PINTSIZED PIONEERS AT PLAY:
Homemade Frontier Fun and Danger
By Preston Lewis & Harriet Kocher Lewis
Young Adult / Nonfiction / History
Publisher: Bariso Press
Pages: 218
Publication Date: 4 November 2025
*** SYNOPSIS ***
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, the book includes a glossary of related terms.
Perfect for fans of Western history, educators, homeschoolers, and lovers of untold American stories!
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*** REVIEW ***
From a historical perspective, this book is a treasure trove of facts and details about life for children in the late 1800s. One such fact that I found particularly interesting is that circuses often used part of the afternoon matinée to teach children a bit of history. In 1893, the Adam Forepaugh Circus offered vignettes from the American Revolution such as Paul Revere’s Ride, the Battles of Concord Bridge and Bunker Hill, and more. By the time a circus came to my childhood home, that no longer happened that I recall, but then we had regular schools with regular classes, unlike many children on the frontier back then.
It’s clear that the authors did an incredible amount of research, digging through newspaper archives, old diaries, and other books written about this time in history. That research paid off in the scope of the topics covered in the book.
As with the first book in the Pintsize Pioneers series, there are sections I found more enjoyable than others. The writing tends to be uneven, sometimes very academic in writing style in contrast to chapters that rely more on narrative and actual diary entries that have a more creative nonfiction style.
The best chapters are the ones about Christmas, Fourth of July, and other holiday celebrations, as well as those about pets, toys, baseball, and the circuses. The stories direct from the children make those chapters easier to read and bring in the human interest to add another layer to the facts. That was especially true in the letters to Santa Claus that were published in newspapers.
The children were often thoughtful of their siblings in their letters, as illustrated in one letter where a boy asked for one or two toys and included a request that Santa bring a doll for his sister.
And the simple request for a toy and an orange in several letters was such a stark illustration of the poverty experienced by so many pioneer families. That alone made the strong point about the level of poverty facing those families, a point that the authors had repeated in several other chapters.
The vignettes where dogs, and even one cat, were instrumental in saving a child from danger, will resonate with any pet lover who has fond memories of old television shows such as “Lassie” and “Rin Tin Tin” that showcased the love and loyalty of a family dog.
It was hard to read so much detail in the chapters about the dangers of children playing with matches or guns that lead to injury and often deaths. The point had to be made of course. It was a dangerous time for children to play unattended, but perhaps that fact could have been presented with only a few examples of what happened to some children. For me, the multiple references to newspaper accounts of accidents, injuries, and deaths made me want to skip-read, something I never do that when reviewing a book as I owe it to an author to read the entire book if I’m going to publish a review.
Pintsized Pioneers at Play is an important resource for scholars, writers of Western fiction and nonfiction, as well as curious readers who wonder what it was like to play on the frontier.
*** ABOUT THE AUTHORS ***
Preston Lewis and Harriet Kocher Lewis co-authored three books in the “Magic Machine Series” published by Bariso Press: Devotionals from a Soulless Machine, Jokes from a Humorless Machine, and Recipes from a Tasteless Machine. They reside in San Angelo, Texas.
Preston Lewis has published more than 50 fiction and nonfiction works. The author and historian’s books include traditional Westerns, historical novels, comic Westerns, young adult books, and historical accounts. In 2021 he was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters for his literary accomplishments.
His writing honors include two Spur Awards from Western Writers of America and three Elmer Kelton Awards from the West Texas Historical Association. He has received ten Will Rogers Medallion Awards, and in 2024, he earned an inaugural Literary Global Independent Author Award in the Western Nonfiction category for Cat Tales of the Old West.
He is a past president of Western Writers of America and the West Texas Historical Association, which named him a fellow in 2016.
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Harriet Kocher Lewis is the award-winning editor and publisher of Bariso Press. Titles she has edited have been honored with Will Rogers Medallion Awards, Spur Finalist designations, and Independent Author Awards.
Lewis concluded her 26-year physical therapy career as the inaugural clinical coordinator for the physical therapy program at Angelo State University, where she taught technical writing and wrote or edited numerous scientific papers as well as a chapter in a clinical education textbook.
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