Seven books for a class studying westward expansion, and the whole point is the word eyes. Taught the usual way, this is a story of covered wagons and brave pioneers and empty land waiting to be settled, and every part of that except the wagons is a decision somebody made about whose story counts. So this set is built to be taught from more than the wagon seat. Two of these books stand on the land before the settlers arrive: a real Hidatsa girl farming a Missouri River village that had been there for generations, and an Ojibwe family living an ordinary, whole life in the same decade the pioneers were rolling west. The other five are the settler side, and they are worth reading — the practical how-to of the trail, the loneliness of a homesteading mother, a Black family claiming free land in Kansas, the beloved and seriously troubling Little House on the Prairie, and one girl's long haul to Oregon. Each book works at every level from a picture book on the carpet to a full novel, so a mixed room can read all seven at once. But read the next paragraphs before you plan, because how you arrange these books is the entire lesson, and one of them carries racism you will need to name out loud.
Read this before you plan, because the order you build the unit in is the lesson. Start by establishing whose land this was. Open with Buffalo Bird Girl, or with The Birchbark House for your older readers, so the first thing your class learns is that the West was not empty and was not waiting — it was home to nations with names, towns, farms, and children, long before a single covered wagon appeared. Only then bring in the settler books, and teach them as one perspective rather than as the truth. If You Traveled West is the trail's mechanics from the traveler's side; Dandelions is a homesteading mother's loneliness; Wagon Wheels is a Black family claiming free land in Kansas, and it is settler-side too, though it adds the perspective the canon most often drops and shows the Osage as the neighbors who kept the family alive; Bound for Oregon is one girl's crossing in full; and Little House on the Prairie is the beloved classic that must be handled with care. Taught alone, the five settler books erase whose land it was — that is not a risk, it is what happens, and it is why this unit exists. Taught as one set of eyes, paired in the same week with the two Native-authored books, they become what they actually are: the settlers' own account of their own experience, sitting next to the account of the people already living there. Never teach the settler books straight and by themselves, and never teach Little House without naming its racism to your class in plain words. The entries below say which book is which, and the discussion angle gives you the one question that holds the whole unit together.