...we had youth in our favor, and an indomitable will to succeed, and I have since learned by experience that a kind providence watches over fools and children. So begins Lavinia Honeyman Porter in her true tale about emigrating to the American west in 1860, a woman barely twenty, from a privileged background, with a husband hardly older and who was no more suited for wilderness adventures. It is to our great fortune that Porter's sister much later convinced her to write down her memories of that time. Only fifty copies were printed and bound in 1910 but some have survived. Every record like Porter's adds to our understanding of one of the greatest migrations in American history but this one in particular was written by a woman who could write. Her musical prose makes an already wonderful true story a joy to read.