A vivid work based on a lifetime of learning about a remote miningarea east of the Colorado River, Pioneer Women, Minersand Thieves is a collection of portraits of enterprising people whose stories have never been told. In the late 1800s, prospectors and pioneers poured into this part of the Arizona Territory. When the ore was gone, the mining camps faded into ghost towns. All that remained was the exquisite desert and a handful of intractable people determined to live audacious lives in splendid isolation.Long before HBO's Deadwood became America's most popularmining camp, Cactus Kelli wrote about mining towns Harrisburg and Harqua Hala. With personal experience as her guide,she writes of people she knew or heard tales about while she was growing up in the McMullen Valley.Ms. Kelly has informed her work with extensive research. A poet at heart, she writes with an awareness that, sculpting memories is a natural phenomenon used to soften the realities that can sear our souls.