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, Pintsized Pioneers at Play includes a glossary of related terms.
Perfect for fans of Western history, educators, homeschoolers, and lovers of untold American stories!
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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.
“The Old West was never a childproof environment.”
Pintsized Pioneers at Play: Homemade Frontier Fun and Danger by Preston Lewis and Harriet Kocher Lewis is the second book outlining the fascinating lives of frontier children in the 1800s. The first book, Pintsized Pioneers: Taming the Frontier, One Chore at a Time, is filled with many anecdotes gleaned from extensive archival research. This second book is just as riveting but instead focuses on curious and often mischievous children entertaining themselves through play in between their many chores, sometimes with disastrous results.
This delightful and informative narrative is well researched and well laid out, with each chapter outlining categories of “play,” including pets and other animals; dangerous activities, such as with guns, fire, and railroads; holiday mishaps; circuses; education and religion; and various toys (mostly homemade).
The frontier was the children’s playground, based on imagination and ingenuity; however, the anecdotes warn that tragedy was often poised to pounce on the unfortunate child. Playing with guns, matches, fireworks, and even kites was all fun and games until something went awry, which it often did because parents were sometimes too busy providing and surviving to watch the children’s every move.
Through broad analysis, Lewis paints an interesting and captivating picture of life on the frontier for children of all ages. Thankfully, many of the anecdotes are amusing ones, thus balancing the inevitable injurious and fatal events that peppered the newspaper headlines throughout the 1800s. Children will always be inquisitive, and with few safeguards or minimal supervision, that trait often led them into danger or at least into some sticky situations.
This book and the previous one are quite entertaining, offering a unique glimpse into the lives of children on the frontier. With little to no spending money, children had to improvise and typically found joy in the simplest of toys and games. Some of my favorite anecdotes involve the store catalogs sent to Post Offices and eventually to homes so that families could dream of all the wonderful things that could be ordered, if money allowed, of course. I remember poring over the store catalogs before Christmas, circling all the toys I wanted, knowing I would never get the majority of them but dreaming about them all the same. Some things never change for children throughout the ages.
The author’s extensive research reveals that dolls (both homemade and store bought) were the most ubiquitous toy across the frontier and beyond, mostly for girls but also for boys to some extent. Dolls provided not only hours of imaginative playtime but were also a way for children to cope with the harsh realities of life on the frontier: struggle, tragedy, and the death of loved ones and beloved pets.
If you like reading about life on the frontier, especially from the unique perspective of children, this book is definitely for you. Both Pintsized Pioneers books are fabulous and do not need to be read in order to be enjoyed fully.
“Sure, they had many chores to do, but play remained the primary job of any frontier youngster.”
While you are at it, browse the rest of Preston Lewis’s many books because they are all phenomenal.
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