the journal she kept while traveling west by wagon. Her writing stands out for its clear, personal view of the hardships, landscapes, and day-to-day realities of overland migration.

She later made her home in Virginia City in the Montana Territory. According to library and public-domain book sources, her journal first appeared in a local newspaper in the early 1880s before being published in book form in 1902.

Herndon died in 1914. Today, her work remains valuable both as a readable travel narrative and as a firsthand record of a major era in American frontier history.