Pioneer Girl

Barbara Robertson is the author of Wilfrid Laurier: The Great
Conciliator and the co-author of The Well-Filled Cupboard.

Maryanne Caswell was 14 in 1887 when she and her family left Ontario to
make their home on 160 acres of land in a part of the Northwest
Territories that later became Saskatchewan. To Maryanne, the oldest of
the six children, it was a great adventure. She promised to write her
grandmother faithfully, and indeed she did, in a series of letters from
12 April 1887 to 1 January 1888. Remarkably, the letters were preserved
and eventually published (first in 1952 and subsequently, in book form,
in 1964).

Here they are again, presented in a format that will please young
readers. Maryanne is a good companion, observant, honest, and not
without a sense of humor. She does full justice to the excitement and
tedium of traveling, not to mention its dangers. And she describes the
many and varied demands of pioneering, from cutting green willows to
make baskets to searching for lost oxen. The sheep often wandered, and
there was the danger of getting lost while looking for them.

Maryanne is very alive to nature: “if you listen carefully to the
whispering of the wind in the grass, the buzzing of the insects about
the countless bright, lined flowers, changed by a miracle every few days
to another color and variety, you are in another world.” Sometimes the
prairie space overwhelms her (“Sometimes, we do get lonesome,
Grandma”). Other times, as with the northern lights, she is enthralled
(“There’s beauty here, Grandma”). Highly recommended.