Well, I was going to tell you that this would be a hard one to find – it’s not in print anymore – but looks like there are a lot of used copies out there. It must have been a bestseller when it first came out.

I picked up my copy at a used bookstore whilst on vacation in New Mexico earlier this year. It was priced higher than I usually pay for a used book of this nature ($25) but was totally worth it.

Agnes Morley Cleaveland was born in New Mexico in 1874. Her father was an engineer, building railroads across the southwest. In 1882, her father was killed in a freak gunshot accident, causing their family to have to leave the life of luxury they were accustomed to. Her mother remarried to a man who decided he needed to invest her inheritance in a cattle ranch in rural New Mexico, having no idea what he was getting into. Faced with the reality, he took off for parts unknown, and the little family was on their own.

Their mother picked a spot in the mountains and built a house, furnished it with rosewood furniture from her previous home and a library of books handed down through the generations of her family, and settled in. The kids – adaptable as kids are – grew up without going to school, educated by the love of reading, and learned in the lessons of ranching: starting the day by catching the horses; how to locate and tag range cattle.

These were different times. Before telephone – or even telegraph, most places – with hundreds of miles between neighbors, it was nothing, she says, to send a child of 7 or 10 on a horse to share news with the neighbor. Sheep-buyers in town? Better let the neighbor know, saddle up – and a kid would race across the sage-covered mountains in whatever weather to let the neighbor know that it was time to round up the sheep and head to town. Need to deliver an object to a group of cowboys driving the herd from one distant part of the range to another? Give it to a kid, throw her on a horse, and off she rides!

And modern Americans worry about children walking to school without a parent!

The author is a grand storyteller and the book rolls along, one anecdote after another – in chapters entitled things like Cows Were Our Universe, Satan Didn’t Like Parasols, and Animals Were Our Friends. Although each chapter focuses on a different theme – favorite horses, neighbor children, sibling rivalry, gunslingers, dudes, a dance, the scorn of an aunt from a civilized home who comes to stay while their mother is in hospital for surgery – the book overall follows an arc. The children learn to ranch, have adventures, grow up, go off to boarding school – the chapter in which she reads letters from home to the family she is staying with in Philadelphia, who is certain she has been making it all up, is priceless – return home when the market crashes and their mother, not raised as a business woman, loses all their stock and horses. Agnes and her brother flip for it, her brother loses and returns to school, and she takes over management of their ranch until he returns, rebuilding their stock to previous levels. Later, Agnes finishes her schooling at Stanford and marries a man from there, dividing her time between California and home.

I would like to point out that, for many of Agnes’s adventures on horseback – including one where she goes bear-hunting and follows a bear up a mountain and down onto a ledge that is too small for the horses to turn around on and too high and steep to descend from on foot – she is riding sidesaddle (as shown on the dust-jacket above, which my copy lacks)! Sidesaddle! Oh, and they finally solve that problem by blindfolding the horses, wrapping them in a rope slung about an old tree, and lowering them one by one off the ledge. Only one of the horses was slightly injured; Agnes offers to walk that one back to camp, while her companions continue the pursuit of the bear – only she gets turned around in the dark and arrives at 1 am, footsore, battered and torn.

The book ends sadly: in the 1930s, her brother sells the ranches. He had lost heart, after the congress passed a homesteading act that gave families 160 acres of sub-marginal land to work, a recipe for disaster. It becomes clear, in the last pages, that the brother that she had loved and competed with all her life, had formed opinions that diverged from hers in his late years – and yet she still writes of him with love, something we could all learn from now. It is possible to disagree with someone’s politics or opinions without declaring them the devil and cutting them off.

When Agnes returns one last time to visit her old home, a man approaches, reminds her of how she welcomed him to the county so many years ago, gave him advice on his first day that he never forgot. And she decides to write this memoir, in her late 60s, her brother long gone, his heart broken by long days and nights of heavy work, a changing world, and a steady diet of meat, potatoes, and lard pie (I theorize).

Her writing reminds me much of Mark Twain’s Roughing It, without, perhaps, his furthest forays into exaggeration. But she does tell the tale of one of her college pals coming to visit. Before the girl leaves civilization, their school friends exhort her to write back the truth, for they feel that dear Agnes stretches fact on occasion with her stories, entertaining as they are. The friend’s first letter back, however, disappoints by assuring them that Agnes practiced “considerable restraint” with her stories.

Oh, I loved reading this book. It reminded me of my grandfather and his sense of humor. The characters come alive, and the scenery unfolds before you, rocks, sand, cliffs, canyons, and mountains, stubborn cattle and sneaky horses, bear, coyote, mountain lions brawling on the porch, loyal cowboys and strange men who pass in the night, possibly one step ahead of the law, such as it is. I’m going to guess that, when this book was published in 1941, it had a pretty big print run, which is why you can still find copies around.

I’m a sucker for autobiographies that tell of a different kind of life, different worlds than we know now. I can’t imagine that, if I wrote about my life growing up, that it would capture the imagination as these biographies from earlier ages do. I just don’t have the raw material.