Content area
Full Text
Children's Voices from the Trail: Narratives of the Platte River Road. By Rosemary Gudmundson Palmer. (Spokane: Clark, 2002. 336 pp. $39.50, ISBN 0-87062-313-3.)
This book attempts "to identify the child's vision of the westward experience" (p. 31) by discussing 453 diaries, letters, journals, and reminiscences of children who traveled on the Overland Trail between 1841 and 1869. Using psychological and grammatical analysis, lots of quotations, and comparisons among 23 documents written at the time of crossing and 430 adult reminiscences, Rosemary Gudmundson Palmer discusses a broad range of "juvenile feelings and perceptions" that were often quite different from adult experiences.
Palmer notes that historians such as John Faragher said little about children on the trail. In fact, Faragher once claimed that nothing could be found, which motivated my own "Children and Young People on the...