Our Wyoming Heritage: As Seen Through the Eyes of the Young

In the tradition of the Foxfire books, this collection of essays, poems, letters and drawings by Wyoming elementary school children vibrates with an authentic sense of history and reverence for the Wyoming countryside. The freshness of the children's art and written presentations, prepared as part of the Lasting Legacy project for Wyoming's centennial, makes for light diversion, but the book's greatest utility will be for teachers and parents who want to impart to children an object lesson on the theme that history is fun. While silliness and oversimplification are inevitable in such a volume, there are also humor and imagination as the students make concrete the daily lives of historical figures, including Sioux Indians (``Sioux children learned to swim before they could walk''), frontier soldiers (``The Frontier Soldiers / Slept on cots. It was hot.''), mountain men and cowboys. The blunt facts are here, from settlers running the Indians off their own land to the Teapot Dome Scandal. A bibliography at the end of each chapter provides references for further reading. (July)