Prairie Schooner Slogans

HE Lore of the Lizzie Label in AMERICAN SPEECH for December, 1930,1 calls to the mind of anyone familiar with literature of the American West the slogans or mottoes painted on the prairie schooners of the emigrants-home-seekers or gold-seekers. The list I offer is brief, including only those which I came upon in several months' miscellaneous reading. Unfortunately it did not occur to me, when I was reading a number of journals of Western travel several years ago, to keep the many slogans which I found in them. They await a collector. Variants of the Peak or Bust slogan make up about half of my list. There was a great rush to the West when gold was reported in the vicinity of Pike's Peak in 1858. Many of the immigrants were doomed to disappointment. In 1859 and 1860 disgruntled gold-seekers in large numbers were passing through St. Louis on the return trip eastward.2 The Daily Missouri Republican observed that they were the type of miners who had expected to find gold easily in surface diggings. Some of the mottoes painted on the wagon covers were amusing, said the Republican. On one side of a prairie schooner was the original Peak or Bust, on the other, Busted, by G-d. Hit or miss, the carefree slogan on one side of another wagon, had the grim addition, Missed, by h-ll. A fortune for Bet and Baby suggested its own story. Going-Gone was the laconic announcement of a fourth gold-seeker in the Rockies.3 The Daily State Journal of Lincoln, Nebraska, frequently mentioned during the 'sixties, 'seventies, and 'eighties the white covered wagons4 which passed through this frontier town on the overland

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