Jo Ella Exley has complied and edited a collection of writings of frontier Texas through the eyes of Texas Pioneer women. This has to be one of the best books I've read describing life in early Texas. Some of the women came from much but most from little, but they all shared in the determination to survive the Texas Frontier. Whether it was Mary Rabb, one of Austin's original "Old Three Hundred", or Silva King brought to Texas enslaved, one word can be used to describe them all, "tough". Mary Blankenship homesteading on the staked plains of West Texas at the dawn of the twentieth century best described the loneliness and hardship of life on the frontier with this quote, "We had plenty of time to be still and know God. He was our closest neighbor."