When Montana and I Were Young : A Frontier Childhood

'Peggy Bell's memoir is as rough, gritty, and blue as the Montana frontier in the 1890s. Her voice is frank and true, never sentimental, as she speaks of sexual abuse, premature dying, people and animals worked beyond endurance. Yet there is joy in horses. Joy in the open land and the great skies. Mary Blew has done a great service in retrieving this memoir from the attics and back shelves where most women's stories just fade away' - Annick Smith, author of 'Homestead". '[Mary Clearman Blew] has introduced us to Peggy Bell and a western story, vividly and simply told, that is engrossing, disturbingly but doubly transcendent. Bell rises above a troubling girlhood to a clear and honest understanding of who she is and where she has come from. And doing that, she elevates this memoir of rural Montana into a struggle of the human spirit' - Elliott West, author of "The Contested Plains: Indians", "Goldseekers", and the "Rush to Colorado". 'Bell's memoir will become an instant classic in Montana literature, one that will rank with those by Nanie Alderson and Mary McLane. It is brave and revealing, with episodes that expose the sometimes brutal realities that define community-building on the frontier. This is a significant contribution to Montana's social history' - William L. Lang, author of "Great River of the West: Essays on the Columbia River". 'Some life stories are more amazing than fiction, and this is one of them. Bell's matter-of-fact tone with regard to brutalization and abuse of every kind makes her an innocent like Huck Finn, and as admirable in her pluck, resourcefulness, and resilience' - Alanna Kathleen Brown, Montana State University, Bozeman. Lost for almost half a century and never before published, "When Montana and I Were Young" is the rarest of finds, a remarkable primary account of a child's life in the early part of the twentieth century. Margaret Bell (1888-1982) was a rancher and horse breaker whose memoir tells the story of a frontier childhood on the high plains of Montana and Canada. Hers was not a typical childhood. Like "Mari Sandoz in Old Jules", Bell introduces us to a new villain in Western literature: the stepfather. Bell was barely seven when her mother died, and her stepfather, Hedge Wolfe, moved her and her three younger half-sisters far from their nurturing grandmother to the Canadian plains and a life of extreme poverty, hardship, and abuse. Never asking for pity, she matter-of-factly describes the details of her extraordinary life. Mary Clearman Blew is a professor of English at the University of Idaho in Moscow. She is the author of "Balsamroot and Bone-Deep in Landscape". Lee Rostad is the author of "Honey Wine and Hunger Root".