What is a better life? When your parents send you with an unfamiliar family to go west where opportunities are supposed to be better, Ellen wondered better for whom. Times were hard, that was true, but to leave her family in search of more opportunities for a seventeen year old girl was difficult. It wasn't long before she realized that the Martin family only took her along to help with the work required to travel west on a covered wagon. Befriended by the woman in the wagon behind theirs, Ellen came to the conclusion that she would be better off slipping away in the dead of night to search for her own happiness.
