John Brown's Family and Their California Refuge

After a severe Iowa winter, when Annie and Sarah returned from their last formal schooling, 47-year-old Mary, her four surviving children and two small grandchildren joined a wagon train for California. Their journey, begun in April of 1864, would take six months, fraught with not only the normal dangers that plagued westerning families but also hazards unique to the family of abolitionist John Brown. Because their emigration was of great interest to the reading public, pro-Union reporters eagerly - and perhaps, in retrospect, thoughtlessly - published the route plans of the Browns in newspapers read by those on both sides of a bitterly-divided nation still at war.