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PINTSIZED PIONEERS:
Taming the Frontier,
One Chore at a Time
By Preston Lewis
& Harriet Kocher Lewis
Young Adult / Nonfiction / History
Publisher: Bariso Press
Pages: 184
Publication Date: September 24, 2024
SYNOPSIS
Children tread lightly through the pages of Old West history. Pintsized Pioneers: Taming the Frontier, One Chore at a Time gives frontier children their due for all the work they did to help their families survive. Even at early ages, the youngsters helped families make ends meet and handled chores that today seem unbelievable. Written for today’s young adults, Pintsized Pioneers offers lessons on frontier history and on the value of work for contemporary youth.
In 1850, adolescents sixteen and under accounted for forty-six percent of the national population, making them an important labor force in settling the country. Pintsized Pioneers examines their tasks and toils starting with the chores on the trail west. Children assisted in providing fuel and water on the trail and at home when they settled down. In their new locations the young ones helped grow food, make clothing for the entire family, and assist with the housekeeping in primitive dwellings.
These pintsized pioneers took on farm and ranch chores as young as six, some going on cattle drives at eight years of age. Even Old West town tykes, who enjoyed more career possibilities, helped their folks survive. In the end, many pintsized pioneers pitched in to help their families make ends meet. Difficult as their lives might have been, those children learned that handling chores helped them and their country in the years ahead. Those pintsized lessons have contemporary applications to the youth of today.
Targeted at young adults, Pintsized Pioneers is written at a ninth-grade reading level and includes a supplementary glossary. Pintsized Pioneers is an eye-opener for adult readers as well.
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REVIEW
HALL WAYS BLOG REVIEW: Pintsized Pioneers: Taming the Frontier, One Chore at a Time shows that whether they were six or sixteen years old, pioneer kids did miraculous and surprisingly adult things. By giving readers example after example, often via direct quotes, authors Preston and Harriet Lewis make their point that [young] age is just a number.
As I read the book, I appreciated that the authors included first person accounts from both males and females and showed how traditional gender and age roles were thrown out the window when a family's survival was on the line. Boys took up sewing and cooking; girls plowed fields and were cowhands (including one very young girl who disguised herself as a boy and rode trails for three months herding cattle).
Pioneer children were enterprising, resourceful, clever, ambitious, and most of all capable. Take eight-year-old Mamie Rose as an illustration; at age eight, she was forced to take on all of the housework and cooking for the fifteen members of her household, including her mother who'd been blinded in an accident. Or ten-year-old Henry Young, who left home to become a cowboy and did just that, working a sixty-square-mile Texas ranch that supported some ten thousand cattle.
The Lewises provide dozens of examples of kids who not only struck out on their own at tender young ages, but stepped up at home, like it or not. For example, two Kansan brothers ages seven and twelve were tasked with the daily fresh water haul from a creek five miles away from the home. Given, "a milk cow on a mild day could consume more than a hundred and fifty pounds of water," water management was a huge and heavy chore that many pioneer children undertook.
Pintsized Pioneers includes helpful chapter headings that guide the reader along. The chapters share stories of survival in the hardest of times with youngsters raising siblings, tending farms and farm animals, hunting to feed the family, and oh, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the pages dedicated to the gathering of fuel. In reading the extensive list of euphemisms for cow poo, I chuckled more than I should have as a grown-up, and it had me recalling a college French lit class and reading François Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, which includes a decidedly naughtier list of euphemisms. *SNORT* (If you know, you know.)
Impeccably researched and well-organized, Pintsized Pioneers includes many sources in the Acknowledgments, plus there's a Bibliography and fun Glossary, where you'll find the definition of euphemism but none of the terrific terms it references. Given the intended young adult audience, I would have liked to have seen footnotes or citations within the text, shorter chapters, and some variety in how information was presented to model formatting to keep young readers engaged.
I can envision Pintsized Pioneers being used as early as fifth grade as an excellent springboard to other learning activities in the classroom or library. It would also make a great read-aloud or read-along for grandparents to be able to share stories about their own lives and those of their predecessors with grandkids. Pintsized Pioneers puts modern life in perspective and reminds this reader that it actually wasn't so bad having to set the table for dinner, walk a few blocks to school, or mow the lawn on the weekend.
It's always a pleasure reading books authored by one or both of the talented Lewis team. I am most appreciative of my cherished personalized copy of Pintsized Pioneers. (Pictured above with my husband's boots he wore at age four; he'll tell ya those scuffs are because of the chores he had to do, but don't believe him.)
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Preston Lewis and Harriet Kocher Lewis co-authored three books in the Magic Machine Series published by Bariso Press: Devotionals from a Soulless Machine, Jokes from a Humorless Machine, and Recipes from a Tasteless Machine. They reside in San Angelo, Texas.
Preston Lewis has published more than fifty fiction and nonfiction works. The author and historian’s books include traditional westerns, historical novels, comic westerns, young adult books, and historical accounts. In 2021 he was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters for his literary accomplishments.
His writing honors include two Spur Awards from Western Writers of America and three Elmer Kelton Awards from the West Texas Historical Association. He has received ten Will Rogers Medallion Awards, and in 2024, he earned an inaugural Literary Global Independent Author Award in the Western Nonfiction category for Cat Tales of the Old West.
He is a past president of Western Writers of America and the West Texas Historical Association, which named him a fellow in 2016.
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Harriet Kocher Lewis is the award-winning editor and publisher of Bariso Press. Titles she has edited have been honored with Will Rogers Medallion Awards, Spur Finalist designations, and Independent Author Awards.
Lewis concluded her twenty-six-year physical therapy career as the inaugural clinical coordinator for the physical therapy program at Angelo State University, where she taught technical writing and wrote or edited numerous scientific papers as well as a chapter in a clinical education textbook.
