This book is an adventure from cover to cover, but the dramatic events in it are real history. Across the Plains in '64 is the story of how thirteen-year-old Philura Vanderburgh and her family crossed the continent in a covered wagon as part of the Great Daily Train. Many years later, when she had children of her own, Philura told them of her experiences on the journey, and her daughter Anna wrote them down especially for young people who will never again have the chance to hear the pioneers tell their own stories.
Across the Plains in '64 tells all about the hazardous journey - the preparations, the daily excitements, labors, and fun, and the people who were going West. The wagon train forded treacherous rivers, crossed bleak and hot deserts, and climbed impossibly high mountains. Travelers on the trail ahead and behind were massacred. The Vanderburghs met unfriendly Indians, bushwackers, snakes, and quicksand, but they had their good times too; there was a thrilling hunt for fresh food, a stop at exciting Fort Laramie, and a meeting with an Indian who liked dogs.
Reading of the trials and triumphs of the Oregon Trail will help us to appreciate our own twentieth-century lives, because in order to understand America as it is today, we need to know how it grew. A great part of our heritage is bound up in our expansion westward, and this book is an authentic part of the saga of the great wagon trains which crossed the deserts and the mountains to California and Oregon in the middle 1800's. The prairie schooners carried families who were going to make homes in the West, to build, to develop, to grow - not prospectors who wanted to make a quick fortune and return to the luxuries of the East, not hunters or trappers who explored and exploited but never build solidly. It is well to remember these pioneers in these days when there is so much talk about the "American character."
The Author, Anna Dell Clinkinbeard, daughter of the heroine and teller of Across the Plains in '64, was born in Coos Bay (then Marshfield), Oregon. A graduate of San Jose State Normal School in California, she was a teacher for thirty-five years, including twenty years as principal of the Central School Coos Bay. She retired in 1948.
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