Another Time, Another Place....

I finished reading "Far Away and Long Ago" by W. H. Hudson. I like to read "19th Century Childhood or Pioneer Memoirs"; a recent example was "Clearing in the West", which I mentioned a few months ago. The English author of this book lived from about 1840-1920; he was born in the Argentine pampas country where his parents ran an estancia or ranchero til he was in his teens. Hudson was a life-long naturalist with a love of bird-watching. The book is full of his memories of the very colorful and exotic animals, plants and most of all, people that filled his early life. The narrative has a feel of Alice in Wonderland. His parents indulged their children with rather lenient discipline for the era; the kids had a lot of freedom to roam the pampas, riding bareback on their ponies after daily lessons taught by a series of inept tutors. A age 6 or 7, the boy came near to being killed and eaten by a wild pig while out riding alone! The foundation of the ranchero home was occupied by a multitude of snakes which moved about their area "speaking" to one another all night long. Strange observations of an extinct time and place. Even as the book was written, in the 1910's, the wild pampas was already turned to farm land.

Clearing in the West: an autobiography ....

Who was Nellie MClung and why did she write this book? That was the question that drew me into this memoir. Turns out, she was a Canadian writer and politician of the late 19th and early 20th century: one of their suffragettes. Born in 1873, she and her family left there around 1880 to pioneer a new wheat farm in the area of Brandon near Winnipeg. If you loved "Little House on the Prairie" or "Little Women" or "Caddie Woodlawn", you might enjoy this book. The lady was in her 60's when she wrote the book in the early 1930's, yet it seems crisp and young and sprightly with good humor. She explains some of the circumstances that caused many women to support temperance organizations. Somehow it feels as if written by a younger women, closer to our own time. Along with political and social rights for women, Mrs. McClung also supported the idea of Eugenics, which was popular at the time but not so much any more, especially after the actions of the despots of the WWII era. I learned the inspiration for "The Phantom of the Opera" and that men who harvested wheat in late summer preferred raisin pie over all other desserts.