Julie McDonald Zander

Matilda Koontz cherishes her life as a wife and mother on a Missouri farm, but her hardworking husband wants to claim free farmland in the Pacific Northwest. When he suggests selling the farm to trek two thousand miles across the Oregon Trail, she balks.

But in the spring of 1847, Matilda and Nicholas Koontz and their sons embark on a grueling journey westward. Fresh graves testify to dangers of disease, accidents, starvation, and a multitude of hazards threatening her family and her beloved’s dream.

With new struggles at every turn, Matilda wonders how she can protect her sons on such a perilous journey. Will they reach the trail’s end? Will the babe growing inside her womb survive?

When tragedy strikes, the question changes: How can she possibly continue?

This pioneer woman’s journey is inspired by a true story.

Matilda (Glover) Koontz was thirty-seven years old, a pregnant wife, and the mother of four young sons when she joined her husband in May 1847 for their trek across the Oregon Trail, lured by the promise of fertile farmland in the Willamette Valley. After a series of tragedies, she fulfilled her husband's dream and arrived with their sons in Oregon City—but then what?

 

Life on the Home Front: Stories of Those Who Worked, Waited, and Worried During World War II

 

Life on the Home Front compiles the recollections of several dozen Rosie the Riveters and men who worked in defense plant industries on the home front during World War II. It features chapters on the attack on Pearl Harbor, the internment of Japanese Americans, expanding aircraft plants and shipyards, first-person accounts of working on the home front, women who entertained soldiers as part of the United Service Organization, and celebrations at the end of the war.

"This account by historian Julie McDonald Zander  is centered primarily on the activities of those employed by the Boeing Aircraft Company wing factory in Chehalis, Washington, building the wings for B-17s. The wings were shipped to the company's Seattle plant where they were put together with other parts and became the workhorse bombers of World War II.

 

"It's more than a story of ladies getting up and going to work every day, though. It tells of the other struggles in their lives and how they balanced those things with the need to support the war effort. Some had the pain of losing loved ones during the fighting, and others even saw local friends who happened to be of Japanese ancestry shuttled off to internment camps.

 

"McDonald's accounts, based on hours of interviews with survivors and illustrated with precious photos from their albums, may bring a tear to one's eye, but it will probably be a tear of pride in what the distaff side of the Greatest Generation was able to accomplish."

 

John Martin, former newspaper editor