ISBN: Paperback: 978-1-964830-11-7; ISBN: Hardback: 978-1-964830-12-4; ISBN: E-Book: 978-1-964830-13-1
by Preston Lewis
Release Date: November 4, 2025
Discover the Wild Side of Frontier Childhood!
Pintsized Pioneers at Play: Homemade Frontier Fun and Danger explores the forgotten world of how kids lived, laughed—and sometimes limped—through their childhood years in the Old West.
While their parents settled the land, these pintsized pioneers explored it, creating their own adventures with homemade toys, daring games, wild animal encounters, and risky escapades. This engaging sequel to the award-winning Pintsized Pioneers: Taming the Frontier, One Chore at a Time shines a spotlight on the joys and perils of play in a land still being tamed.
From exploring the prairie and wrangling critters to celebrating frontier holidays and watching traveling circuses, this book reveals how children carved out fun and entertainment in a rough-and-tumble world. Learn how railroads and mail-order catalogs brought new toys, how schools and churches doubled as social hubs, and how a simple game could end in laughter—or injury.
Written for young adults but fascinating for readers of all ages, Pintsized Pioneers at Play is packed with history, heart, and a hint of danger. Written at a tenth-grade reading level perfect for curious minds, Pintsized Pioneers at Play includes a glossary of related terms.
Perfect for fans of Western history, educators, homeschoolers, and lovers of untold American stories!
Excerpt from Pintsized Pioneers at Play
In 1863 Kansas farmer Joseph M. Reed bragged to his brother about his young son. “Little Baz can run all over, fetch up cows out of the stock fields, or oxen, carry in stove wood, and climb in the corn crib, and feed the hogs, and go on errands to his grandma’s.” Little Baz was only two years and three months old at the time.
What Pintsized Pioneers Say
“Our playground was not measured in acres or city blocks, but in miles and miles. We could do just about everything a little boy dreams of.” — Fiorello La Guardia of Arizona
“My very first memory is of chasing a pet duck about on a sunny hillside, the ‘quack, quack’ with which he would elude my outstretched hands when I pursued him, and the happy way he would come and settle himself in my lap or by my side at other times.” — Myrtle Lobdell of the Prairie
“We found arrowheads everywhere, so numerous we wouldn’t think of taking in a defective one. If it was not practically perfect, we threw it back and looked for a better one.” — Edwin Lewis Bennett of Colorado
“From early march, when the snow was disappearing and the first flowers beginning to bloom, until October, when the hardiest fall flowers and the autumn leaves covered the mountainside with treasures, I with my brothers and sisters roamed the mountains and hills and explored the streams for miles in every direction.” — Ella Irvine Mountjoy of Montana
“It seemed, as I recall it, a lonely little house of scholarship, with its playground worn so bare that even the months of sun and idleness failed to bring forth any grass. But that humble little school had a dignity of a fixed and far-off purpose. It was the nest of the West’s greatness. It was the outpost of civilization.” — James Rooney of Texas