Loneliness pervaded the lives of pioneers on the American plains,
including those in the empty expanses of West Texas. In The
Lonesome Plains, Louis Fairchild mines the letters and journals of
West Texas settlers, as well as contemporary fiction and poetry, to
record the emotions attending solitude and the ways people sought
relief.

    Hungering for neighborliness, people came together in times of
misfortune—sickness, accident, and death—and at annual religious
services. Fairchild describes the practices that grew up around these
two focal points of social life. He recounts the building of coffins and
the preparation of bodies for burial, the funeral rite itself, and the lost
and lonely graves. And he tells the story of yearly outdoor revivals:
the meeting sites, food, and the tangential courting and mischief.

    In doing so, Fairchild skillfully draws a moving picture of life in
West Texas during the frontier-rural period of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries.

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LOUIS FAIRCHILD was a professor of psychology at West Texas A&M
University who currently lives in Ardsley, New Yok. He is the author
of They Called It the War Effort: Oral Histories from World War II.


Number Seven: West Texas A&M University Series