Jeannette Walls reconstructs the life of her maternal grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, in this oral history styled as a novel. Set in the American Southwest during the early twentieth century, the narrative follows Lily from her childhood in a Texas dugout to her adulthood managing a cattle ranch in Arizona. The account details her various occupations as a teacher in one-room frontier schools, a horse breaker, and a bush pilot. She navigates droughts, flash floods, and the shifts from horse-drawn transport to the combustion engine, maintaining a pragmatic approach to survival in a harsh landscape.
Readers interested in the logistics of pioneer life and the history of the rural West will find a technical look at ranching and frontier pedagogy. It serves those who want to understand the lineage of the stubborn survivalism described in Walls's previous work. The reader walks away with a clear picture of the physical demands placed on women in the early 1900s and a historical record of how individual grit functioned before the presence of a social safety net.
- Published
- 2009
- Language
- EN
