| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

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.	1
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 Overland Trail" article (Western Historical Quarterly, July 1975), based on the extraordinary collection of Overland Trail documents at Yale University's Beinecke Library. It is truly gratifying to see how many others have since unearthed more material about those crucial young participants in American history. Palmer has not utilized the Yale collection; she has, however, gathered and quoted from a host of other documents from various western libraries and private sources.	. . .

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