Kathleen Karr brings the history of American expansion alive with her three novels set along the Oregon Trail, and finally, in Oregon City itself. The Petticoat Party series reflects the extensive research and real-life experience of the author who re-created the westward journey herself, and thereby came to realize the hardship -- and humor -- experienced by the real pioneers.

Go West, Young Women! The Petticoat Party #1
Summary | Pre-Reading

Phoebe's Folly The Petticoat Party #2
Summary | Pre-Reading

Oregon, Sweet Oregon The Petticoat Party #3
Summary | Pre-Reading

Activities Across the Curriculum
Social Studies | Language Arts | Math | Art
Reviews
Other Books by Kathleen Karr

Feel free to print this teacher's guide for use in the classroom.

Go West, Young Women!

Summary

Phoebe Brown (12) and her sister Amelia (17) are journeying West with their parents along the Oregon Trail in 1846. Book One follows them from New England to Fort Laramie in present-day Wyoming. Along the way a buffalo hunting accident kills a majority of the male members of their wagon train. The women of the train must band together, learn their strengths, and gain resolve in the process of completing the monumental trek.

Find out more about the book.

Pre-reading

Discuss what the United States was like in the early 1840's, particularly in New England and the Middle Atlantic states, where most of the emigrants for the Oregon Country originally lived. Other topics to consider:

The Mexican War (1846-48), the immediate cause of which was the annexation of Texas. The long-term causes included the concept of "Manifest Destiny" which fueled the U.S. desire to also acquire California.

President James K. Polk (in office 1845-1849). Among the "four great measures" he campaigned under for president were settlement of the Oregon boundary dispute with Great Britain (Democrats used the slogan "54-40 or Fight,") and the acquisition of California. By working fourteen hour days, seven days a week, Polk achieved these measures. Unfortunately, the work so exhausted him that he died shortly after leaving office.

Popular culture of the period: Listen to Stephen Foster's "Oh, Susannah," and discuss why it became the theme song of westering emigrants.

Talk about New England mill towns such as Lowell, Massachusetts. Discuss why they opened the age of the Industrial Revolution in America. What would it feel like to work twelve and half hours a day, six days a week, surrounded by the chaos of dangerous, clattering machines and air filled with cotton fibers? How would it feel to be sent from your farming home at the age of nine or ten to live in regulated dormitories filled with young ladies?

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Summary

Book Two continues the remainder of the journey to Oregon City itself. Interaction with native Indian tribes, wild animals and weather keep the women of the wagon train in fighting trim.

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Pre-reading

What of the many Native American tribes whose territories the wagon trains crossed? Why were these tribes at first friendly to the interlopers? (E.g., curiosity, trading possibilities.) As the stream of emigrants quickly turned into a river within a few years, try to understand why the tribes' initial cordiality turned to fear and then aggression as they watched first their grazing lands, then their food (buffalo), and finally the very land itself disappearing before their eyes.

What of women's rights? How much of a voice did women have in decisions their fathers or husbands made for them? What choices were available to young ladies of this period other than marriage? (Amelia Brown desperately wants to become a writer, but is frightened of displeasing her father. Miss Simpson and Miss Prendergast have both chosen the vocation of teaching; how has this affected their private lives?)

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Why I Wrote These Books:

I love American History, particularly events that took place in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The saga of westering pioneers struck me as an epic subject. I wanted to know what it actually felt like to trek across thousands of miles of "The Great American Desert" day after monotonous day. Fifteen miles a day tops, if one was lucky and the wagon didn't break down, or the oxen didn't sicken, or . . .

I dragged my husband and children out to the Oregon Trail. From Independence, Missouri, all the way to Oregon City, Oregon, we followed the original trail. We camped on it, hiked on it, and found every major wagon stopping point and "landmark" along the way. We studied the names and messages scratched into rocks. We scrambled along the banks and among waterfalls of the great Snake and Columbia Rivers. We talked to descendants of Native American tribes who once populated these lands.

After that experience settled into my mind, and after I'd read most of the existing period accounts written by actual emigrants of the Trail, I knew I had to write about these people myself. I wanted to express the hardship, yes, but I also wanted to show the humor of real human beings. "The Petticoat Party" series is the end result. All of the historical situations, all of the locations are absolutely true. Every mile traveled by my characters has been worked out on a vast chart of the original Trail.

What I chose to add that was different was a humorous, feminist interpretation of the experience. My starting premise was to take a group of women who really weren't anxious to pull up stakes and head West. They did it only because they were forced to by their marriage vows of obedience or because it was a lesser evil than, for example, working in the Lowell mills. I've tried in these books to make a little time machine, to recreate what it was really like on the Oregon Trail or, what it could have been like.

There are many stories about journeying West along the Oregon Trail. I noticed a large gap in the literature, however: no one ever wrote about what it was like when these pioneers actually arrived. My mind swirled with questions. What did Oregon City look like in 1846 and how was it different, yet similar to eastern towns? How did the immigrants set up their homesteads? What was their connection to the rest of the world, and how did they learn of events happening outside the Willamette Valley? How did the original occupants -- the Native American tribes -- react to this sudden influx of strangers onto their lands? I began to try to find the answers to these and other questions.

Visiting Oregon City and the Willamette Valley helped. Seeing the area today, I got a feel for the lay of the land -- how trees still towered, rivers still flowed (despite added dams,) cliffs still brooded, and the land itself was still wet and green with rain. I also collected and studied old photographs and maps until I had an image of the town circa 1846-1850 in my head. I began to subtract people and progress from the current land and add my own characters to the earlier environment.

It's easy in theory to learn how to build a log cabin or a barn. There are many books on the subject. I wasn't satisfied with theory. I wanted to know what it felt like to whittle a peg for a joist or actually help raise the walls of a barn. Luckily, I got the opportunity when the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., held a barnraising within the cavernous walls of its building. As a volunteer I was able to do all these things using period tools under the supervision of master carpenters. It was an extraordinary experience. I hope I was able to evoke some of the excitement and sense of accomplishment and camaraderie in "Oregon, Sweet Oregon's" barnraising scene.

Oregon City during this period was connected to the world by occasional ships arriving to do business with the Hudson's Bay Company's trading center in Fort Vancouver. More importantly, it was connected by its very own newspaper, "The Oregon Spectator." I studied period copies of the journal in the Library of Congress, then created my own paper, "The Oregon Intelligencer." I gave it my own editor, the struggling young man who gives Amelia the opportunity to continue her literary aspirations. Next I needed to know how a real newspaper office would have looked at that time. I also wanted to know how a press was actually operated. The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History had all the answers. I introduced myself to the museum's resident printing expert who not only answered my questions, but also raised the ropes on the exhibit of the pertinent press, invited me inside, and actually taught me how to set type, ink it, and print with the press. After my "Oregon Intelligencer" scenes were written, this magnificent gentleman also proofed the copy to catch errors. (He was distraught because Johnny Tremain, the most famous of all children's books involving the printing business, contained numerous technical errors.)

As for the local Native American tribes, I soon learned that they were by nature less belligerent than most of the Plains tribes. The coastal Chinooks quietly carried on their trading endeavors. The Cayuse on the other side of the Cascade Mountains did eventually lose their patience. The results were the Whitman Massacre and the succeeding Cayuse Wars. I acquired a Chinook Dictionary to make my dialogue between these Indians and the Kennan twins more authentic. I visited the Whitman Mission National Historic Site near Walla Walla, Washington, to try to understand the competing point of view of these earliest missionaries to the Oregon Territory.

Slowly I learned what it was actually like to have arrived in the Oregon Country in 1846. I began to feel as if I were one of the new immigrants myself. I hope Phoebe's adventures and her state of mind reflect all these elements. More to the point, I hope that she comes alive for readers in her own right and that the research I did is conveyed with enough subtlety to make Phoebe and her world real. Historical fiction is meant to bring the past believably alive. It shouldn't use a sledgehammer to give the reader facts.

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Oregon, Sweet Oregon

Summary

In Book Three, Phoebe Brown (13) and her family have arrived in the promised land of Oregon. Amid the late rains of autumn and the early snows of a particularly difficult winter, the family must built a cabin on the land Papa Brown has chosen. Settled at last, Phoebe spends the next two years learning that pioneering life is not for her. It has its compensations for nearly every other member of their original wagon train: Phoebe's big sister Amelia finally lands her printer beau; Papa is content with his rich fields; Mama satisfies herself with her home, neighbors, and the Oregon City Ladies' Literary Society; Miss Simpson starts her own school for young ladies. But Phoebe longs for new adventures. When she meets Robbie Robson, a young man with similar goals, she takes a bold chance to fulfill herself.

Find out more about the book.

Pre-reading

Discuss the major events in the Oregon Territory bordering California during the period 1846-1848:

The Oregon Controversy and the Hudson's Bay Company: The peace treaty that ended the War of 1812 between the U.S. and Great Britain left undecided the ownership of "the Oregon Country," so it remained jointly controlled by the two countries. The Territory was a huge, vaguely known block of land stretching from Mexican California north to Russian Alaska, and from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. This land was originally explored by wilderness men who worked for competing fur traders. John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company established Astoria on the Pacific Coast in 1811. In 1825, to keep the British interest in the land alive, the Hudson's Bay Company established Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River.

As it turned out, Fort Vancouver became the end point of the Oregon Trail, and John McLoughlin, the fort's chief, or factor, found himself dealing more often with new American settlers than with British interests. McLoughlin was cordial to the Americans and eventually became an American himself, settling in Oregon City. In the interim, his fort became the major point of civilization in the Territory. To the dismay of his British employers, McLoughlin sent out a call for more American settlers. With the population increasing in the Americans' favor, the British eventually moved their fur operations to Victoria Island. As the U.S. became more involved in the Mexican War (1846-48), Washington backed down on its claim, and the boundary dispute was resolved in 1846 with the fixing of the Canadian-U.S. boundary at the 49th parallel, even after the war hawks in the east had vowed "54-0 or Fight!" (N.B. that the 54th parallel would have reached the southern tip of Alaska.)

The Donner Party Disaster: The most infamous wagon train of the 1846 westering season, the Donner Party allowed itself to be conned by California promoters waiting at South Pass. Convinced to take an unproven "cutoff" route through the Utah desert to California, the emigrants were beset by hardships, bad decisions, and bad luck. Instead of making it over the Sierra Nevada Mountains before winter, they were stranded by heavy, early snows. They could have walked out and survived, but were loath to leave their wagons and livestock. They stayed, starved, and eventually resorted to cannibalism. Of the 23 men, 15 women, and 41 children who reached Donner Lake (named in their honor for the spot where they wintered) two-thirds of the men, one third of the children, and one quarter of the women died. Four relief expeditions were sent through the mountains for help before the survivors were finally evacuated to Sutter's Fort with the coming of spring. Twelve-year-old survivor Virginia Reed summed up the situation in a letter sent back East after being saved: "Never take no cutofs and hury along as fast as you can."

The Whitman Massacre and the Cayuse Wars: Marcus and Narcissa Whitman traveled West to organize a Methodist mission to the Cayuse Indians in 1836. Narcissa was the first white woman to cross the Rockies, and their baby, Alice, was the first child born of U.S. citizens in the Pacific Northwest. They built their mission in the dry plains between the Blue Mountains and the Cascades (near present Walla Walla) and called it Waiilatpu.

The Whitmans preached to the Cayuse, and Marcus, a doctor, treated their illnesses. After ten years they had few native converts and found themselves ministering more often to the wagon trains following the trail they had pioneered. When little Alice drowned in the mission's pond, the Whitmans adopted the Sager children who were orphaned on the Oregon Trail during the 1844 season. By autumn of 1847 there were 74 people staying at the mission, most of them wintering emigrants. The Cayuse, frustrated by a combination of ever-increasing whites and the results of a disastrous measles epidemic that began decimating them, massacred thirteen of these people on November 29, including the Whitmans and most of the Sager children.

When Gov. George Abernethy, head of the provisional government in Oregon Territory, heard of the massacre, he called out a company of riflemen to punish the Cayuse. Soon 500 volunteers joined the effort. The Cayuse fled to the mountains and the volunteers pursued them, but not very efficiently. Eventually the volunteers wandered back home. After two years of hardships, the Cayuse gave up five of their men in an effort to make peace with the whites. The five were arrested for murder and tried by jury in Oregon City. They were hanged in 1850. This punishment solved nothing (and it wasn't even clear that these particular men had been involved in the massacre.) For the next generation intermittent Indian wars plagued the Pacific Northwest, but the Cayuse were never again a source of real trouble.

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A Journey
by Kathleen Karr

"I was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and grew up on a chicken farm in Dorothy, New Jersey. After escaping to college, I worked in the film industry, and also taught in high school and college. I seriously began writing fiction on a dare from my husband. Then my children asked me to write a book for them (It Ain't Always Easy) and I discovered I loved writing children's fiction.

"I find it a pleasure to be able to invent my own worlds. To watch a character come alive, become real flesh and blood and take the reins of a story in hand, is an exhilarating experience. It's also hard work. I love historical settings, and feel quite comfortable in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It's a challenge to try to recreate a specific time and place, with its specific language patterns. Short of inventing a time machine, this is my way of reentering the past. It's my way of showing my readers that while events may change, the nature of human beings is fairly constant. Courage and common decency against difficult odds have always existed.

"Where do my ideas come from? I've always loved to read, and to travel. Over the years my family and I have visited nearly every state in our country (and Puerto Rico.) We've driven through most of Europe, walked the walls of old Jerusalem, sailed up the Nile, and gone by dugout canoe through the rainforest of Venezuela to Angel Falls. We've traveled by gypsy caravan in Ireland and trekked with burros in the high country of Yosemite. We've camped on the Oregon Trail. Along the way we picked up a taste for archeology. We've dug at Montana gold towns, pioneer sites in upper Wisconsin, and excavated an Anasazi pottery kiln in Utah. Coming home from all of this, we even excavated the historical grounds of my children's school in Washington, D.C. (the former summer home of four U.S. presidents!)

"So do the ideas come from these trips? "The Petticoat Party Series" certainly did. Other ideas come from research at the Library of Congress and the National Archives in Washington. I love to root through old letters, deciphering the wonderful handwriting from another time. I love to find people who actually existed, and build a life around them from the bits and pieces that they show of themselves in these letters. Sometimes the inspiration for an entire novel will pop out at me from just a thrown-away phrase. Soon an intricate adventure is bubbling in my brain, crying to get out and be peopled with real characters.

"And how does my family put up with all this? My husband Larry is a physicist/computer consultant and my biggest supporter. After working with numbers all day, I think he secretly enjoys following my fictional flights of fancy. As for my children, well, they've been reading and editing my work since they could read and edit. One positive result is that they have no fear of writing school essays and papers. They've grown up in a house full of books and words and still feel comfortable with them. My daughter Suzanne has taken off for Brown University, while my son Daniel is about to start the tenth grade. I guess my only complaint is that they've both grown beyond children's fiction to adult literature. But they still faithfully critique my novels-in-progress!

"I've given talks in classroom and assembly situations. For larger audiences, more generic topics seem to work, e.g., "So You Want to Be a Writer?" (what it's really like; where ideas/inspiration come from; how a character comes alive). Since I love history, I can also do specific talks on specific books, e.g., "Along the Real Oregon Trail with Phoebe Brown," (outlining period and current conditions of the Trail; pointing out original adventures that happened to real people along the way). Since I also happen to have spent a number of years in the film industry and teaching film history, I can do terrific talks on the Silent Film era. For more intimate classroom encounters, I can do short "writing seminars," getting the kids really involved in the process of creation. In short, nearly anything requested/required by a school situation is possible."

Ms. Karr is available for school visits, and to arrange one please contact Catherine Balkin at telephone 212-207-7450 or email catherine.balkin@harpercollins.com. Ms. Karr's honorarium is $750 a day, plus expenses, and she'll do up to three presentations a day.

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Activities Across the Curriculum:

Social Studies:

Why did the pioneers go West?
Much is written about the trek itself, but little is said about the reasoning behind the decision thousand of eastern families made to uproot themselves from everything they knew and were comfortable with in their lives. The Brown family leaves New England for two specific reasons:

1) Papa Brown's scrappy Massachusetts soil has finally worn out. He is a farmer, and the accounts of free land in the Oregon Country ("man-tall grass green four seasons, sprouting from loam a yard thick,") are irresistible.

2) The Brown sisters are frightened of the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts. Older sister Amelia has already spent six months in back-breaking, limb-chewing, soul-deadening labor in these mills to help support her family. Younger sister Phoebe is petrified with fear that her father will send her off to the mills next. To these sisters, even a two-thousand mile trek by wagon seems a far, far better thing.

Other families on the wagon train leave for political reasons, especially the idea of Manifest Destiny. This was the doctrine (popular in the first half of the nineteenth century) that the United States had the right and duty to expand its territory and influence throughout North America. In the early 1840's the Oregon Territory was still being disputed between the United States and Great Britain. It was believed that if a sufficient number of American immigrants settled on these lands, the chances were more favorable that the Territory would become permanent U.S. property. In point of fact, this is what did happen.

Were women truly in demand out West?
In its May issue of 1846, the Scientific American stated:

It is urged upon emigrants to Oregon to take wives with them. There is no supply of the article in that heathen land.

In truth, there were women already in the West. These were, of course, Native Americans. Wilderness men in the Oregon Territory had been marrying Indian women for decades. By 1800, Mexican women were being sent by the Spanish colonial government of Mexico north to the province of California as marriage fodder for the men working there. But the first white, Anglo-Saxon woman did not arrive west of the Rockies until Narcissa Whitman journeyed to what is now Walla Walla, Washington, with her missionary husband, Marcus, in 1836.

John McLoughlin, the factor (or boss) of the Hudson Bay Company's Fort Vancouver, was himself married to an Indian woman. McLoughlin was responsible for recommending that more eastern women move west. He strongly believed they would be a civilizing factor in the wilderness. And yes, there were lots of men in the Oregon Territory still single and anxious to take on eastern brides.

As noted in the historical background above, there was a lot happening in the Pacific Northwest/Oregon Territory during the first half of the nineteenth century. Interestingly enough, all the strings were being pulled from the East-- either by men like Astor and his fur company or by the politicians in Washington City. American History and Social Studies courses could certainly be enriched by exploring these events in greater detail. The fact that John Jacob Astor made one of the great American fortunes in the fur trade through the work of illiterate wilderness men who hunted, trapped, married into the Native American tribes of the West, and did the real trail blazing of the region ought to intrigue kids.

Read the stories of some of these men (i.e., Jedediah Smith.) Discuss how these furs were used (primarily to fuel the fashion of "beaver top" hats.) Could such an industry survive in today's politically correct "Fur is Dead" environment?

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People talked differently in the 1840's than they do now. These novels reflect some of those differences. The characters sometimes speak more formally than we are used to speaking. Quite often, they use bigger, fancier words. All of this was the result of how people normally lived in that period:

Families were a strong unit within the community, and holding together each community was its church. In a time before television and radio and computers, people used their churches as gathering places and social centers, as well as places of religious worship.

Because of this central role religion held in their lives, the Bible was used as a teaching tool for learning how to read. The King James version of the Bible, written while Shakespeare was producing his plays, was the edition used. The King James Bible was, and is, one of the finest pieces of poetic literature extant in the English language. Thus, nineteenth century Americans were steeped in flowing, ornate words. They used these words, and the sentence structure of the Bible, naturally. The art of oratory (speechmaking) was another natural extension of this. Giving and listening to speeches was a prime entertainment of the times.

There are currently available hundreds of first-person, period narratives written by immigrants who survived both the Oregon Trail and the homesteading experience. Some are literate, some are filled with spelling and grammar mistakes, just as they were written. All of them are poignant. Gather excerpts from these narratives for your students to read. They'll encounter real people, experience real trials and tribulations. Most importantly, they'll learn how these people triumphed over adversities today's kids could never imagine.

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Study a map of the Oregon Trail. Break down the number of miles between logical camping sites each night. From the quality of the terrain, decide how many miles a wagon hauled by four oxen could logically have traveled in one day (anywhere from less than half a mile for a tedious river crossing, to eight or ten miles when the oxen were thirsty in the desert, to a maximum of fifteen miles over the flat, grassy prairies.)

How much money would a family need to make the trip? Estimate the costs for the following supplies, per person, for the journey. You can make up or estimate prices. Period statistics are difficult to find. We do know, however, that in 1846 Fort Laramie was charging $l.00 a pint for coffee, $1.50 a pint for sugar, and $.50 a pint (16 ounces, or half a pound) for flour, prices which were considered highway robbery. Supplies:

wheat flour: 200 pounds
corn meal: fifty pounds
hard tack (dry biscuits): a barrel
dried fruit (to ward off scurvy): one bushel
bacon: fifty pounds
a milk cow
salt
sugar
coffee
tea
a gun, powder, and shot
Don't forget to throw in a wagon and oxen!
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How to Build a Cabin or Raise a Barn:
Using the books suggested below, design on paper a typical pioneer homestead. Estimate the length, width, and number of logs needed to construct a cabin or barn.
How many trees would need to be cut down? How long might it take to chop down each tree using hand axes? How long would it take to finish the particular building if only one person were working on it? How would this time element change with more people helping? Add the human factor: you slip and break your leg before the roof is finished. Will you survive the winter? In short, get the kids to think like pioneers.

Bibliography: the following books contain superb drawings and descriptions of period tools and construction methods

Sloane, Eric. Diary of an Early American Boy. Ballantine, New York. 1965.
Sloane, Eric. Eric Sloan's America. Promontory Press, New York. 1982.
Sloane, Eric. A Reverence for Wood. Ballantine, New York. 1973.
Tunis, Edwin. Frontier Living. World Publishing Company, Cleveland. 1961.

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Reviews:

"Very enjoyable . . . Kathleen Karr does a good job of communicating the sense of hope and adventure, the details of life on the trail, and the problems and hardships that plagued those courageous enough to venture across the country in rickety wagons. I'm of the opinion that we need many more heroines as funny, brave, clearsighted, and determined as Phoebe, and I can't wait to find out what she does in and to Oregon." --Karen Cushman

"A good adventure tale by Karr and a real consciousness-raiser to boot." --Kirkus Reviews

"Phoebe is a likable, spunky heroine who will attract a loyal following." --Booklist

"Karr creates intelligent characters and examines thought-provoking themes. Phoebe realizes that she has the power to find final freedom within herself and learns that "all of us have something worth fighting for." . . .With dashes of humor and romance, this is a fine addition to the series." --School Library Journal

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