Frontier Children, by Linda Peavy & Ursula Smith, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1999, $24.95.
Children should be seen and heard, even those youngsters who lived in the 19th-century West. If the roles played by women on the frontier have been largely overlooked until recent years, the part that children played has been downright buried beneath a mountain of blazing gunfights, thundering hooves and clinking whiskey glasses. No question the small people who traveled to and lived in the early West have been neglected. Most Western history buffs know them only as infants in cradleboards, captives of Indians, nameless victims of disease or starvation on wagon trains, or perhaps orphans on trains.
Children, though, as authors Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith remind us with more than 200 vintage photographs and plenty of vivid stories, were “as integral a part of frontier life as were adults. They were evident in every Indian clan and village, on every hacienda, in every mining camp, on every homestead, and in every town.” They were involved in life-and-death struggles. For instance, during the so-called Dakota Conflict of 1862, 11-year-old Merton Eastlick carried his baby brother from a burning cabin after his father and two brothers were killed. And they were involved in the small joys often lost to adults–taking wagon rides to town, nibbling on sticks of candy or playing hide-and-seek.
As the authors note, part of the trouble in dealing with frontier children is that very few letters or journals were written by children. Memoirs written much later and oral history transcripts thus provide many of the stories of childhood. Fortunately, the photographic record of childhood is far more extensive. The result: The frontier children are seen here in fine fashion but are not really “heard”–something just not possible if authors don’t fictionalize their history, and Peavy and Smith do not. This is a book about children, and while not a children’s book (the hard realities of frontier living are included; there are no cuddly mountain lions or talking bears), these 164 pages can–and should–be shared with today’s kids. Frontier Children is a visual delight, with plenty of stories and information to boot about aspects of frontier life too often ignored. It deserves a place on the shelf of any educator or Western historian…and it doesn’t look bad on a kid’s bookshelf, either.
Chrys Ankeny
