Lily Klasner

Lily Casey Klasner was truly a child of the New Mexico nine-teenth-century frontier, encountering its turbulence and hardships in westward migration and later in Indian raids that robbed her family of most of their possessions. Although her formal education was intermittent, Mrs. Klasner attended toon meer the New Mexico Highlands University at Las Vegas and became a teacher and telegrapher as well as a rancher. She also became a writer, and from a meticulous diary, reinforced by letters, clippings, pictures, and documents, she fashioned an autobiography, further guided and shaped by historians Maurice Garland Fulton and Eric Bruce. The Klasner manuscript, lost after the author's death in 1946, showed up twenty years later in a trunk in an adobe hut in New Mexico. In 1968 Eve Ball, teller of tales about territorial New Mexico (Ma'am Jones of the Pecos and In the Days of Victorio), undertook the editing and annotation that resulted in the present volume. Lily klasner learned the harsh realities of frontier life at an early age. Born in Texas in 1862, she was only five when her family lost most of their provisions in an Indian raid while trekking to New Mexico; their ranch on the Pecos became a stopover for outlaws; and she assumed leadership of the family at thirteen when her father was murdered. toon minder