Steve Sorensen was just finishing his history degree at the University of Utah in 1997 and felt certain he would get a graduate fellowship that year. But he didnât. Suddenly, he had several months of free time, so he decided to take his family â wife Wendy and four kids (another was born after) â on a three-month sojourn with the re-enactment wagon train. But Sorensen and others wanted their experience to be more âprimitive,â without retiring nightly to RVs or writing on laptops.