The Lonesome Plains: Death and Revival on an American Frontier (West Texas a&M University Series, 7) (Hardcover)

by Louis Fairchild (Author) "PHEBE KERRICK WAS A YOUNG TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD IN 1898 when she stepped off the train from Illinois into the harsh cold and wind of a Texas..." (more)
Key Phrases: recorded interview with the author, làpe recording, first federal census, West Texas, New Mexico, Joe Shelton (more...)

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Product Description
Loneliness pervaded the lives of pioneers on the American plains, including those in the empty expanses of West Texas. In The Lonesome Plains, Louis Fairchild mines the letters and journals of West Texas settlers, as well as contemporary fiction and poetry, to record the emotions attending solitude and the ways people sought relief. Hungering for neighborliness, people came together in times of misfortune - sickness, accident, and death - and at annual religious services. Fairchild describes the practices that grew up around these two focal points of social life. He recounts the building of coffins and the preparation of bodies for burial, the funeral rite itself, and the lost and lonely graves. And he tells the story of yearly outdoor revivals: the meeting sites, food, and the tangential courting and mischief. In doing so, Fairchild skillfully draws a moving picture of life in West Texas during the frontier-rural period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

About the Author
LOUIS FAIRCHILD is a professor of psychology at West Texas A&M University who lives in Canyon, Texas. He is the author of They Called It the War Effort: Oral Histories from World War II.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 323 pages
• Publisher: Texas A&M University Press; 1 edition (May 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585441821
• ISBN-13: 978-1585441822
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,977,609 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What to do until the drought comes., November 3, 2002

By	John Troesser (Texas United States) - See all my reviews

Using interviews, diaries and published sources, Mr. Fairchild, a psychology professor at Texas A & M University, Canyon, Texas, explores a rarely discussed subject - the suffocating and omnipresent loneliness of the Panhandle frontier.

Diet, infant mortality, burial procedures and etiquette, mourning, and the importance of friendship and neighborliness are all covered by these sobering and sometimes heartrending personal accounts. Also discussed is the way men dealt with these problems and benefits, which predictably, was quite different from women.

Instead of romanticizing the pioneers - the facts revealed in their writings make them more human and
allow for an easy connection with the reader. The details of everyday pioneer life are valuable and the passages gleaned from letters and diaries are well chosen.

Thankfully, the second part of the book is a little lighter than the first and covers the camp or brush arbor meetings. Here the reader is relieved to find that there was some fun to be had when families would bring their children, dogs and most of their furniture to these semi-annual events. Getting a year or six months worth of friendship and/ or religion crowded into a few short days is something few societies experience.

It's a readable book on a serious subject without a droning academic tone.