Desert Hawk Books

 

Frontier Children

Linda Peavy
and 
Ursula Smith

Foreword by
Elliott West

 

176  pages
196 Duotone Illustrations
10 Line Illustrations
8.5" x 11"
Hardback

Quantity:   $24.95 & S/H

 

Enriched by over 200 vintage photographs, Frontier Children is a visual and verbal montage of childhood in the nineteenth-century West. From a wide range of primary and secondary sources, Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith, well known for their books on western women, have brought together stories and images that erase the stereotypes and bring to life the infinite variety of the experience of growing up in the American West.

"If the stories engage us, the remarkable photographs pull us further into the frontier children's world. . . . It is a diverse bunch we see: boxcar dwellers and Hispanic cornhuskers, youthful slayers of mountain lions, orphans, Great Basin Indians by their wickiup, Crow sisters in dresses spangled with elk's teeth, and mining-camp youngsters costumed from the eighteenth century. . . . The experiences of frontier children are a distinctively American variation of what draws us to all history --both the need to stand on the common ground of the human condition and the desire to enter experiences utterly strange. We can thank Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith for taking us on this compelling trip into fascinating terrain."--Elliott West, in his foreword to Frontier Children

Among the many books that Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith have coauthored are a companion volume, Pioneer Women: The Lives of Women on the Frontier, and Women in Waiting in the Western Movement: Life on the Home Frontier