BOOK REPORT

Today I am reviewing "Ruth Fielding In The Saddle" or "College Girls In The Land Of Gold" By Alice B. Emerson. Copyright 1917 Cupples & Leon Company.

I was introduced to much more care worn books about Ruth Fielding when I was a child. My Grandmother Horn let me read her copies I'm not sure if Grandma ever read any book but the bible but I'm sure my Mom and Aunt Wilma read them. The books were Girls Adventure books, a precursor to Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys.

In this book Ruth is a freshman at Ardmore College, she and her girl friends are on their way to Arizona to spend six weeks at an old abandoned mining camp. Ruth has a job writing a screenplay for a movie producer and the film is called "The Forty-Niners". Basically they wind up discovering gold miners, and gold. This book is not exactly politically correct. One of the characters is explaining how he came to be in Arizona and he tells a joke.

There were some miners arguing about which smelled worse; sheep or greasers. They decided to have a contest. The jury was seated and the sheep were brought in. The jury fainted. The greasers were brought in and the sheep fainted.

See, I told you it was politically incorrect. In a book dealing with successfully independent young women, quoting such casually accepted prejudice was an eye opener.

I will have to dig around and see if I can find the rest of those books, they are in pretty bad shape. I purchased this book from the Antique Center of Sonoma in 1996 for five dollars. Today was the first time that I actually read the book.