A wonderful story of growing up in the 1930s and 1940s on a vast ranch in the mountains and desert hugging the Mexican border in the Big Bend country of Texas, before it became a national park. The author's family weathered rattlesnakes and drought, accidents, lonliness, and financial hardships of the Great Depression with fortitude, ingenuity, and grace. Like their scattered neighbors - miles away over rugged roads - it was the love of the land that gripped and held them there. Clothier paints a picture of this vast and glorious territory with words as vivid as any artist with a pallet of paint. An adventure in Western life the reader will not forget.