"Did you get the tar?" demanded Seenie.

"I got it," nodded Peter. "But I almost didn't. Ma saw me getting the tar bucket and asked what I wanted it for. When I told her we wanted to write our names on Independence Rock, she said, 'Fools' names and fools' faces always seen in public places.'"

But no matter what, Peter Hockett and Seenie Luelling had to write their names on Independence Rock. The names of everyone else who had traveled the Oregon Trail were inscribed there, including those of Kit Carson and J.C. Fremont, whom history has long ceased to call fools, and how could Seenie face her twenty-eight grandchildren if hers was missing? Seenie and Peter were traveling the Trail with the "tree wagon" filled with grafted fruit trees and berry bushes which Seenie's father was taking to Oregon. And it is through Seenie's determined efforts to preserve her own gooseberry bush, through the long perilous journey, that the reader fully realizes the stubborn vision of the man who brought grafted trees to the Northwest Territory.

All boys and girls who like good adventure will alternately laugh and thrill with this delightful and unusual story of the historic trek of the tree wagon over the Oregon Trail.

From the dust jacket