The more things change...
So the next unit is the Westward movement for my fifth graders. I'm looking through collections of diaries and letters and memoirs of Pioneers and others involved in the Westward Movement.
Came across this bit from a letter from a wagon train driver going out to the Gold Rush.
Whenever a wagon unluckily gets stuck in the mud in crossing some little rut, the other rains behind made a universal rush to try to pass that wagon and to get ahead of each other. Amid the yelling, popping of whips and cursing, perhaps a wagon wheel is broken, two or three men knocked down in a fight, and twenty guns drawn out of the wagons. All of this occasioned by a delay of perhaps two minutes and a half.
James Evans, 1849
Not much different from LA freeways in 2006.
Came across this bit from a letter from a wagon train driver going out to the Gold Rush.
Whenever a wagon unluckily gets stuck in the mud in crossing some little rut, the other rains behind made a universal rush to try to pass that wagon and to get ahead of each other. Amid the yelling, popping of whips and cursing, perhaps a wagon wheel is broken, two or three men knocked down in a fight, and twenty guns drawn out of the wagons. All of this occasioned by a delay of perhaps two minutes and a half.
James Evans, 1849
Not much different from LA freeways in 2006.