By Ellen Levine
Pioneer life on the westward trails, told as a run of questions and answers: what you'd pack, how you'd get a wagon across a river with no bridge, what happened when someone got sick on the way.
It's the whole covered-wagon journey broken into the questions a curious child might ask. Why would a family leave home to go all the way to Oregon? What was a covered wagon, and what did you pack in one? How did you get across a river when there were no bridges? What did you eat, how did you find the way with no road signs, could you send a letter home? Each question gets a short, clear answer, so your child can take a guess and then find out. Read it straight through and you've followed the whole two-thousand-mile trail; open to any page and you've still got a real answer.
For the nuts and bolts of the trail — the packing, the river crossings, the slow grind of two thousand miles in a wagon — I haven't found anything in a westward-expansion unit that does it this cleanly. The answers are short and plain, and even a reluctant reader will finish it. The thing to know going in is that the whole trip is told from the wagon seat. It's the settlers' account of their own journey, which is worth reading, but it's only one side, so it does best sitting next to books written from the Native side rather than standing on its own.