The Book: Let’s start with a classic of 90s fiction for kids, Across The Wide and Lonesome Prairie: The Oregon Trail Diary of Hattie Campbell, 1847, by Kristiana Gregory, 1997.

I loved, loved, loved this book as a kid. Loved it. I must have read it twenty times and forced my dad to read it as well. Part of this was because it coincided so neatly with my fifth-grade unit on the Oregon Trail, but part of it was because I was just utterly fascinated with people walking all the way to Oregon. Walking! On their feet! And riding in bumpy wagons! For months on end! Sometimes when I get crabby about having to walk a long way to the mall, I think about people walking to Oregon for six months and then I feel ashamed of myself. And the Oregon Trail seems to be the kind of thing that’s relegated to children’s books and really awful romance novels, the kind you can buy three for a dollar at used bookstores—why is that? It’s such an interesting story!

But let’s move on to the book itself. Hattie is thirteen years old, as we learn on the very first page. One of the more aggravating things about reading Dear America books as an adult is way things like ages and relationships are shoehorned in at the very beginning, but that is fairly par for the course in kids’ books. Anyway, Hattie and her family live in Booneville, “Missoura,” which Google tells me is in central Missouri and now has 8,319 residents, and hosts the “primary breeding farm for the Budweiser Clydesdales,” which is an interesting claim to fame.

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