The historian Francis Parkman, strolling around Independence, Missouri in 1846, remarked upon the “multitude of healthy children’s faces … peeping out from under the covers of the wagons.” Two decades later, a traveler there wrote of husbands packing up “sunburned women and wild-looking children” along with shovels and flour barrels in preparation for the long journey west. In the gold fields of California in the 1850s, a chronicler met four sisters and sisters-in-law who had just crossed the Plains with thirty-six of their children. “They could,” she wrote, “form quite a respectable village.”

In the great overland migration that lasted from 1841 until the start of the Civil War, more than a quarter of a million people pushed their way from the Missouri valley to the Pacific coast. Probably at least 35,000 of them were young girls and boys; except during the gold rush, at least every fifth person on the trails was a child. Yet, in all we can read today, these thousands of young emigrants are infrequently seen and almost never heard.

The voices of many of them do survive though. Some kept diaries along the way that have been preserved; many others wrote down their memories later. These records permit glimpses of a life that children of today might easily dream about—a child’s life of adventure and purpose, of uncertainty and danger, albeit sometimes of sheer boredom. Once they reached their destinations and became settled, these children might well begin long years of isolation and monotony, but getting there was bound to be unpredictable and a challenge. From Independence and St. Joseph and Council Bluffs, their families packed into wagons usually no more than five by ten feet and set out when the spring grass was up. For the next six months, they would roll and lurch westward for more than 2000 miles—across plains and deserts, along the Platte, Sweetwater, Humboldt, Carson, Malheur, Snake, and Columbia rivers, and through the Rockies, Blue Mountains, and Sierra Nevada.

Children had little idea of what to expect. For most of them the trip at first seemed a lark. “Every day was like a picnic,” a young girl remembered of her earliest weeks on the trail. A seven-year-old had finished nearly half the trip when a question suddenly dawned on him. “I was looking far away in the direction we were travelling, across a dreary sage plain … and I got to wondering where we were trying to get to.” “To Oregon,” someone answered.

One boy had heard the fantastic names upon the land and waited eagerly for the show: “I was looking for the Black Hills. Hills I saw, but they were not black. Blue River had faded out, Chimney Rock was only a sharp pointed rock on the top of a hill, not a chimney at all. The ‘Devil’s Backbone’ was only a narrow ridge.…”

Much of the passing scene measured up easily. Children gawked at giant whirlwinds, boiling springs, chasms hundreds of feet deep, wide rivers and dried desert streams. Some passed for hours at a stretch through land black with bison. There were antelope that bounded from sight before the dust was raised behind them, dogs that sang, squirrels that yipped like dogs. The human inhabitants of the land were just as marvelous. Boys and girls who overcame their first fears traded jackknives and coffee for beadwork and moccasins, and in the bargain they got a taste of the exotic. “They amused us by eating grasshoppers,” a girl of twelve told her diary. As another young girl put it, “It was like traveling over the great domains of a lost world.”

Children whose recollections survive rarely complained about the closeness of life in a wagon—they seem to have welcomed it at a time of uprooting—but food was another matter. While they generally enjoyed antelope, bison, and the other new dishes of the Plains, there was much to rail at—like campside baking (bread “plentifully seasoned with mouse pills”) and foul water (“drank red mud for coffee”). More than anything, they longed for fresh vegetables and fruit. Dried apples were brought along to ward off scurvy, but most youngsters found them a cruel mockery. An eleven-year-old recommended them for their economy. “You need but one meal a day,” he explained. “You can eat dried apples for breakfast, drink water for dinner and swell for supper.”

Between the moments of excitement fell inevitable hours of boredom. Parents packed small libraries and organized school lessons to fill these hours; the children made up games. Many of their games would be instantly recognizable to both earlier and later generations —London Bridge, run-sheep-run, leapfrog, button-button. Girls and younger boys made wreaths and necklaces from wildflowers, a favorite pastime before the present century, and chanted handed-down rhymes and rounds.

By and large, they seem to have preferred highly competitive games that stressed strategy. And they invented some of their own. Near Fort Hall, young boys found that when they dived onto a dead ox, its sun-bloated stomach would fling them back. This became a contest, with each competitor jumping harder and bouncing farther. Finally, a lanky boy sprinted, leaped head-first —and plunged deep into the rotting carcass. Only with difficulty did his friends pull him out.

The same group of boys was expected to find fuel for the company’s evening fires, and this, too, turned into a competition. At the end of the day they organized teams and divided the area around the night’s camp into districts. Each group scoured its section and tried to amass the largest pile of buffalo chips, driving away all chip rustlers and claim jumpers with barrages of dried dung.

Most of the work was not so light. Children herded, cooked, hunted, gathered water, cared for babies, and did other important tasks. And circumstances often left a boy or girl with graver responsibilities. When his fatherless family was abandoned by a hired hand, the eleven-year-old Elisha Brooks drove the animals, stood guard at night, and in general took charge. At 14, Octavius Pringle was sent on a life-saving ride of 125 miles to fetch food for his group. Children of ten and under sometimes drove ox teams, cared for herds, and took part in difficult family decisions, and ones only a little older served on picket duty and chose camping sites. When the challenge of the road left her parents floundering, a daughter barely in her teens virtually took over the family of twelve. “They all depend on her,” wrote a fellow traveler. “The children go to her in their troubles and perplexities, her father and mother rely on her, and she is always ready to do what she can.”

Young girls in particular had chances to fill new roles—and to taste the complications that came with them. Mary Ellen Todd, eleven, learned to drive the oxen pulling her family to Oregon. Later she recalled: “How my heart bounded … when I chanced to hear father say to mother, ‘Do you know that Mary Ellen is beginning to crack the whip?’ Then how it fell again, when mother replied, ‘I am afraid it isn’t a very lady-like thing for a girl to do.’ After this, while I felt a secret joy in being able to have power that sets things going, there was also some sense of shame.…”

Bobbing in a frail vessel across a vast landscape, youngsters learned quickly of dangers from which their parents could not protect them. Nothing taught this more vividly than the famous Plains thunderstorms. Jesse Applegate wrote seventy years afterward of the first one he encountered as a seven-year-old: “Sometime during the night, I suddenly awoke. The rain was pouring down in my face, my eyes were blinded with the glare of lightning, the wind was roaring like a furnace, and the crash of thunder was terrible and almost continuous. I could see nothing but what looked like sheets of fire, and hear nothing but the wind, the pouring rain, and the bellowing thunder.”

Being lost or stolen could suddenly seem a real possibility on the trail. One seven-year-old sent to fetch a horse became disoriented and wandered for hours until he was found that night, miles from his party. Another, age three, was found whimpering under some sagebrush a day after he walked away from camp.

“A dreadful fear of Indians was born and grown into me,” remembered a girl who had crossed the Plains at five and had nightmares for years. Fed