Our pint-sized heroine, Mamie, was born in 1844 to rich Southern folks who kept black slaves. She was "born to the manor," so to speak and raised in true "Scarlet O'Hara" fashion. The fabulous satin gowns with yards of lace and puffy petticoats, this was our Mamie.

She was sixteen years old when the Civil War brought an end to the family's affluent lifestyle. With youthful idealism she helped make the first Confederate flag to fly over Missouri and proudly waved it from an upstairs window of a tobacco shop. This stirred Southern patriotism to riotous proportions; Union troops were sent in to quell the riots; friends were shot; family assets were confiscated and Mamie and her family feared for their lives.

Sometime during the next terror filled months a handsome Mexican freighter came to her rescue. Don Epifanio Aguirre spoke no English and Mamie spoke no Spanish, but when he proposed marriage, Mamie accepted. Dubbed the romance of the century, their wedding occurred in 1862 when jayhawkers and bushwhackers were having a heyday murdering the neighbors. That summer Cole Younger's father was gunned down on the outskirts of town, and Cole and Jesse James, two lads well known to Mamie, hid in a nearby canyon.

Mamie was only nineteen (and a young mother) when her husband loaded her in a carriage behind his mule train and she made the first of her five long journeys over the Santa Fe Trail. For the next six years the Aguirres made their home in New Mexico, but in the fall of 1869, after losing their freighting business to fire and Indian raids, the young couple made their way to Arizona. No longer rich, Mamie rode part way to Tucson in a grain wagon, atop a load of wheat-through hostile Apache territory. "My husband's hand never left his pistol," Mamie recounted.

A short time later, her husband was driving a stagecoach en route to Tucson, when he was ambushed and killed by Indians. This left Mamie a widow with three small sons to raise. Needing money, she began teaching school. Her first school was Tres Alamos situated on the banks of the San Pedro, east of Tucson. The makeshift schoolhouse, a one-room shack with a dirt-floor, had been left vacant when the owners were killed by Apaches. Bravely this tiny woman (she was less than five feet tall) walked to school through the desert accompanied by her small pupils. Eight months into the school term an Apache paid a surprise visit to Mamie's classroom. Calming the children, she continued teaching as if nothing was amiss and eventually the Apache left without incident. But it was soon discovered the man belonged to a raiding party-one that brutally killed two area ranchers a few days later.

Next, Mamie taught in Tucson's old adobe school on Congress Street, or as she put it, "the most unruly girls God ever let live." Yet she enjoyed teaching and soon had the miscreants behaving like proper young ladies. Known as an extremely competent teacher, she continued teaching in Arizona grade schools until 1896 when she was appointed to the University of Arizona as the faculty's first woman professor.

Not surprisingly the book includes her memories of Johnny Behan and Wyatt Earp's famous gunfight as well as the Geronimo uprising. It is a gripping story from beginning to end, one that is fraught with tragedy, yet contains the kind of romance, courage and inspiration not often found in non-fiction.