By Jean Van Leeuwen
Nine-year-old Mary Ellen Todd's real two-thousand-mile crossing to Oregon in 1852, built from the recollections she wrote down late in life: the river crossings, the cholera in the wagon train, and the long dusty stretches in between.
Mary Ellen Todd is nine when her family sells nearly everything they own and turns the wagon west out of Arkansas. Her father is a hopeful potter, her stepmother is someone Mary Ellen is still learning to love, and two little sisters come along for the whole thing, all of them bound for Oregon in 1852. This is the entire journey, month by hard month. There are the swollen rivers a family somehow had to get a wagon and a team of oxen across. There's sickness passing through the wagon train. The oxen wear down to bone, and there are days when the grown-ups argue about which route to take and whether they'll make it at all. Van Leeuwen built it from the real Mary Ellen's own account, so the small true things sit right beside the terrors: a footsore dog given a ride, a birthday kept on the trail.
This is the trail book for your most ready readers, the ones who want the whole thing and not a highlights reel. Instead of a general pioneer, they get one real girl and the full length of what she went through: the boredom, the fear, the small joys. By the last page they actually feel how enormous and how costly the crossing was. The picture books touch a single feeling and the survey books answer questions; this one is the long haul. One thing to keep in view is that it's the travelers' side, and it never asks whose country all those wagons were rolling across. Put the Native-authored books next to it and let them answer what this one leaves out.