Young children will love to read this historically-accurate, personal account of pioneers heading west on the Oregon Trail during the mid-1800s. Great illustrations, large print and helpful maps will enhance your child's journey through this exciting historical period.

Describes what it was like traveling on the Oregon Trail, including what travelers ate, wore, and saw along the route

For use in schools and libraries only. Answers questions about what it was like to travel to the Oregon Territory by covered wagon, crossing rivers, mountains, and prairie.

Illustrations and simple rhyming text follow a family as they make the difficult journey by wagon to a new home across the Rocky Mountains. Full-color illustrations.

Excerpts from the diary of Sallie Hester, a fourteen-year-old girl who tells her family's journey along the Oregon-California Trail during 1849-1850. Includes activities and a timeline related to the era.

Grandma Essie describes how her family left Missouri by covered wagon looking for a better life and lived in Kansas and Oklahoma before returning to Missouri.

The diaries and letters of women on the overland trails in the mid- to late nineteenth century are treasured documents. These eleven selections drawn from the multivolume Covered Wagon Women series present the best first-person trail accounts penned by women in their teens who traveled west between 1846 and 1898. Ranging in age from eleven to nineteen, unmarried and without children of their own, these diarists had experiences different from those of older women who carried heavier responsibilities with them on the trail. These letters and diaries reflect both the unique perspective of youthful optimism and the experiences common among all female emigrants. The young women write of friendship and family, trail hardships, and explorations such as visits to Indian gravesites. Some like Sallie Hester even write of enjoying the company of men, and many speculate about marriage prospects. Domestic roles did not define the girls’ trail experience; only the four oldest in this collection recorded helping with chores. As they journey through Indian lands, these writers show that even their youth did not prevent them from holding notions of white racial superiority. Two of the selections are newly published, having appeared only in limited-distribution collector’s editions of the original series. For all readers captivated by the first Best of Covered Wagon Women collection, this new volume’s focus on youthful travelers adds a fresh perspective to life on the trail.

A new American journey.

This is a portrait of pioneer and American Indian children in the 19th-century West. It covers both the lives of settlers, crossing America in covered wagons and building log or sod cabins, and of the American Indians whose lives were changed by the new arrivals.