Lessons from the Old West

Could there be anyone more prolific than local author Chris Enss? Seems like I'm always hearing from her about a new book coming off the press.

Enss is the author or coauthor of more than a dozen books on women in the Old West, and her latest is "Frontier Teachers."

Says her promotion, "If countless books and movies are to be believed, America's Wild West was, at heart, a world of cowboys and Indians, sheriffs and gunslingers, scruffy settlers and mountain men - a man's world. Here, Chris Enss, in the latest of her popular books to take on this stereotype, tells the stories of 12 courageous women who faced down schoolrooms full of children on the open prairies and in the mining towns of the Old West."

Courageous, I'll say. I recall my seventh-grade class in Hamden, Conn. We sent our teacher Miss Porter screaming out of class one day, never to return. Maybe, though, seventh-graders in the 1850s were more polite, or perhaps teachers more hardy.

"Frontier Teachers" is available at local bookstores, at Barnes & Noble and at Amazon.com. The author's Web site is www.chrisenss.com.