Pioneer Women - Joanna L Stratton

Letters from early 1900's tell stories of homesteading in Kansas territory.  Contains biographical names list.  I enjoyed reading this book.  The author came across letters sent to her great-grandmother who published a newspaper or magazine but had never gotten to these.  Stratton weaves them into a tale of what life was like in the settler's time. 

Published: 1981  Read: August 2019  Genre: History

Wolf Willow - Wallace Stegner

This was a wonderful read.  Someone I was working with had recommended the author and had been given the book by his mother.  I read it to see if there was any meaning implied in the gift.
Possibly, the message was to be as the pioneers coming to the desolate prairies of central Canada; stoic, keeping on, bouncing back from crushing hardships. 

Stegner's writing is lyrical, savored for it's imagery.  It's the story of his growing up in the small town of Eastend, Saskatchewan, Canada just as the last of the frontier was conquered and the natives vanquished.  It's a lesson in Canadian history.

Surnames in "Whitemud" aka, Huffman, Sickerton, Fetter, Orullian, Stenhouse, Young, Harold Jones, William Christenson, Nels Sieby
term - metis - mulatto in U.S. someone who is half-French, half native of Canada

Grain Growers Association - people who remained after bad winter.

Published: 1955  Read: May 2019  Genre: Memoir

At the Edge of the Orchard - Tracy Chevalier

This was a book my step-daughter got me for Easter, by the author of The Girl with the Pearl Earring, which I read many years ago.  It's the story of a family in the 1800's that moves from Connecticut to Ohio to create a homestead and grow apples.  The first half of the story tells of their struggles in Ohio and the second half is the life of their son who heads west for a better life.

I found the book painful to read because the mother, Sadie, is a mean-spirited, broken woman who abuses applejack and takes out her unhappiness on her children and husband.  He's completely absorbed in raising the apple trees and blandly overlooks her nastiness as long as the orchard thrives. Johnny Appleseed is an occasional visitor to the family, feeding Sadie's need for hard cider.

The story shifts abruptly to their son, Robert, who strikes out as a teen for the west. He quickly wanders across America, ending up in California during the gold rush.  He hooks up with a botanist in the Calaveras big trees area, collecting seeds of the giant trees to be exported to England, all the time keeping a secret of his family's past.  We visited this park back in 2008 and I liked the backstory this book provided on its use in the 1800's.

There's a lot of research here on the life of pioneer settlers but with unlikeable characters, the story is hard to enjoy.


Published: 2016  Read: April 2016  Genre: Fiction

ISBN: 978 0 525 95300 5