Mamie's Children

Brenda Reed is the curriculum and reference services librarian in the
Education Library, Queen’s University.

In this biography of Mamie Harris, a woman who immigrated with her
husband and family to Saskatchewan from Nebraska in 1910, the author
goes beyond the particulars of her grandmother’s story to provide a
general history of the province. In the last section of the book,
Schultz offers a history of the prairie that begins “six hundred
million years ago” and works its way up to a rodeo in Wood Mountain in
the summer of 1996. The dramatic impact of the prairie on the lives of
the people who live there is interwoven with the history of rural
Saskatchewan and the rise and fall of the farming population.

The story of Mamie Harris is a compelling one. Mamie spent her first
winter in Saskatchewan in a one-room “doby house” she had helped to
build. Just when years of hard work had earned Mamie and her family a
pleasant house and a few comforts, their crops and land were destroyed
by the drought and dust storms of the Dirty Thirties. Mamie displayed
remarkable survival skills in responding to the harshness of life on the
prairies.

This popular history is recommended for secondary school, public, and
academic libraries. Its combination of social history and geography make
it an excellent supplementary text for senior high-school history or
sociology courses.