The Ride of Her Life: The True Story of a Woman, Her Horse, and Their Last-Chance Journey Across America

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To her sister, Emma Elvina Wilkins, Annie gave a life interest in her ‘freehold dwelling-house and premises now used as a Post Office and garden’ as well as all the furniture, fittings and effects. Her plan was to gather her remaining cash and spend two years on the road, heading toward the shores of California where she dreamed of living out her final days. Soon after, she had become ill herself and left the hospital with doctors telling her she had only two years to live. The Ride of Her Life: The True Story of a Woman, Her Horse, and Their Last-chance Journey Across America.

Harriett Annie Wilkins, The great railway catastrophe of the 12th March, 1857, on the Desjardin Canal Bridge, on the line of the Great Western Railway (1857?Autumn leaves (Hamilton, 1869); The holly branch (Hamilton, 1851); Victor Roy; a masonic poem (Hamilton, 1882); and Wayside flowers (Toronto, 1876). Harriett Annie joined the Church of England after her arrival in Hamilton and a number of her poems suggest that she was an ardent admirer of freemasonry.

Letts visited historical societies in small towns across America digging up fascinating details that put context, humanity, and history into this life-affirming book that speaks volumes about the bond between horses, dogs, and humans, and a can-do spirit at an historical time when Americans weren’t so fearful, distrustful of strangers. Annie’s mother put the California fantasy into her head as a child regaling her with optimistic stories, an escape from the hard life of a Maine farm that saw its productivity dwindled to a bare-minimum. The gift Elizabeth Letts has is that she makes you feel you are the one taking this trip: selecting your route from a gas station map, enduring awful weather and accidents, hearing the creak of the saddle and the roar of the trucks that pass you by. As a novelist ( Finding Dorothy, the most recent), history comes alive through Letts’ appealing, novelistic prose.I care deeply about issues that affect women and children, and especially those who are fleeing danger. It didn’t take long for news of this strikingly odd crew to spread, after a reporter discovered them. The family were also accompanied by Florence’s widowed mother Harriet Stubbings, and Bertie’s nephew, Harold John Wilkins.

Our players and our community make us who we are and we are so excited to welcome our new Musical Director, Annie Wilkins, to the Otley Band Community. I suspect that Ellen Amelia has been living with her grandfather and aunt Annie since the death of her mother, Ellen Elizabeth Wilkins, in 1907. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Her father, who had come to act as an interim pastor at the First Congregational Church, Hamilton, died a year or so after his arrival.She also drew attention for riding a mule to her job at a shoe factory in Lewiston out of convenience and necessity. Between 1954 and 1956, the three travelers pushed through blizzards, forded rivers, climbed mountains, and clung to the narrow shoulder as cars whipped by them at terrifying speeds.