Westward Ho - Tales from the Trail

      Each day, students were read several scenarios from the trail and asked to make decisions about their journey. After listening to the "Travel" entries, they met in their wagon groups and decided what to do. After reaching a decision and sharing their ideas with the rest of the wagon train, students heard their "Fate" for each scenario. (We used the excellent resource "Westward Ho!" created by Leni Donlan and Kathleen Ferenz from Classroom Teacher, The Wagonmaster, http://www.cyberbee.com/wwho/)

We tracked our progress on a map, and learned a lot of new vocabulary that we tried to incorporate into our writing each day. We also tried to paint a picture with our words, describing how things felt, what they looked like, etc., and including our personal feelings about our experiences.

Here's an example of a "Travel and Fate": 

Crossing of Wakarusa River (Blue Jacket) 

(5 miles southeast of Lawrence, Kansas) 

Mile 54
May 5-7 

You thought Blue River was meaner'n a chained dog to cross? Then you don't know beans from a buckshot! Because you've just reached the most difficult river crossing on the Oregon Trail. "Wakarusa" means thigh-deep. But the Wakarusa River rarely is. Within hours it can flow from a sluggish river within steep banks to a dangerous flood overflowing to the nearby marshes. You can see the murky, brown pools that have the slimy glisten of water snakes and leeches. 

You must spend several days in the painstaking process of moving supplies and children, lowering your wagons by means of ropes, and fording the racing river. How will you cross this river? By the way, how many oxen do you have? 

(After you reach your decision, read the fate.) 

Fate: Those families that had less than 10 oxen to pull their wagons across had to pay a local Shawnee Indian named "Fish" $5 to pull their wagons out of the mud.

We read about filling up water barrels tainted with cholera, making river crossings in calm, shallow and wild, deep water. We made decisions about stopping for supplies or detouring to see amazing natural sights. We tried to figure out what to do when we had to move our wagons down a steep incline or through narrow passes wide enough for only one wagon at a time. We gathered around a (paper) campfire and listened to a few tall tales told on the trail -- "The Legend of Deadman's Pass" was a big hit and sparked several spin-off tales (listen to an excerpt of one in the videos below). We imagined what it would be like to be at the back of the wagon train, breathing in dust and worrying about the health of our oxen and what might be waiting for us in the mountain pass ahead. We also read about many of the main stops along the trail - here we are "carving" our names into Chimney Rock:

At the end of each session, we wrote about what we had experienced that day, often sharing our journal entries:

We researched things we came across along the way, like bicarbonate of soda and hot springs, and we thought about what  might happen if we decided on another route (Santa Fe trail, anyone?)

We also, of course, reflected on the transitions, both personal and larger-scale, that people went through on this journey, and how it changed each individual as well as the landscape.