Burro Bill and Me

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."