This book primarily consists of thematically linked excerpts from interviews conducted with people born between 1880 and 1910 who grew up in southwestern Utah, the Arizona Strip and the Muddy River region in Nevada. The excerpts are divided into seven topical chapters: family life/childhood/teenage years, school, work, health and sickness, Mormon colonists in Mexico who relocated to the Mohave Desert during the Mexican Revolution, interactions with Native Americans, and service. In his introductory essay the author offers 15 overarching observations based upon the interviews. These furnish a valuable collective portrait of life on the fringes of the Mormon culture area early in the twentieth century - a time period that has been largely overlooked in the social (as opposed to institutional) history of Mormonism. Several of these observations are reinforced by statistical data contained in the appendix. Each chapter concludes with an evaluative section drawing out insights from the interviews.