Westward Expansion (recent titles)

  • Across the Wide and Lonesome Prairie: the Oregon Trail Diary of Hattie Campbell, 1847 by   Kristina Gregory (Really shows the struggle people went through, and how they often reached Oregon with only the clothes on their backs.)
  • Boston Jane by Jennifer Holm.  (A girl leaves Boston to live as a pioneer in Washington State.  However, she gets there by boat.
  • Daniel's Walk by Spooner it presents a negative view of Manifest Destiny
  • Daniel's Walk" by Michael Spooner is about a boy who walked a section of the Oregon Trail, beginning in Missouri. He is searching for his father, who is a trapper in the Rocky Mountains. Daniel hooks up with a wagon train, and the descriptions of their travel include historical characters. Daniel's father is involved in Native American mysticism, bringing an ecological consciousness into the story.
  • Daughter of Madrugada by Frances M. Wood (Delacorte Press, 2002)-- Cesa de Haro lives in the "abundant, pristine California of the 1840s on the vast and beautiful Ranch of the Valley of the Dawn." After the 1846 war with Mexico, Cesa and her family must face the arrival of foreigners, the Americans, who arrive "hungry for gold and for land
  • Dear Austin by Woodruff
  • Save Queen Sheba by Moeira
  • The Far Side of the Moon (ISBN 0-7414-0910-0, Infinity Publishing), a story of the Aizu Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Company, refugees from the "Meiji Restoration" wars in Japan who attempted  to start a farm at Placerville, CA circa 1869.
  • The Grasshopper Summer by Turner
  • The Great Turkey Walk, Kathleen Karr, 1998.  "In 1860, a somewhat simple-minded fifteen-year-old boy attempts to herd one thousand turkeys from Missouri to Denver, Colorado, in hopes of selling them at a profit."
  • Thunder on the Sierra  by Kathy Balmes (Silver Moon Press, 2001 In 1852, recently orphaned, thirteen-year-old Mateo becomes an arriero or mule driver, bringing supplies to California gold miners and searching for the notorious bandit who stole his horse, but when he learns that Yankee squatters are threatening to take the ranch he grew up on, Mateo heads for home.
  • Tucket Series by Paulsen
  • West Along the Wagon Road, 1852 by Laurie Lawlor  (Another on the Oregon Trail)
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