And I don't know if Sarah did all those things because mostly her life consisted of diapers and babies for about twenty years, but my grandmother read These Is My Words and said it did seem much like her mother, combined a little with her grandmother, Sarah's mother, whose name was Roxie Stockman and was in Sarah's words 'a toot.' (I'm amazed that she was on a horse throwing one!) There wasn't a diary - people have often asked where I found it. She quit ranching in her mid seventies because she could no longer hit what she was aiming at with a lasso. She never went to school but longed to, that much is true never did anything notable other than work 'like two men' according to her children until she died in her nineties. In reality she had nine children who lived to adulthood, and probably two more that didn't.

I used the information about the trip from Henry Prine's memoir but told the story through the eyes of a 16 year old Sarah. How better to get to know a teenager than to read her diary? The only connection I had to her real life was a memoir written by her brother, several years her senior, that detailed a wagon train trip from the Four Corners area (Cottonwood springs isn't near Cottonwood, AZ but up near Monument Valley) down through central AZ to Benson and east to Texas. The earliest record we have of her she would have been 16. So, as a freshman (forty years old) at a Junior College, when I got an assignment to write a short story about someone I wanted to get to know, she was the first person I thought of. All my life I heard stories about her but the facts were few. Everything I knew about her when I began writing the short story that turned into These Is My Words could have filled less than a single page. Nancy Turner: Sarah Agnes Prine was my great grandmother.

Sarah agnes prine series