Living Memories: A Memoir

“This enthralling historical timepiece by Moulton—rescued from obscurity and edited by her great-grandson, Scott Barnes—preserves the legacy of a “true pioneer…” —BookLife “The book’s key strength is that Moulton is an engaging narrator. Written when she was eighty-eight, the prose style is a beguiling blend of wry humor and exacting detail.” —IndieReader In 1879, John and Prudence Gail set off across Kansas in a covered wagon seeking a new life. Their baby daughter Nellie and her sisters suffered the hardships along with their parents: devastating drought and storms, cruel twists of fate, illness, and privation. But they persisted and even in those hard early years, Nellie and her sisters studied and learned, and found time for fun. Sometimes the girls climbed to the barn roof to watch men building a railroad far in the distance—the country’s future in the making. When Nellie wrote her memoir many years later, she described what kept the family going; Her father was an “ambitious and intelligent” man who never gave up, and her mother was a woman of “great fortitude and grace…and deep Christian faith,” who cheerfully made the best of things no matter what. By the time she wrote her memoir, Nellie had lived her own life of adventure. She didn’t know what lay ahead when she hopped on a train alone in 1902 and headed to Washington state to become a schoolteacher. She’d meet Lewis Fenno Moulton, an “ambitious, adventurous” Southern California rancher, who would fall in love with her. She would travel around the world by ship—more than once. She would manage a 22,000-acre sheep ranch in Orange County and co-found the Laguna College of Art and Design. With a foreword by her great-grandson Scott T. Barnes, and more than 100 photographs, in Living Memories Nellie Gail Moulton tells her own riveting story of adversity, old-fashioned grit, adventure, and finding love on the American frontier. View Less