So many pioneer stories were written at the request of a child or grandchild. What makes Christiana Tillson's humorous memoir different was her background. Tillson's story records the reactions produced upon a refined New England woman by an environment at once predominantly southern and wholly frontier. Her youth in 1822 and her parting from all that she had known in the east were common of many later western migrants. But when she and her husband went out to try their fortunes, the "west" was what we today call the Midwest. It was still a wild, dangerous, and uncertain place to try to make a future.