Children Go West: Fact and Fiction

Abstract

Children Go West:Fact and Fiction Marilyn Fain Apseloff (bio) The West has always drawn people seeking a new life or adventure; between 1854 and 1929, it was attractive to many New York City residents for a special reason. It was a place of myth and opportunity, a chance for a better life away from the degradation and poverty of the city slums, both in reality and in the fiction of writers like Mark Twain and Bret Harte. Rumors and fiction created a dream of Eden in many minds, and the real accomplishments of some perpetuated that dream. The West, from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean, offered the prospect of betterment, of another chance for happiness, not only for adults but for children. Although Missouri and the Kansas prairie may not seem West to everyone, to an Easterner around the turn of the twentieth century (and even today), St. Joseph, Missouri, and the prairie country were definitely part of the real West. Even Pennsylvania and Ohio were considered the West to native New Yorkers. An astute New Yorker, Charles Loring Brace, concerned about the growing number of homeless, destitute, and orphaned children in his city, founded the Children's Aid Society in 1853 to do something about the problem. The Society offered a solution: the removal of children to foster homes out west. According to Henry Thurston in The Dependent Child, "The one road, as [Brace] saw it, for the homeless child, and even for the children of poor parents, was that of emigration to foster homes in the villages and on the prosperous farms of the West" (96). There was another practical reason for this solution, as noted by Miriam Langsam in Children West: "it cost only a tenth as much to send a child west as it did to maintain him in a jail or asylum" (25). Little notice of the phenomenon of this emigration of children was taken until decades after the last orphan train made its run in 1929. In 1983 a substantial article with numerous photographs appeared in American History Illustrated. It was "The Orphan Trains" by Leslie Wheeler, and it described the plight of destitute nineteenth-century children and their growing impact on the crime rate. Wheeler cites the chief of police of New York City, who estimated that "there were ten thousand homeless children at large in the city, and . . . that four-fifths of the felony complaints for one year, 1852, were against minors" (14). Although Brace hoped to reach the children in the city through Sunday school meetings, education, and employment and "to establish lodging houses for homeless children, and industrial schools where boys and girls could learn a useful trade" (15), the main goal was to get the children out of the city and into good homes in the country. That aim was called "placing-out." According to Wheeler, as stated in annual reports, "the society's goal was 'to help the children help themselves'" (16). The proper environment was crucial, and that is why placing-out in a kind, industrious, religious family became central to the society. There was a screening process, not always successful, both of families applying for children and of the children themselves. The orphan [End Page 24] trains began in 1854 and ended in 1929. During that time "nearly a hundred thousand orphaned, destitute, and unwanted children from New York City slums made the journey westward to new homes in the country" (10). Decades later, the impact of the placing-out of the children as described by Wheeler attracted the attention of others and became the impetus for five novels. Four of them, called The Orphan Train Quartet, were written by Joan Lowery Nixon when a friend of hers brought Wheeler's article to her attention and suggested that she would be a good person to write about the situation. The first book, A Family Apart (1987), reveals why the Kelly children are separated from their mother and put on the orphan train for St. Joseph, Missouri. The novel then portrays the children's experiences on the train and at their destination when they are taken by various families, with special focus on some of...