Title Post: Which Way to the Wild West?

Today's post comes from Steve Sheinkin, author of King George: What Was His Problem?, Two Miserable Presidents, and his latest, Which Way to the Wild West?, which came out earlier this month. Enjoy!

Any writer who does school visits knows the feeling. You look looking out at a group of kids and realize: I'm losing them. You can lose fifth-graders at any moment—though not usually in the first minute. But that’s what happened at a recent “Book Bash” at a Brooklyn elementary school. The second I opened my mouth, a hand shot up and a kid called out, “Are you the guy who wrote The Invention of Hugo Cabret?”

      “No,” I said. “I think he’s coming here after lunch.”

      “Oh,” the kid said.

      Then silence.

      “I write history books,” I said.     

      Longer silence.

It was a time of crisis, a time to abandon the script and improvise. “You’re stuck in the mountains, starving to death,” I said. “How many of you guys cook and eat your best friend?”

That bought me a minute of attention.

I grabbed my latest book, Which Way to the Wild West?—all about America’s wild and violent westward expansion—and flipped to the Donner Party section (titled “You Call This a Party?”). I read them the story, which I tell from the point of view of Virginia Reed, a 12 year old girl traveling west with her family in 1847. After taking a disastrous “short-cut,” the group ends up trapped in Sierra Nevada snow drifts. Facing certain starvation, Virginia volunteers to join a 15-person rescue party. They take enough food to keep them alive six days—nine days later, they’re hopelessly lost in the white peaks. As the group shivers around the campfire, someone dares to say what they’re all thinking: do we kill and eat one of us, to the save the others?   

“Even the wind seemed to hold its breath,” Virginia later wrote. “Then the suggestion was made that lots be cast and whoever drew the longest slip should be the sacrifice.”

I stopped here and asked the kids what they’d do in Virginia’s place. A lively discussion followed, with opinions ranging from “Gross” and “No way!” to “You gotta do it, you gotta stay alive.” One girl suggested that cannibalism was not very different from eating a chicken. In terms of morality, that is, not flavor (anyway, I hope that’s what she meant).

I told the class that Virginia and the group couldn’t go through with drawing lots, but that a few soon died anyway. The others, Virginia included, sliced flesh from the bodies, roasted it, ate it, and packed up the extras—carefully labeling the pieces, so no one would have to eat a loved one. Virginia was one of just seven to make it out of the mountains alive.

Now I had the kids with me, and I pressed my advantage by reading a Lewis and Clark story that never makes the textbooks. Lewis was hunting elk with a nearsighted Corps of Discovery member, Pierre Cruzatte. Lewis spotted an animal and was aiming his gun when he heard a bang and felt a sudden pain in his butt. He turned around and saw blood running down his thigh.

Turning to Cruzatte, he said: “You have shot me.”

Cruzatte denied it, an audacious refutation given the fact that the bullet from his gun was visibly lodged in Lewis’ leather breeches. (Lewis spent the next few weeks lying face down in a canoe, but was otherwise fine.)

Then I told them about William Thompson, a Transcontinental Railroad worker who clashed with Cheyenne fighters and became one of the few people to get scalped and live to tell the tale. “I can’t describe it to you,” Thompson told a reporter. “It just felt as if the whole head was taken right off.” Amazingly, he recovered the scalp, and paid a doctor to sew it back on. After a painful failure of an operation, he donated bloody flap of skin and hair to the Omaha Public Library. They put it on display in the children’s section.

These are just a few of the hundreds of stories I’ve wanted to tell kids for years. But in my career as a history textbook writer, the editors always crossed them out of my manuscript. So I decided to write my own books, full of all this great rejected material. Do I think kids need to know all this stuff? Not really—it certainly won’t show up on their standardized tests. But let’s face it: most kids think history stinks. So my strategy is to bust that preconception first, and teach second.

And it worked that day in Brooklyn. The kids were energized about history, and maybe even a little impressed with a history book writer. At least, right up until the very end of the Q and A, when a kid asked: “What kind of car do you drive?”

Comments

[Kristi Valiant]

How wonderful! I was one of those kids that hated history but would have loved this book. That was some quick thinking during your author visit.

[Kellie]

That sounds like it was a great visit for the kids!