FINALLY, women are having their say about the pioneer experience, and not a day too soon. Once the diaries, letters and reminiscences of girls and women began to emerge from under the weight of Western male myth (including revisionist male myth), feisty women, neither prostitutes with hearts of gold nor martyred stoics, began taking their rightful place in the fiction of the West. Sarah Agnes Prine is such a woman, and Nancy Turner fittingly tells Sarah's story through the device of a diary, beginning in 1881 when Sarah is 17. With her family, she is making her way from the Territories to Texas in a wagon train. Having no formal education and only a rudimentary knowledge of the alphabet, she has taught herself to read and write, quickly (and fortunately for the reader) mastering the language.

Within the 20-year span of the diary, she observes and endures enough hardship and loss to fill a dozen novels. In the first year alone, her beloved father and one of her little brothers die. Her mother has a breakdown, Sarah kills two men as they rape a friend, and the camp is attacked by Apaches fighting to retain their land. The best news is that she and her remaining family end up in the Arizona Territory, familiar and not far from where they began their journey. All this just for starters and all told through a fresh and fierce eye, and without a hint of whining.

As the diary unfolds, so do the dramatic escapades, but just about the time the adventures begin to wear, the pace changes. On one occasion Sarah and the love of her life, Capt. Jack Elliot, visit his father in the quieter, more civilized setting of Austin, Tex. Often Turner sets up a domestic situation among women, primarily Sarah, her mother and her sister-in-law. These scenes are lovingly rendered.

As Sarah recounts the shaping of a cattle ranch, she also tells of the disappointment in an early marriage and the pain of childbirth, made more difficult because of her understandable fear and need to control. Through these pages comes her evolving acceptance of Jack Elliot, an army officer whose primary mission it is to rid the Territory of the Apaches. Jack represents much of the wanderlust of that age, although he is aptly drawn as a vigorous, complex character in his own right. In fact, one wishes Sarah had more of his complexity.

But what she lacks in introspection, she more than makes up for in courage and cleverness. In episode after episode, she proves herself equal to the challenge. If her spirit falters, she rallies herself. Sarah, however, is no female version of the good-guy sheriff, for Turner portrays a woman beset by human frailties and willing to tote up her mistakes. When she is digging the graves of murdered neighbors and friends, her first emotion is relief that her own family has not suffered.

Acknowledging her vulnerabilities, she confesses to her journal: "Sometimes I feel like a tree on a hill, at the place where all the wind blows and the hail hits the hardest. All the people I love are down the side aways, sheltered under a great rock, and I am out of the fold, standing lone in the sun and the snow. I feel like I am not part of the rest somehow, although they welcome me and are kind."

For the most part, the tension is of the what-will-happen-next variety and is sufficiently continuous to keep readers turning the page. Until Sarah and Jack stop spinning in separate orbits, their frustrated love affair sustains the suspense. Afterward Turner relies on the pitfalls of life in the Territories and the inevitable pulls and compromises of marriage and family. Jack, for instance, isn't much tamed by domesticity. He is still out there looking for Geronimo.

Later, to please him, she moves with the children to the fort and then into Tucson itself, but her heart is always back at the ranch, which she still owns. She also aspires to more and more for herself: "I want everything, my insides are not just hungry, but greedy. I want to find out all the things in the world and still have a family and a ranch."

Although the author is in control of her material and writes in clear, at times lyrical prose, this book could have been even better if, along with providing vivid, colorful characters and historically accurate backdrop, Turner had examined in more depth both the era and her protagonist. Then again, Sarah's survival, and on something akin to her own terms, may be enough. The strongest image that lingers is that of Sarah on horseback, engaged with the land and with life. Hers is a spirit that will remain long after the story fades.