In 1905, 48-year-old Sarah Harkey Hall set down her memories as a gift to her children. "My first recollection is of fear of Indians; sitting up at night listening to the whistle of the Comanches all around and shivering with fear and trembling," she writes. Sarah Hall was the fifth of thirteen children. She was 12 when her mother died in childbirth. Her father died from a lingering illness (cancer?) three weeks later. Though their parents left the children well off, with a well-kept, productive farm and cash in the bank, they were too young to manage properly and soon were struggling to eat. Sarah's older sisters married and moved away. Her older brother, who took responsibility for the family, had to travel to find work, leaving the young Sarah to tend her younger siblings. This is not a romantic tale of courage that conquered every obstacle. It is a tale of the brutality of life on the American frontier, where children were often orphaned and frequently left to fend for themselves, where childhood often ended before the child became a teen. San Saba, Texas had a school house, but it was in use only three months out of the year, when the traveling school master arrived. Sarah went when she could, learning more from her sheer thirst for knowledge than from instruction. The glamour of the shoot-'em-up West is shown for what it was, as Sarah loses three brothers to senseless gun fights. Sarah Harkey Hall is a better-than-average writer and her story, told without self-pity, is a page turner. ( )