THE AMERICAN WEST: LIVING THE FRONTIER DREAM, by James R. Arnold and Roberta Wiener, Blandford Press, $29.95.
Arnold and Wiener make use of diaries, letters, and black and white photographsand illustrations to recreate the daily life of the average European pioneer family in the nineteenth-century American West. While other books highlight the lives of cowboys, outlaws, fur traders, and miners, the authors choose to focus on how the pioneers “undertook the leap into the unknown that was their journey west; what they found when they arrived; and how they gathered the necessities of life,” thus demonstrating how their determination to succeed helped to create new homes and a new nation out of the wilderness.
