Students experience pioneer life
By TRAVIS PURSER
Express Staff Writer
Parent
Kathy Haskell, right foreground, urges Hemingway Elementary and Carey School students to
tow the line. A tug-of-war was the grand finale to Thursday's Wagons Ho event, during
which students received a mirthful dose of history. (Express photos by Willy Cook)
Imagine this: The year is 1889 and your family has just arrived in the
Wood River Valley with two mules, a covered wagon, two barrels of flour, some dried beef
and a few basic hand tools.
About the only permanent buildings you can see are a bank and a
mercantile on Main Street. Most of the locals—the industrious ones—live in crude
cabins, and the rest have pitched tents. You’ve got $12.65 stowed under the wagon
seat.
What do you do next?
Students from Hemingway Elementary and Carey School had a chance to
figure that out for themselves Thursday in the schools’ annual Wagons Ho event.
Students and parents spent the entire day outdoors, where they were
challenged by such pioneer dilemmas as how to replace a missing button.
With little more than the materials Mother Nature offers and their own
ingenuity, they discovered they could make butter, split shingles to keep the snow and
rain out of a log cabin, rope and brand cattle and wash their clothes.
"It’s
the best hands-on approach to learning pioneer history and life," teacher and
organizer Jill Palm said.
But pioneer life was not all hard work and no play. After a pioneer
lunch straight out of the chuck wagon, students, teachers and parents spent the afternoon
playing pioneer games.
There was a sack race, and a spoon and egg race. But the grand finale
was the championship tug-of-war contest.
Was it the Carey School against Hemingway? No, Palm said, just like the
Old West, they were all mixed up together.
