Fannie Davis Veale was born in Dresden, Texas, in 1861, and she grew up on the Texas frontier, moving with her family form place to place. At the age of eighteen, she married Henry Harrison Beck, a young man from Iowa. They continued to live in Texas, and as the years went by, Mrs. Beck became a mother and then a grandmother; and through the years she told and retold stories of life growing up on the Texas frontier.

In 1937, at the request of her children, Mrs. Beck wrote down her stories and published them in a book, On the Texas Frontier--Autobiography of a Texas Pioneer. That book, treasured by her family and admired and collected by Texas history buffs, has been out of print for years. Now the book is back, in a facsimile edition, thanks to Robert Veale Hays, Mrs. Beck's fourth grandson, who wanted to preserve the stories of frontier life that his grandmother told him when he was a child.

A combination of personal history and the history of pioneers, On the Texas Frontier captures the stories of one family's experiences in: making lye from collected ashes and the scavenged fat and bones of dead cattle; slavery as remembered from a southern child's point-of-view; log cabins; cowboys and their grim sense of humor that included "scaring the liver out of a dude"; stage holdups and robberies; the employment of Mexican workers; early farm machinery; and more. These are stories that capture the history of Texas--the joys and hardships of day-to-day life.

Charmingly written, On the Texas Frontier is a first-person account of the people and the life that helped form the character of Texas and Texans.

On the Texas Frontier
Autobiography of a Texas Pioneer

by Mrs. Henry Beck

296 pages, cloth, $24.95
ISBN 1-56474-303-0