55 pages • 1 hour read
Nancy E. TurnerThese Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: The American West
These Is My Words depicts the American West during its decades-long ranching and settlement phase in the years between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the 20th century. In the story’s era, the Transcontinental Railroad was already built, and American cities like Tucson, Arizona, and Austin, Texas, were in their earliest stages of industrialization. While the railroad was far from a perfected mode of travel, as it was vulnerable to criminals and harsh weather, this new railway infrastructure made settlement and travel in the American West faster and safer than ever before.
However, Sarah’s family elects to travel to the Texas and Arizona Territories by covered wagon, rather than by train; this form of travel was more common in the earlier decades of the 19th century. Sarah’s diary does not explain the Prines’ choice to travel by wagon, but she mentions that in their youth, Mama (who is otherwise unnamed) and Papa (Henry Arthur) traveled the Oregon Trail by covered wagon to the family’s former settlement in New Mexico Territory. Their choice to move via wagon train reflects the family’s relative lack of education, as well as their living—particularly while in New Mexico Territory—at a remove from any bustling, developing cities or towns. Their choice of wagon travel is also consistent with the Prines’ humble beginnings, as railway travel was a more expensive means of transport. As Sarah points out, Jimmy Reed’s Arizona ranch was a successful business, while Papa’s New Mexico horse ranch was “just a living” (115); at the novel’s opening, the large Prine family would likely not have had the means to travel by rail to San Angelo.
Authorial Context: Nancy Turner
Nancy Turner began These Is My Words as a short story assignment at her community college. The assignment asked students to compose a story featuring a historical figure, and Turner chose her great-grandmother, Sarah Agnes Prine. Her family’s oral history, along with genealogical research her father was piecing together and a handwritten memoir by her great-uncle, Henry, inspired the story that would become These Is My Words. From these sources, Turner learned that her family settled in Oregon during the early 19th century; they eventually moved, by way of a bleak journey to Texas, to Arizona Territory via wagon train, much like her novel’s fictional protagonist does.
Turner’s actual great-grandmother, Sarah, like the Sarah of the novel, never had a chance to attend school. Unlike Turner’s character, her great-grandmother never learned to read or write, so she never kept a diary that Turner could use as reference in her own writing. Rather, Sarah’s daughter—Turner’s grandmother, Minnie—provided the basis for the novel’s plot by sharing stories about Sarah with Turner. Each of the real-life Sarah’s other nine children also shared stories; during her younger years, Sarah was well-known for being able to “out-ride and out-rope her five brothers” (8). Like the fictional Sarah of These Is My Words, Turner’s great-grandmother ranched, kept house, and worked as hard as any man for nearly her entire life.
It took added months of research to expand the story into a historical novel steeped in authentic settings and circumstances. General Crook and Geronimo, for example, are historical figures. The fictional Sarah’s ranch is in the middle of Geronimo’s territory during a time “when he had sworn revenge on all white people” (9). For her research, Turner spent about a year studying old territorial newspapers on microfilm at a library, organizing the dates in Sarah’s diary to correspond with real battles between Indigenous people and cavalry in the late 19th century. The novel addresses these conflicts from a white settler’s perspective that presumes the right to Westward expansion and settlement on tribal lands.
