From the Prairies Through the Years

by Wilda Werner

Wilda Werner was born in July 1929, just a few months before the stock market and banking crash that precipitated America’s Great Depression... to a farmsteading family on the western Kansas plains near Scott City. Her maternal grandfather William Lenihan helped to settle the area after the Homestead Act of 1862, and was himself the child of Irish immigrants who came to America because of Ireland’s Potato Famine of the 1840s. Her father, Prosper Minnix, had Scottish and English roots. Together with Wilda’s mother, Julia, and Wilda’s siblings, Berl and Lilia, he tilled the land, tended livestock and made a go of life alongside other mutually self-reliant pioneer farmers in a “from the prairies” community. Grandpa Lenihan told stories of his cattle clubs, driving mules for the Army, even living in Dodge City briefly, to his rapt young grandchildren, esp. to Wilda. They made it through the Depression not in luxury, yet with enough to eat, a roof, beds, plenty of love and hard work. As the state motto of Kansas, ad astra per aspera, suggests, farm life is work life, sunup to sundown, with play mainly integral to discovery and doing favorite tasks—Wilda recounts her siphoning job from pond to garden, pet lambs, climbing and doing flips in the hay loft, caring for her and her sister’s sheep miniflock, and so on. Share in the enlightening and heartwarming story of her ancestors then of the full life she lived, thru the WW2 years, marriage to a dedicated and thoughtful small town doctor, her work in the lab and teaching, gardening, raising similarly resourceful and healthy children, all the challenges and joys. This is Wilda’s saga of generations, anecdotes of her ancestors, heirlooms for the heirs.

256 pages, Paperback

Published March 19, 2021

Reviews

[Lori Trautwein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delightful account of a life well lived from her childhood on the Kansas prairie during the depression, college graduation with a degree in biology, work as a lab assistant, marriage to a small town doctor, and mother to three children.