Born in 1907 into one of the first families to settle in eastern Nevada, Elbert Edwards constitutes a link with a little-known phase of the pioneer past of southern Nevada. A member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, he conveys an impression of the dedication and the industry of that segment of society. Mr. Edwards has been sensitive to his surroundings and perceptive of his evaluations of them. When he was a youth in Panaca, pioneer agricultural and domestic practices were still common. While there are a number of studies of Mormon community life, this account offers a fresh insight on that subject.

Mr. Edwards was a student at the University of Nevada in the late 1920s, and he became a schoolteacher in Las Vegas at the beginning of the Depression, just as the city and the adjacent area were beginning the remarkable expansion that accompanied the building of Hoover Dam. As a teacher and later as an educational administrator in Boulder City, he was a modern pioneer. Edwards gives an invaluable account of the community and educational problems of southern Nevada a third-of-a-century ago.

Elbert Edwards gives reminiscences of his family's Mormon pioneers; memories of family and everyday life in southern Nevada; a description of his mother's ranch life; accounts of water distribution processes in the Panaca area; remembrances of his training for, and pursuance of a career in education; a perspective on the modern LDS church; the account of a peculiar experience in sighting an unidentified flying object; and a philosophical conclusion. The period and communities in which he lived are among the least known and the least well described in the literature on Nevada, and this memoir will prove important for future researchers on southern and eastern Nevada.