Desert Wife

by Hilda Faunce

Book Overview

"This is the compelling narrative of the wife of an Indian trader in the desert wilderness of the Navajos before World War I. No other book about life at such trading posts equals its revealing portrayal of the land and the people, and its implication of the racial differences still confronting us today."--From the introduction by Frank Waters

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080326853X
• ISBN13: 9780803268531
• Release Date: February 1981
• Publisher: Bison Books
• Length: 305 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

rare gem

This is an account of a woman's journey from the wilds of Oregon to the wilds of Arizona around the turn of the century. These are honest and simply told tales of life on the frontier told with an innocence and freshness that captures the reader. This is a western classic.

It takes you there.

I couldn't put this book down. I felt as though i was alongside the wagon on it's way from Oregon towards the "Four Corners", and with Hilda & Ken through life at their trading post. Early 1900's life on Navajo Land was anything but simple. Hilda's writings carry you with her through suspense, joys, dancing, humour, births, sickness, deaths, everything we experience now, but as a white woman in an Indian world in a time when life was much more basic, survival was difficult & and instant gratification didn't exist...I loved it!

Another winner!

The third installment of Living Voices of the Past is another wonderful history lesson!Hilda Faunce leaves her comfortable Seattle, Washington, home to journey to the Southwest and the Navajo reservation with her husband in 1914. While one may think that everybody had cars back then, the Faunce's made their way in the manner of the original pioneers: by wagon.Hilda's journey is not so much a journal of her trip as it is her life on the reservation between 1914 and 1918. Hilda's writings are indeed an historical eye-opener.First, there is the problem with the language; then the protocol; and the normal daily variances of two races trying to live side-by-side. Cultural diversity may be a late-twentieth-century term, but the fact is that many in America were already experiencing this phenomenon. The entire journal is mesmerizing; Hilda uses very descriptive language to convey the sights and sounds of the unusual customs and landscapes that she encounters that transfers the listener to reservation life during the second decade of the twentieth century.Two aspects were particularly telling of a different culture: contending with a white-man initiated illness and the onset of World War I. The Navajo's were forced to face and contend with small pox, a deadly disease they had never known until the white man arrived. Many of Hilda's new friends died, devastating the young woman.Newspapers were a rarity and treat on the reservation, so Hilda did not know much of what was going on outside her and her husband's little trading post. While the world was trying to blow itself to smithereens, the Faunce's and the Indians were trying to make a living by mainly trading...especially furs and foods.Desert Wife is an important historical document that from which we can all learn tolerance and the need to just get along!

One of the best accounts I've read of western women's lives

As an avid reader of first-person accounts of the lives of women in the early West, I would call this one of the finest I've seen. It's an absorbing tale of a woman's adjustment to the bleak and initially terrifying emptiness of the desert Southwest where her husband sets up an Indian trading post at the time of World War I. She comes to love the place and to appreciate the culture and manners of her Indian neighbors, which at first seem so alien to her. Hilda Faunce gives us a fascinating direct view of the interaction of Indians and whites, which is only the more interesting from our current vantage point 85 years later. I was struck by her simple, straightforward, but eloquent writing style as well as by her courage and receptiveness in facing a very challenging experience. I felt as if I'd entered her world, and was sorry to leave when the book was over.

A true story of pioneer days

A lively account of a woman's wagon journey fromOregon to Navajo country in Arizona. She and herhusband start a trading post in a remote area, learn to speak Navajo, and participate in the culture. Reads as smoothly as fiction, and would also be enjoyable for young adults.