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The Women Who Traveled West
Paperback
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Publisher: Sarah Colleen Books
Pages: 262
Weight: 0.68
Height: 0.59 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
In the spring of 1847, Sarah Mercer has one loaf of bread left and two daughters depending on her.
Nearly a year has passed since a mine collapse killed her husband, her father, and her brothers, leaving the women of their Pennsylvania mining valley to survive on dwindling relief payments and whatever work they can find. When the mine finally closes for good, Sarah knows there is nothing left to wait for.
So when talk begins of wagon trains heading west, Sarah makes a choice few expect from a widow with children: she will go.
Her younger sister Rebecca refuses to let her go alone. Their Aunt Maggie, a lifelong midwife with a quiet knowledge of herbs and healing, joins them, as does another young widow with two boys of her own. Together, the women sell what they can, pool their money, and buy their way into a wagon train bound toward a future none of them can clearly imagine.
The road is harder than the stories ever made it sound.
There are blistered feet, dangerous crossings, illness, hunger, brutal heat, frightened children, and the constant work of keeping food on the fire and wagons moving forward. Along the way, more women carrying losses of their own join their growing circle, and strangers slowly become the people they depend upon most.
For Sarah, the journey is also something more. Haunted by the earth that took nearly every man she loved, she longs for a place with enough sky to breathe again. But learning to survive without Peter is one thing. Allowing herself to imagine a life beyond grief is another, especially when the quiet steadiness of Christopher Talbot begins to feel like something she thought she had lost forever.
And while Sarah learns that accepting help does not make her weak, Rebecca discovers that the life waiting for her may not look anything like the one women have always told her she should want.
Rooted in the everyday realities of nineteenth-century westward migration, The Women Who Traveled West is a historical novel about widows, sisters, mothers, daughters, and the quiet labor that kept families moving when history was busy remembering the men.
They are not grand heroes.
They are tired women with sore feet, shared bread, frightened children, and miles of road ahead of them.
And they are going west.
The Women Who Traveled West is Book One in The Long Road West Series.
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