for The Betsy Ross of the Bears

The true story of the first American woman in California is told exactly as it happened, with Holland's powerful prose to set the scene and reveal the heart of this courageous pioneer.

With her stunningly realistic and exhaustively researched novels, Cecelia Holland has earned unanimous acclaim as one of the finest historical novelists of our time. Her subjects range from the dawn of prehistory and the turbulent middle ages to the rough-and-tumble pioneer days of her own native California, chronicled in such sweeping epics as The Bear Flag, Pacific Street, and her most recent novel, Railroad Schemes. Now, in An Ordinary Woman, Holland gives us an intimate portrait of a remarkable woman who played a crucial role in the settlement of the West--Nancy Kelsey, the courageous young pioneer who was the first American woman to set foot in California. Drawing upon Nancy's own accounts of her harrowing journey, as well as the writings of those who traveled with her, Cecelia Holland has crafted a stunning biography of this amazing woman that is filled with all of the action, passion, danger, and determination that have made her historical novels bestsellers around the world. Married at the age of fifteen to Ben Kelsey, a restless young Scotch-Irish pioneer who eked out a meager living on the Missouri frontier, Nancy Roberts Kelsey was a strong and capable woman who could milk a cow, skin a deer, make hew own clothes, plant a field, drive a team of oxen, and shoot a rifle. The child pioneers, bred to courage and risk, she had grown up in the wilderness only a few miles from the great Missouri River that was, in 1838, the border of the settled United States. But when the lure of a new life on the farthest edge of the frontier beckoned to Ben Kelsey, Nancy was determined to be at his side. Together they embarked on an arduous odyssey across thousands of miles of uncharted wilderness, crossing the Great Plains, the Rockies, and the High Sierra to reach their promised land. Braving hunger, disaster, illness, betrayal, and death, Nancy Kelsey and her family would play a crucial role in American history, becoming the first wave of a great tide that would transform a nation.

From Kirkus Reviews , February 1, 1999
Holland returns to California (Railroad Schemes, 1997, etc.) for her 24th historical, a dramatized biography of Nancy Kelsey, the first American woman to cross the wilderness of the Great Western Desert and Rockies, afterward settling in California with her husband Ben and raising a large family. Accompanied entirely by men and carrying an infant in her arms, Kelsey trekked over the Sierra Nevada, facing down hostile Indians (her seven-year-old daughter was scalped and killed) and surviving the brutalities of land and weather. When Kelsey arrived in California, the Spanish dons realized that a virtual takeover by easterners was a foregone conclusion. Kelsey's husband, in none-too-good health, was often laid low, but at last he sprang back to work. Kelsey herself hefted pounds of gold at Sutter's Fort on the American River, and when California seceded from Mexico, she rode in the Bear Flag Rebellion. This was clearly a woman of awesome endurance; when her husband died, after giving his name to many California trails, hamlets, and canyons, she went north to the wilderness area of the San Joaquin Valley, built a new homestead, and lived to old age. Holland, basing her story on journals of the period, writes in her usual non-nonsense, straight-ahead style that is more intent on covering the distance than on smelling the wind (or the flowers).