Pioneer Children’s Diaries Tell of Suffering, Survival on Way West : California: One 13-year-old girl lost six relatives to starvation. But she overcame despair and found a loving husband, who named Marysville for her. Most of those who wrote displayed a similar resiliency.

Thirteen-year-old Mary Murphy lost her mother and five other relatives to starvation.

“I hope I shall not live long, for I am tired of this troublesome world and want to go to my mother,” she wrote.

That was in 1847. Murphy was a survivor of the infamous Donner party, which became snowbound in the Sierra Nevada and resorted to cannibalism to survive.

She was one of 40,000 children who helped settle the American West. Emmy Werner, a child psychologist, has gathered the stories of these youngest pioneers. Her book, “Pioneer Children on the Journey West,” is about the youngsters who faced blizzards, desert heat, massacres and epidemics on the way west.

“I wanted the children to speak for themselves,” said Werner, whose book includes excerpts from diaries and letters.

Some of the stories are well known. Others have never been published, including the tale of a 7-year-old girl who was kidnaped twice in a month in California’s Gold Country, but rescued each time by a caring stranger.

“Pioneer Children” follows the stories of 120 of the youngsters who embarked with their families for California from 1841 to 1865.

More than one in five never made it. They died from accidents, illnesses, starvation, cold and, in the case of six Oatman children, from an Indian raid.

But most of those who did survive lived long and productive lives, said Werner, a professor at University of California, Davis.

“The really remarkable thing was that among those who wrote, the majority really managed extraordinarily well,” Werner said.

The despair expressed by Mary Murphy was the exception rather than the rule, Werner said. And even Murphy went on with her life. Her first marriage at 14 was abusive and ended in divorce. But she later remarried, to a man who founded Marysville, Calif., and named it after her.

Others displayed a remarkable resiliency.

“One day, I was riding along, feeling just as happy as a bird out of a cage,” recalled Virginia Reed, another young Donner party survivor. “I laugh even to this day when I think of it and I sometimes imagine I must be a thousand years old now; it does not seem to me that I ever was a child, and yet in many respects I am a child even now.”

The book was an outgrowth of Werner’s years of studying contemporary children who overcome extreme odds, including teen mothers, poor children in the United States and war refugees.

“I’m trying to see how similar the experiences of these kids are to what the children from Bosnia will write about today, or the children of World War II,” she said.

Werner found the pioneer children shared common traits that helped them survive. They had an extended community of people who cared for them, religious faith and a deep sense of hope.

“I think hope was the thing that kept [them] going, that somehow there was something around the bend, that ultimately they would get there and that they could make it,” Werner said.

Those characteristics are the same for her contemporary subjects who, in most cases, turn out well as adults, she said.

But there was one difference, she said. Pioneer children bore responsibilities that were crucial to their families’ survival.

They cared for livestock, hunted and fished, cooked, stood guard, scouted for camping spots, nursed the sick and injured and buried the dead.

“These experiences taught them self-reliance, gave them a sense of worth, and strengthened their conviction that hard times could be endured and overcome,” Werner concludes in her book.

“As long as they were healthy and could walk, even the youngest children were assigned duties on which the welfare of the wagon train depended.”

Werner’s book, published earlier this year, is in its second printing. The first printing of 5,000 sold out.

“It’s a good book,” said Elliott West, a history professor at the University of Arkansas and author of another book on frontier children, “Growing Up With the Country.”

West said more than half the American population in the 19th Century was under 16.

“Historians for the last 20, 25 years have paid a lot more attention to the lives of common people, not just presidents and powerful people,” he said. “I think it’s a natural progression to also ask about our children.

“Children just perceive the world differently,” he said.

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Werner included several accounts of Native Americans whom the children met along the way.

“In the diaries of the adults, the Native Americans were always perceived as a threat. But the children, they were much more open. They looked at the Native Americans as an exciting and new experience. They recorded a lot of close relationships,” Werner said.

“A number of them became good friends over time. They were much less judgmental than adults were. They didn’t immediately decide that they were savages, uncivilized or whatever. They looked at them much like modern anthropologists would. In turn, a lot of Native Americans that they mention in their diaries were really helpful.”

Werner, a German native whose own childhood was interrupted by World War II, said she fell in love with the American West while studying for her doctorate at the University of Nebraska in the 1950s. As a student, she took weekend field trips along the Platte River Trail.

When she became a professor at Davis, at the other end of the trail, the view from her office included a fig tree planted about the time of the westward migration.

Her research included looking through boxes containing yellowed letters and diaries, wooden dolls and a girl’s arrow-pierced apron.

Going through letters from the Donner party children, Werner made an unsettling find.

“In one of them I found a little child’s tooth and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I hope it isn’t a leftover from a meal,’ because, as you know, some of the babies were cannibalized.”

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Young Men, and Women, Go West

Excerpts from Emmy Werner’s book, “Pioneer Children on the Journey West.”

“We had a difficult time to find a way down the mountain. At one time I was left alone for nearly half a day, and as I was afraid of Indians I sat all the while with my baby in my lap on the back of my horse. . . . It seemed to me while I was there alone that the moaning of the winds through the pines was the loneliest sound I had ever heard.

“We were then out of provisions, having killed and eaten all our cattle. I walked barefeeted until my feet were blistered and lived on roasted acorns for two days.”

--Nancy Kelsey, 18

Who in 1841 became the first white woman to travel over land to California

“We now had nothing to eat but raw hides and they were on the roof of the cabin to keep out the snow; when prepared for cooking and boiled they were simply a pot of glue.”

--Virgina Reed, 13

A member of the Donner party

“It was always the same--hunger and thirst, and an awful silence. . . . My husband tied little Kirke to his back and staggered ahead. The child would murmur occasionally, ‘Oh father, where’s the water?’ His pitiful delirious wails were worse to bear than the killing thirst. It was terrible. I seem to see it all over again. I staggered and struggled behind with our other two boys and the oxen. The little fellows bore up bravely and rarely complained, though they could hardly talk, so swollen were their lips and tongues. John would try to cheer up his brother Kirke by telling him of the wonderful water we would find and all the good things we could get to eat. Every step I expected to sink down and die. I could hardly see.”

--Juliette Brier

Who crossed Death Valley with her family in 1850

“The first part of [the Platte River route] is beautiful and the scenery surpassing anything of the kind I have ever seen--large rolling prairies stretching as far as your eye can carry you. . . . The grass so green and flowers of every description from violets to geraniums of the richest hue.”

--Elizabeth Keegan, 12

1852

“There is an Indian village a short distance from our camp. It is quite a small one, only about 20 wigwams. Had been there only a short time when a goodly number of the inhabitants called on us. . . . They were very much amused at our singing, and when we would stop, they would motion for us to go on.”

--Maria Elliott

1859

“After two weeks of traveling, we struck a desert of sand and sagebrush. On this sagebrush plain we found lots of prickly pears. We children were barefooted and I can remember yet how we limped across the desert, for we cut the soles of our feet on the prickly pears. . . . They also made the oxen lame, for the spines would work in between the oxen’s hoofs.”

--Benjamin Franklin Bonney

Who was 7 when his family left Illinois for California in 1845

Source: Associated Press