I bought this book for myself over ten years ago, but this is the first time I’d sat down and read it. The book is a collection of excerpts from journals and reminiscences of children who traveled to California during the 1840s-1860s. The strength of the book is that it provides a lot of original sources, and has a good bibliography if you want to go deeper. It talks about the most famous children (the Donner party) as well as regular children whose trips were less eventful.

The problem with the book, that I actually found kind of annoying, is that I felt that the book was sort of a “paint splatter approach.” The anecdotes were loosely grouped by topic and time period, but the organization stopped there; the author seemingly strung all her notes together with little text to tie any of it together. I wanted to shout at the author, “So what?” There is a summary/synthetic chapter at the end, which talks about qualities that gave pioneer children “resilience.” This armchair critic thinks that it would have done better to serve as an introduction at the beginning, so I had some sort of road map of the author’s argument.

I would recommend the book for anyone looking for a general introduction to the pioneer era, or people studying “Resilience theory.”

Emmy E. Werner. Pioneer Children on the Journey West. 1995. Westview Press, Boulder.