High,Wide and Lonesome

Had I internet access right now I'd check to see if this was made into a movie. Because I went on the road reading this book took nearly 3 weeks.

Told from the point of view of a nine-year-old who is taken out of school and carted across half a continent to homestead half a section in the Colorado High Country so that his parents could prove a claim and gain title to the land. Drama is provided by range wars betweencattlemen, sheep herders, and homesteaders and the latter's barbed wire fences. The dangers and threats provided by lack of rain, prairie fires, rattlesnakes, poisonous plants, blinding blizzards, illness, and broken bones. The challenges of drought, starvation, biting cold, marauding cattle, debt, privation, solitude....

The book is filled with the characters attracted to this pioneering spirit way of life. Told with a naiveté and sense of humour and discovery only a child could bring to such a situation. Privation and danger are approached not so much as challenges but with a sense of adventure and newness. The land is his teacher and his books the prairie dog town and the ant hills. And every boy deserves a dog as his companion.

The story ends when the family proves up their claim and moves to a town where the boy returns to school and father returns to his trade as the printer of a country newspaper. In those times a newspaperman manually set his own type and printed his own papers.