Texas Tears and Texas Sunshine: Voices of Frontier Womenvolume 17

by Jo Ella Powell Exley

Book Overview

Texas Tears and Texas Sunshine are the names of popular quilt patterns, and in this volume, now in its seventh printing, sixteen pioneer women describe how they pieced together a life for their families on the harsh frontier. Their first-person narratives, selected and edited by Jo Ella Powell Exley, provide a gripping, highly personal history of the state from Stephen F. Austin's original settlement through the taming of its last frontier in the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 089096453X
• ISBN13: 9780890964538
• Release Date: September 1990
• Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Remarkable Stories from Pioneer Women In Their Own Words

Jo Ella Exley does a great job of giving justice to Texas pioneer women when it is long overdue. Much is written of the great men of Texas. Heroes like Austin, Houston, Bowie, Crockett and Lamar--just to name a few. But, what about the women who stood beside their men forging their way together through the untamed Texas wilderness? Exley gives a voice to these women, in their own words they tell about life and love on the Texas frontier. Heartaches and hardships along with joy and triumph are told in the pages of this remarkable compilation.

Texas Pioneer Women

Jo Ella Exley has complied and edited a collection of writings of frontier Texas through the eyes of Texas Pioneer women. This has to be one of the best books I've read describing life in early Texas. Some of the women came from much but most from little, but they all shared in the determination to survive the Texas Frontier. Whether it was Mary Rabb, one of Austin's original "Old Three Hundred", or Silva King brought to Texas enslaved, one word can be used to describe them all, "tough". Mary Blankenship homesteading on the staked plains of West Texas at the dawn of the twentieth century best described the loneliness and hardship of life on the frontier with this quote, "We had plenty of time to be still and know God. He was our closest neighbor."