I will be glad to proofread "Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey" by Lillian Schlissel if someone can scan it.
It's a terrific non-fiction book for young adults (for readers 12 and older). The author paints a vivid portrait of what it was like for women to travel west between 1840 and 1870, doing so by presenting extensive selections from actual diaries women kept.
Here's an excerpt from a review of it: "for the married women, particularly those with young children, the trip was fraught with danger and fear. Children could fall under wagon wheels or be left behind in the confusion of traveling with as many as one hundred other wagons. There were buffalo stampedes, Indian attacks, snakebites, dysentery, starvation, and cholera - many women note individual graves, sometimes one per mile. In addition, one of every five women was pregnant when the journey began or became so in the course of a trip that guidebooks said would take three to four months, but often took six to eight. Through Lillian Schlissel's fascinating and extremely readable account, we gain a fuller understanding of the journey few of these women wanted to take."
There are multiple editions; here's the info on the most recent: Paperback: 288 pages Publisher: Schocken (July 6, 2004) ISBN-10: 0805211764 ISBN-13: 978-0805211764 Judy s. To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. To get a list of available commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line.
