December 1985 | Volume 37, Issue 1 For many children who
accompanied their parents west across the continent in the 1840s
and ’50s, the journey was a supreme adventure The historian
Francis Parkman, strolling around Independence, Missouri, in
1846, remarked upon the “multitude of healthy children’s faces …
peeping out from under the covers of the wagons.” Two decades
later a traveler there wrote of husbands packing up “sunburned
women and wild-looking children” along with shovels and flour
barrels in preparation for the long journey west. In the
goldfields of California in the 1850s, a chronicler met four
sisters and sisters-in-law who had just crossed the Plains with
thirty-six of their children. “They could,” she wrote, “form
quite a respectable village.” In the great overland migration
that lasted from 1841 until the start of the Civil War, more
than a quarter of a million people pushed their way from the
Missouri valley to the Pacific coast. Probably at least thirty-
five thousand of them were young girls