Customer Reviews

Texas Tears and Texas Sunshine: Voices of Frontier Women (The Centennial Series of the Association of Former Students, No. 17)

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Jo Ella Exley has complied and edited a collection of writings of frontier Texas through the eyes of Texas Pioneer women. This has to be one of the best books I've read describing life in early Texas. Some of the women came from much but most from little, but they all shared in the determination to survive the Texas Frontier. Whether it was Mary Rabb, one of Austin's original "Old Three Hundred", or Silva King brought to Texas enslaved, one word can be used to describe them all, "tough". Mary Blankenship homesteading on the staked plains of West Texas at the dawn of the twentieth century best described the loneliness and hardship of life on the frontier with this quote, "We had plenty of time to be still and know God. He was our closest neighbor."

Jo Ella Exley does a great job of giving justice to Texas pioneer women when it is long overdue. Much is written of the great men of Texas. Heroes like Austin, Houston, Bowie, Crockett and Lamar--just to name a few. But, what about the women who stood beside their men forging their way together through the untamed Texas wilderness? Exley gives a voice to these women, in their own words they tell about life and love on the Texas frontier. Heartaches and hardships along with joy and triumph are told in the pages of this remarkable compilation.

I appreciate the author's efforts to collect these first-hand accounts of Texas History, but found most of them were difficult to read. This book is not for the casual history reader.