Meanwhile…in my earlier posts I’ve frequently mentioned reading firsthand accounts that have shaped my knowledge of the Old West. Since today’s Top Ten Tuesday is a fill-in-the-blank theme of ten recommendations in a genre (or of a certain type of book, or for a certain reader’s tastes), I thought I’d do up a list of my favorite Western memoirs for anybody who’s interested in following the sources I’ve quoted or getting into the subject.
No Life For a Lady by Agnes Morley Cleaveland
Possibly my personal favorite on the list—Agnes Morley Cleaveland grew up helping her widowed mother and two younger siblings run a New Mexico ranch from the time she was a young girl in the 1880s, and her memoir paints a lively and entertaining picture of the time, the place, and the people.
Little Britches: Father and I Were Ranchers by Ralph Moody
This was a read-aloud that my whole family loved years ago. Moody’s New England family moved to Colorado in the early 1900s, and their adventures with weather, horses, cowboys, haying, land disputes and more make for engrossing reading. Moody went on to write a whole series based on his growing-up years, most of which are set in the West—the third book, The Home Ranch, is particularly good too.
Land of the Burnt Thigh by Edith Eudora Kohl
Not counting Little Britches, this was the first book off this list that I read, and it absolutely captivated me. This one recounts the experiences of two sisters homesteading by themselves in South Dakota in 1907, surviving everything from prairie fires to blizzards, eventually running a newspaper and trading post, and witnessing one of the last great land rushes. See my review here.
A Bride Goes West by Nannie Tiffany Alderson
I never got around to reviewing this one, but it’s well worth a read—the story of a Southern-bred woman who moved to Montana as a new bride in the early 1880s, to live in a two-room shack—with little to no idea of how to keep house! Her stories of life on the prairie, the sometimes friendly but often touchy relationships with neighboring Indians, and especially of the loyal cowboys who took her under their wing and taught her about Western life, make for a fascinating read.
Stirrup High by Walt Coburn
This lightly-fictionalized memoir comes at the other end of ranching days in Montana—Coburn, the youngest son of a wealthy rancher, narrates the story of his participation in one of the last big open-range roundups in the early 1900s. If you loved Little Britches you’ll probably like this one too.
No Time on My Hands by Grace Snyder
Grace Snyder’s family moved to western Nebraska when she was a small child—her autobiography is full of details about settlers’ everyday lives, her experiences teaching a frontier school, her eventual marriage to a cowboy-turned-rancher in 1903, and their experiences with ranch life in the sandhills all the way up into the 1950s.
High, Wide and Lonesome by Hal Borland
A bit similar to Little Britches, in that it’s a story of Colorado homesteading in the early 20th century told from a young boy’s perspective—but it has its own style and its own set of characters, and its own set of challenges and hardships for them to face.
A Tenderfoot Bride by Clarice E. Richards
Another story of an Eastern-bred bride moving West, this time to a ranch in Colorado in 1900—every bit as entertaining as the others on this list.
…and two I haven’t read yet
Of the wide variety of cowboy memoirs that I haven’t gotten around to yet, these two seem to be among the best-known and most frequently referenced. I’ve had Log of a Cowboy (which is in the public-domain and free) on my Kindle for a long time, and one of these days I am going to get to it!
For literally dozens more memoirs, journals and diaries, and collections of letters from the Old West, check out this Goodreads list that I’ve compiled. There are so many titles on there that look fascinating, by ranchers, cowboys, ranchers’ wives, frontier soldiers’ wives and daughters, homesteaders, and more.
“Delicious” is an adjective I often find myself using to describe a really good book, so a tag comparing books to different flavors of cake seems somehow fitting; and it seemed like a nice light bit of amusement for the midst of a summer vacation—so accordingly I picked up the challenge from 
Every family has a collective second language: inside jokes. And I suspect a large part of it is often made up of quotes from their favorite movies. I, for instance, live with three siblings who are amazingly skilled at imitating voices and inflections (my brother’s Walter Brennan imitation has to be heard to be believed), improvising whole conversations “in-character,” and inserting apt quotes into everyday conversation. If we’d gotten started on Shakespeare a little earlier in life, we’d probably be quoting the Bard at each other all day long. As it is, hardly a day goes by when somebody doesn’t get a laugh by using a movie quote in just the right place.