by Sandra Dallas, 1998
Carol Sparks gave me this book to read in the airport and on the airplane on the way to Alaska. It kept me entertained during the entire trip. I finished it in one day. I left it in a beautiful Little Free Library on the Snug Harbor Road in Cooper Landing, AK.
It’s about a young woman, Mattie Spenser, who marries and travels to the Colorado Territory in the 1860s. The book is her diary. She recounts the terrors of the trip – Indian attacks – and then the hardship of living in a sod house on the Colorado prairie. Their first child, a beloved son, died at the age of 2, of scarlet fever. Her husband, his dad, was cheating on Mattie, and took the precious boy with him and kept him in the freezing cold for hours waiting for his rendezvous with the woman. Mattie realizes this and could have left him for a man who loved her, but she doesn’t.
Good book. Life was incredibly hard.