Young Adult
Pintsized Pioneers: Taming the Frontier, One Chore at a Time: Children tread lightly through the pages of Old West history. Pintsized Pioneers:
Taming the Frontier, One Chore at a Time gives frontier children their due for all the work they did to assist their families. Even at early ages, the youngsters helped families make ends meet and handled chores that today seem unbelievable. Written for today’s young adults, Pintsized Pioneers offers lessons on frontier history and on the value of work for contemporary youth.
In 1850 adolescents 16 and under accounted for 46 percent of the national population, making them an important labor force in settling the country. Pintsized Pioneers examines their tasks and toils starting with the chores on the trail west. Children assisted in providing fuel and water on the trail and at home when they settled down. In their new locations the young ones helped grow food, make clothing for the entire family and assist with the housekeeping in primitive dwellings.
These pintsized pioneers took on farm and ranch chores as young as six, some going on cattle drives at eight years of age. Even Old West town tykes, who enjoyed more career possibilities, helped their folks survive as well. In the end, many pintsized pioneers pitched in to help their families make ends meet. Difficult as their lives might have been, the lessons those children learned handling chores helped them and their country in the years ahead. Those pintsized lessons have contemporary applications to the youth of today.
Targeted at young adults, Pintsized Pioneers is written at a ninth-grade reading level and includes a supplementary glossary. Even so, Pintsized Pioneers is an eye-opener for adult readers as well.
Juvenile
One of the books Preston Lewis loved as a child was Ben and Me: An Astonishing Life of Benjamin 
Franklin by His Good Mouse Amos. As Benjamin Franklin’s assistant, Amos narrated their adventures and inventions. The Ben and Me manuscript was discovered, edited, illustrated and published by Robert Lawson in 1939. The book was later made into a 1953 Walt Disney short, which was nominated for an Oscar.
In the Animal Legends series, Lewis applies that first-person point of view to actual animals from Texas and Old West history. Each story is a morality tale on subjects such as leadership, sacrifice, sobriety and integrity.
They Call Me Old Blue: As the lead steer for Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight, Old Blue blazed the way for the great Texas cattle drives. As
Old Blue observes, “The Cowboys who rode with me claim they did all the work. They’re wrong!” Follow the adventures of Old Blue as he teaches the cowboys how it’s done in They Call Me Old Blue: Or How I Helped Charles Goodnight Invent the Chuck Wagon.+
Blanca Is My Name: As a white buffalo, Blanca always endured taunts from those who teased her for being different. But that difference made her special and helped save the buffalo from extinction in Texas.
In Blanca Is My Name: Or How I Saved the Buffalo on the Texas Plains, explore how Blanca managed frontier life in the time of the Comanches and the buffalo hunters.
Just Call Me Uncle Sam: Born on a ship as his parents sail to America as part of Jefferson Davis’s Camel Corps, Ibsam grows up with his
orphaned mule friend Stormy in pre-Civil War Texas. Uncle Sam, as Ibsam becomes known in the Cavalry, must face a harsh climate, Indians and even Stormy if he is to survive.
See Texas through a camel’s eyes in Just Call Me Uncle Sam: Or How a Camel Born at Sea Found Himself in Texas.