Then, after a few years, what I was hearing was “My grandmother used to try to tell me…” Now there is no one left to tell the daughters and the granddaughters. The women who lived that life, a life before electricity—millions and millions of them—of course are almost all dead, and they can’t tell their story to their descendants. So the story might easily have been lost. If in even small measure I told it for them, these women of the American frontier, and in order to accomplish that, The Path to Power took a couple of years longer to write, well—so what?
