An Improbable Pioneer
Letters by Edith S. Holden Healy; Commentary by Cathy Healy

Overview 
They married on a snowy April night in 1911 and honeymooned across a South still recovering from the Civil War. Edith Sampson Holden, born into a prominent Boston family, fell in love and married Alec Healy, son of Utah immigrants, a MIT graduate and a Wyoming sheep rancher. Edith wrote wonderfully observant letters to her mother and friends about the land, ranching, Fourth of July picnics, dancing, adoption, travel to exotic locations, and the art of dying.  Read More

Sample:    Wild West Arrival             
                                                
                                                 Available for purchase from: 
                                                                    -- Amazon.com 
                                                                    -- Barnes & Noble
                                                                    -- Washakie Museum (Wyoming)
                                                                    -- Select bookstores

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Media Response (chronological order)
    

    Review: Buffalo Bill Center of the West, May 2014
    Review: WREN magazine, Wyoming Rural Electric News, May 2014
    Review: Cow Country, Winter 2014
     Wyoming Public Radio
     Billings Gazette
     Casper Star-Tribune
     Buffalo Bulletin
    Northern Wyoming Daily News: Coverage, but not available in online archives

Praise for An Improbable Pioneer
(Read More)

What a gift Cathy Healy and her family has given all of us who are history buffs in sharing an eastern, educated, privileged bride's letters to her mother which give us a personal insight into early life in Wyoming.  Her courageous and cheerful adaptation to life in a small Wyoming town and on a sheep ranch is inspiring.We were fascinated and warmed by her insight and descriptions. Small wonder her progeny have been such contributors to Wyoming's heritage and political life.
-- Ann and Al Simpson
Cody, Wyoming

Edith Sampson Healy, a fine Boston lady and a pioneer woman extraordinaire, takes you on a journey through the sheep country of Wyoming
during the first half of the last century.  She is as fresh and powerful as the spring wind coming off the Bighorn Mountains she loved so much.
-- Grant Ujifusa
Founding Editor, The Almanac of American Politics

Cathy Healy has expertly edited her grandmother's letters from the 1900s to give us a delightful account of a cultured Bostonian's improbable but richly-lived years in the west as the wife of a Wyoming sheepman from Ogden, Utah, who not so improbably, was educated at MIT.--
-- Val Holley
Author, 25th Street Confidential: Drama, Decadence, and Dissipation Along Ogden's Rowdiest Road