Hitting the History Trail : Students in Covered Wagons Re-Enact 900-Mile Trek of Prospector

Tired, grubby and smelling faintly of last night’s mesquite campfire, a group of sixth-graders trundled into the San Gabriel Mission on covered wagons Monday, hitting the home stretch of a unique history lesson re-enacting the 900-mile journey of a California gold prospector.

The 12 students, their teacher and various outriders have spent 20 days cooking and sleeping on the road as they follow the path taken 140 years ago by William P. Huff, who kept a 300,000-word diary of his journey from east Texas to the Central California gold country.

Because of time constraints, the students from Monroe School in Madera in Central California began their journey in Nogales, just above the Arizona-Mexico border. They forded rivers, braved storms, learned to harness and feed mules, started fires, picked cactus out of their flesh and reassured their parents via phone calls that despite roughing it, they are alive and well.

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience and no one else in the world gets to do it,” said Michael Marlow, 12.

Justin Worsham, 14, agrees. “It wasn’t so easy for the pioneers and we have it easier than them. We had water in the middle of the desert.”

The trip is the brainchild of Bill Coate, a Madera history teacher who has won accolades for his creative projects that use historical documents. Coate teamed up with Huff’s great-great grandson, a rancher named David E. Stewart of Van Vleck, Tex., whose family had kept the diary in a cedar chest for generations.

Together, they launched a history project in which pupils in Texas, Arizona and California would edit, research and publish portions of the Huff diary, which historians say provides one of the best records of the Southwestern ‘49ers trail.

Coate’s students worked on the California portion, transcribing Huff’s manuscript, adding maps and footnotes and combing through old census tracts, letters and biographies. Huff, who wrote in a picaresque fashion, met Mexican traders and Apache Indians, nearly perished for lack of water and never did find gold.

An entry from June 23, 1849, reads: “At three o’clock in the evening we hitched up and started on for the Quie Pah or Gap Water Mountain. Our men wished for water. . . . Chewing bullets, sage sticks and coffee grounds only afforded temporary relief.”

The diary piqued Coate’s sense of adventure. With another Madera teacher, he and the students built two covered wagons. Stewart signed on, providing cowboys, mules and a truck to haul equipment. Carmen Sauceda, a nurse whose son, Matthew, is in Coate’s class, agreed to travel ahead of the group in her 24-foot trailer to help handle emergencies.

Over Christmas, Coate did a dry run, enlisting the help of Arizona rangers, local historical societies, law enforcement groups, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and chambers of commerce.

When they headed out from Nogales on Jan. 5, the team followed the Santa Cruz River. They ate boar and deer that the cowboys shot along the way. On some stretches, they traveled under flood and tornado watches, accompanied by local sheriffs.

In densely populated urban areas--where mules tend to spook--the caravan loaded up into trucks and motored onto the next open area. Coate estimates that almost half of the trip was made by mule, covering 27 miles on their best day.

“At first, the kids all thought this was going to be Disneyland,” Coate said, “but then reality set it. When we began to correlate the diary with the trial, what they had studied came alive and they understood what it was like for our diarist.”

Tom Andrews, executive director of the Historical Society of Southern California, praises Coate’s method because “the students are actually doing history rather than reading a book and then being tested on it.”

From the San Gabriel Mission, the students will head up U.S. 101 by truck, switching back to covered wagons at San Juan Bautista. They will trek through the coastal range and pull into Madera on Wednesday.

How did they get along without the Simpsons, McDonald’s and Nintendo?

“I didn’t miss it,” said Todd Recio, 11. In fact, “When I grow up I want to be a teacher and do something like this with my kids.”