The Valiant Seven (Paperback)

The sweep of the prairies, the creaking of wagon wheels over dust-rutted solitudes, the thunder of the buffalo, the heartbreak of tragedy, along the Old Oregon Trail-of such elements has Netta Sheldon Phelps woven this thrillingly true account of one wagon train out of a stream of those that toiled ever westward in the forties (1840s) to found homes and farms beyond the Rockies.

The adventures of the Sager children live vividly in this book because every page, every detail, has been taken from the actual diaries and reminiscences of the three girls who escaped the disaster that overtook the ill-starred Waiilatpu Mission.

In the whole reach of American history there is probably no other family of boys and girls whose story can rival in uniqueness and adventure that of the Sager children.

Two boys, John and Frank, and five girls, Catherine, Elizabeth, Tilda, Hannah, and Henrietta, were the seven children of Henry and Naomi Sager. Only eight years after the first white woman crossed the trackless continent, this brave family left civilization behind them, piled their little store of household goods into a prairie schooner, and set out over the Indian-held wilderness that stretched between the Missouri River and far-off Oregon.

Before the journey was well under way, the father was stricken by the malarial fever which the smiling Great Plains often treacherously harbored, and he was left by the sorrowing family in a roadside grave.

Beyond the Rockies the mother, too, succumbed to the hardships of the trail, and there among the bleak, sandy wastes the Sager children became orphans.

John, who was only 14, took charge of the ox team, and Catherine, who was 9, became the mother to the little group as they continued along the mighty Snake River and over the formidable Blue Mountains to their destination, the Mission of kindly Dr. Whitman, missionary to the Cayuse Indians.