Burro Bill and Me: A Memoir of Our Unusual Death Valley Love Story (Digital Original)

By: Edna Calkins Price

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Synopsis: A memoir of one young woman&’s decade-long adventure with her husband in one of the most uninhabitable and inhospitable places on Earth. Raised as a well-to-do Virginia girl, Edna fell head-over-heels in love with a semi-literate and restless young man whose dreams of adventure and freedom were as wide as the California sky. &“I can&’t take a soft life,&” he told his bride. &“It rots a man.&” Thus began an uncommon love story. For ten happy years, 1931 to 1941, Edna and Bill Price abandoned city life and roamed sun-scorched Death Valley and the Arizona badlands on foot with their string of pack burros. They slept under the stars, scratched out a meager living from the wasteland, and hobnobbed with prospectors, outlaws, herders and hobos. &“In this place,&” Bill explained, &“a man can find his God.&” Far from feeling displaced, Edna thrived as a desert flower. In her extraordinary memoir, a jewel of Western Americana, Edna writes with wit and grit, recalling &“those years when we knew no bed but the ground, no roof but the sky, when we were known all over the deserts simply as Burro Bill and Mrs. Bill.&”