Pioneer Girl: A True Story of Growing Up on the Prairie

In the little Nebraska town where I grew up, everything centered around farmers and farming. My father was the superintendent of schools, but farming still had a tremendous impact on our lives, for many of the students in school lived on farms, and farming drove the economy of the community. I would visit my friends who lived on farms, but I never much liked it. Too quiet out there, away from town. Too much work to do--all those chores, twice a day. Too dirty. I was always stepping in something I didn't want to step in. As for those endless cornfields--well, you could get lost out there, and that sometimes worried me.

Still, I had great admiration for farmers and their families. Every family member worked. My friends worked. And they worked hard! But they also had something very special, for they were living on land homesteaded by their grandparents and great-grandparents. If the work was this hard now, what must it have been like for those first homesteaders? I had learned a little from Willa Cather's books, especially My Antonia (one of my all-time favorite books), but I was curious to know more. I began looking for the story of a homestead child, and I found a wonderful account in the book No Time on My Hands, a memoir dictated by Grace McCance Snyder to her writer-daughter Nellie Snyder Yost when Grace was 80 (she lived to be 100). I loved the story. I especially loved Grace's spunk and determination. I had found my subject. To the material from the memoir, I added family members' recollections of Grace, plus a wealth of information from other sources to tell what life was like for homestead children. All in all, it was a very satisfying book to write. I just wish I could have known Grace. What an incredible person she was!
 


Awards for Pioneer Girl: A True Story of Growing Up On The Prairie (Morrow Junior 1988)

   

* Recipient of the Midland Authors Award
   
* Golden Sower Award finalist
   
* Notable Children's Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies
   
* Young Hoosier Book Award nominee
   
* Featured on NPR's Loose Leaf Book Company program
   
* Featured on Booknotes C-SPAN television show
   
* Scholastic Book Club Selection
   
* South Carolina Association of School Librarians' Children's Book Award
   
* Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children from the National Council of Teachers of English
   
* Excerpted in both Spanish and English by Harcourt School Publishers in its Social Studies Program 2003. Audio available in Spanish and English from Harcourt 

Reviews:
   


School Library Journal:

Grace McCance's family settled a homestead in Nebraska in 1885, when Grace was three. Her funny, exciting, poignant, and romantic life story, as presented by Warren, is based on McCance's own memoir, No Time on My Hands (Univ. of Nebraska Press., 1986), and other sources, including family interviews. Reminiscent of Laura Ingalls Wilder's tales of life on the prairie, Grace's story relates hardships and hilarity in a compelling mix. How is a body supposed to relieve the call of nature when privies have yet to be built and there's not so much as a bush or clump of tall grass in sight? The girl survives fire, blizzards, and an attack by an enraged heifer. These close calls as well as the daily trials of bedbugs, dust, and a scarcity of water illustrate the challenges of homesteading. Indians are mentioned only in passing. This is a fine personal portrait of one woman's life and a good read. Excellent quality archival photos, many of Grace's own family, enhance the well-documented text.



Children's Literature:

This charming true story is based on the memories, memoirs, and interviews with friends of the Nebraska pioneer Grace McCance Snyder. Born in 1882, Grace and her family moved from Missouri to Cozad, Nebraska, and set up a homestead in a soddy when she was three. While Warren tells the story as a narrative and illustrates the book with well-chosen archival and old family photographs, it is the adventures and can-do spirit of this family that compel the reader. From the inch-long worms that drop one day from the soddy's roof, to the family's camp near the Burlington Railroad construction site in order to earn money for the winter, through blizzards and drought, the family perseveres. Although the book presents some of the same pioneering spirit of the "Little House" books, and Grace McCance would be a contemporary of Rose Wilder Lane, the book stands strongly on its own as lively and immediate history. It could anchor a prairie/pioneer theme in the upper elementary or middle school curriculum. Related reading and index are included.
      


Kirkus Review:

Warren, basing her work on the memoir of Grace McCance Snyder about her pioneer childhood in Nebraska, also tells the riveting story of life on the prairie and the determination of the families who settled there. Warren begins with the 1862 Homestead Act, which permitted people to earn 160 acres of land by building a house and cultivating the soil for five years. Despite the droughts, blizzards, grasshopper infestations, loneliness and hard, hard work, the families of the prairie never gave up their hopes. It's all rendered from the point of view of Grace (who lived to be 100 years old): "To Mama it must have seemed poor and desolate I know she must have been nearly crushed by the unexpected bigness of the prairie, the endless blue of the sky, our rough, homemade furniture, and the almost total lack of neighbors." The voice of Grace echoes the spirit of the pioneer families who settled the Midwest: "Most pioneer children did not know how hard their lives were. They just did what had to be done." 



Reader Review:      

Dear Ms. Warren,
I wanted to tell you how much I liked your book. I liked the juicy details. My favorite part was when the girls went swimming. I wish you could visit our school.    
Thanks, Jairo