HUNTINGTON BEACH : Students Sample Life of Frontier Era

Huntington Christian School third-grade students pretended to be pioneers Friday at a local park after completing a semester’s study of frontier America.

The students, dressed in sunbonnets and other Western wear, cooked stew and biscuits, washed plates in a tub, churned butter, pulled taffy, sat in a 1915 Maxwell automobile and competed to see who could spit a watermelon seed the farthest.

They also carved soap, practiced their handwriting with quills and took part in three-legged races, tugs of war and quilting bees.

There was more to the day than fun and games.

“It finalizes everything we studied,” teacher Sherran Allen said.

Trevor Gallahair, 9, said he likes the taffy pull the best. “You get to eat it and stretch it really long. It’s gooey.”

Trevor said pioneer times are interesting, but he he would rather live in the modern era. “It was too much work to take care of yourself,” he said. “If you got sick you possibly would die because there was not much medicine and not much money, either.”

Carrie Funk, 8, also cited health worries that settlers faced. “There were lots of diseases and not a lot of medicine to take care of them,” she said.

But Devin Fowler, 9, said she preferred the earlier times. “It is more fun playing outside than watching television,” she said. She also likes to do chores. One drawback, she said, was that girls didn’t climb trees, probably because their mothers didn’t want them to get dirty.

Jessica Dahl, 9, said pioneer kids only wore their shoes in the winter and went barefoot in the summer. Shoes were always passed down, and the oldest child would be the only one to get new shoes, she said.