Pintsized Pioneers at Play

Homemade Fun and Danger

by

Preston Lewis &Harriet Kocher Lewis

A fresh and fascinating view of pioneer life.

Pintsized Pioneers at Play: Homemade Fun and Danger by Preston Lewis and Harriet Kocher Lewis is a fun but eye-opening, memory-jogging journey into the past of the American West. Full of lively vignettes drawn from personal diaries, memoirs, and newspaper accounts of daily life as pioneers expanded their reach into the unsettled areas of the country, readers will get a real feel for what it was like to grow up in that earlier place and time. Lewis and Lewis have perfectly combined their respective knowledge, skills, and pasts to produce a fascinating nonfictional vision of this aspect of children’s lives. 

If you’ve read the previous book about children on the frontier, Pintsized Pioneers, you’ll already be aware of how much responsibility for the success of their families lay on the shoulders of even some of the youngest children. Money was hard-won, and almost everyone lived “off the beaten path,” so running to the store for toys was not an option. First, there weren’t stores on every corner, certainly not malls, and few had any amount of disposable income. Making do with what you had was key. Playtime came after chores, or as part of them, and school was as much a social event as it was educational (something we all realized when COVID isolated so many youngsters from their peers). 

While our ancestors led a more basic, structured life, they also enjoyed a freedom unheard of in today’s society. Children roamed far from home in remote locations under rugged conditions, all unsupervised: a glorious opportunity, but, at times, things happened. Children were lost, injured, or worse. The newspaper reports of lost and missing children and various mishaps occurring in the small towns were a reminder of this. Still, I thoroughly enjoyed the accounts of childhood activities, straight from the mouths of those recalling their youth. I loved that there were names and places associated with each precious memory, and that some of those stories came from well-known figures, such as Eliza Donner, a survivor of the tragic Donner Party expedition. 

The narrative is compelling and easy to read, one of those books you start and look up an hour or so later without realizing how much time has actually passed. Also, if you’re interested in early childhood development, be sure to read the introduction to understand how children mature and how their awareness of the ramifications of their actions changes. It might be a sobering realization of how lucky any of these children are to have survived, or of how vigilant their parents had to be while physically making a life for the entire family. 

I recommend PINTSIZED PIONEERS AT PLAY to readers, young or old, of tales of the Old West. 

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