Very short stories for children are not that common. Here is one.
Robin Day

Great-Great-Grandmother Cora’s Great Gold Mine Adventure
as told to Lisa J. Lehr
© Lisa J. Lehr 1997, 2006

My great-great-grandmother Cora was a brave and adventurous woman. Just over 100 years ago, she traveled to Peru to visit my great-great-grandfather’s gold mine.

In the spring of 1896, Cora (my mom’s mother’s mother’s mother), her 2½-year-old daughter Helen and 17-month-old son Warren, and four other adults left southern California by train for New York. From there it was a seven-day sail to Panama. (Cora was very sick on this part of the trip. She didn’t know it then, but her third child would be born in South America.) They continued by train across the Isthmus of Panama, then south by boat to Peru.

The first days in Peru, Cora and the others had to climb to about 14,000 feet in elevation. Several people became sick from the altitude, and one night there was a severe earthquake, though no one was hurt.

The next part of the trip was even more difficult. Horses and mules carried both people and equipment, and some of the animals ran away and lost their packs before the group even got started.

When they finished crossing the Andes—up to 17,000 feet in elevation—they descended into a very wet and foggy area. The horses’ feet became tender from the mud, and the trail was so steep and narrow that Cora was afraid her horse would slip over the edge. Little Warren kept sliding down the neck of Cora’s horse, and often she couldn’t see the rest of her group through the fog. She learned that on her husband’s first trip there, one of the mules had fallen over the edge.

There was little water to drink in this part of the country. They had to depend upon the local Indians to find it for them, and the Indians were not always reliable. One night when they had no water at all, my great-great-grandfather, who had joined them by now, told the others not to eat, but one man was so hungry that he ate some corned beef. By morning he was nearly crazy with thirst. Fortunately, his wife remembered that she had brought a lemon from southern California, so he drank the juice.

The next part of the trip they had to walk, and the children were carried by Indians, which Helen didn’t like. Then, they had to get across two rivers by sitting in an iron triangle on a pulley, one at a time, and being pulled along a rope. Here they rested for six weeks while the children recovered from whooping cough, which they had caught on the trip.

On the last part of the journey, they had to cross a swift stream at least 150 times because it zigzagged so much. Finally they climbed up cliffs so steep that they had to be pulled up, or use ladders.

When Cora was almost too tired to go on, her husband insisted that the mine was “just around the corner,” and at last they were there. They stayed several months, and Cora and the other woman in her group were the first white women ever to go into that mine. In early 1898, Cora returned to California with her two children and the new baby. (His name was Ernest, but he was always called Domingo, after the Santo Domingo Mine where he was born.) There her husband joined her later, and they went on to have six more children, of whom my great-grandmother was one.