This biography of a 20th pioneer on the Canadian prairie tells vividly about a very difficult life. But anyone may feel a kinship with life at the edge of the wild and the vast emptiness of this new world. But it is written for readers who want the truth of history, even a tough truth. Nellie wrote of the joy of childhood days in a Haliburton Ontario log cabin, Of seeing a spring flood carry away the building on which her living depended, And settling by the Souris in Manitoba, in an area already surveyed as too arid for farming. Saskatchewan was Virgin prairie when Nellie and four sons homesteaded. Details from those years are poignant, among them the events of the World War I. The letter she wrote when her favorite son, Bert, was killed in France survives to give us s a picture of heartbreak. Here are contemporary glimpses into a life significant both as a personal and social history.