Homemade Frontier Fun and Danger written by Preston Lewis and Harriet Kocher Lewis
Date Published: 11-04-2025
Publisher: Bariso Press
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!
Interview with Preston Lewis
How did publishing your first book change your process of writing?
My first book, a novel, was published in 1981. That was so long ago it was written on an IBM Selectric typewriter and not the correcting type. It was long and painful. After that, I got my first computer. It cost $2,000 and was the size of a suitcase and had a screen the size of a postage stamp. Primitive as it was, it took the pick-and-shovel work out of writing, as Elmer Kelton once told me.
What was an early experience where you learned that language had power?
When you write a book, it’s a solitary endeavor and it’s hard to gauge the power because you are not observing a reader’s response or reactions. About a decade ago I wrote a dramatic reading of a series of Civil War letters between my wife’s great-great grandparents. There was a point in their correspondence where the wife thinks her husband had been killed. I described it with a sentence that said “and then she received the letter she dreaded from the day her husband left for war. James Wood was no more.” At all the performances of Beloved Companion, the audience gasped at that line because they had grown connected to the two personas. That was the first time I really understood the power of language when dramatically written.
What one thing would you give up to become a better writer?
My linear or literal thinking as it prevents me from writing with a more literary style.
Tell us a little about yourself? Perhaps something not many people know?
I have been writing for half a century. When I started, there were a dozen or so publishers producing mass market Westerns, which is where I got my start. I was good enough to get published, but not good enough to counter the trends in Western publishing. Over the years, eight publishers that brought out my Westerns either went bankrupt or dropped their western or historical novel lines. That was not to say I was that good or bad a writer, depending on how you look at it, but rather I was riding out the changes in Western publishing. Even so, my reputation got around and one of my friends in Western Writers of America dubbed me “the Typhoid Mary of Western Writers.” In terms of my career, I’ve published about 60 books. During that career, I’ve received three Spur Awards and 11 Will Rogers Medallion Awards (seven gold, two silver and two bronze). I am a past president of Western Writers of America and the West Texas Historical Association, which named me a fellow in 2016. In 2021 I was elected to the Texas Institute of Letters for my literary accomplishments and this year I was named recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Will Rogers Medallion Awards.
If you had to do something differently as a child or teenager to become a better writer as an adult, what would you do?
I read a lot as a youngster, but I would have read even more. The more you read, the better you think. The better you think, the better you write.
What is the biggest surprise that you experienced after becoming a writer?
There’s an aura about being an author to the average American reader, who often holds you in awe even though what you are doing is simply what our son and daughter called “seat work” during their elementary school days.
Could you tell us a bit about your most recent book and why it is a must-read?
Pintsized Pioneers at Play: Homemade Frontier Fun and Danger is the sequel to Pintsized Pioneers: Taming the Frontier, One Chore at a Time, which is the most honored book I have ever published, earning a Spur Award, a Will Rogers Gold Medallion and a handful of other awards. Co-Authored with my wife, Harriet Kocher Lewis, Pintsized Pioneers at Play fills out the picture of frontier childhood, explaining what youngsters were doing when they weren’t handling the numerous chores that had to do to help their family’s survive in the Old West.
About the Author
Preston Lewis is the award-winning author of more than sixty western, historical, juvenile, and nonfiction works. In 2021 he was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters for his literary achievements. The Will Rogers Medallion Awards named him the 2025 recipient of the organization’s Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the literature of the American West.
Western Writers of America (WWA) has honored Lewis with three Spur Awards, one for best article, a second for best western novel and a third one for YA nonfiction in 2025. He has received eleven Will Rogers Medallion Awards (seven gold, two silver and two bronze) for written western humor, short stories, YA nonfiction, short nonfiction, and traditional Western novel.
Harriet Kocher Lewis is a retired physical therapist and PT educator. As an assistant clinical professor of physical therapy at Angelo State University, she taught documentation and scientific writing among other topics as the department’s coordinator of clinical education.
After retirement she became the publisher of Bariso Press and in that capacity an award-winning author and editor. Books she has edited have earned a Spur Award, Will Rogers Gold and Bronze Medallions for YA nonfiction and western humor, a Literary Global Book Award for cookbooks, and an Independent Author Award for western nonfiction. Other books she has edited have been finalists for Spur Awards in juvenile nonfiction and for Independent Author Awards for both memoirs and humor.
Kocher Lewis is co-author with her husband of the Spur Award-winning Pintsized Pioneers: Taming the Frontier, One Chore at a Time and three books on artificial Intelligence, all published by Bariso Press. They live in San Angelo, Texas.
Contact Links
Twitter: @prestonlewisaut
Instagram: @barisopress
https://mybook.to/PinsizedPioneersatPlay
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