The Montana Frontier: One Woman's West
This true story of a Victorian-era young woman who follows her husband to a small town with the improbable name of Gilt Edge, Montana, will remind readers of Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose, the classic novel of a woman's life in the Mountain West. As a young girl, Lillian Weston, the author's grandmother, aspired to be a concert pianist. However, as a young woman in turn-of-the-century New York, she became a newspaper columnist. Her marriage to Frank Hazen took her west in 1899, ending her career as a newspaperwoman. She turned her writing skills to journals, diaries, stories, and poems, which traced her family's life on a frontier that was no longer unspoiled. The Hazens endured brutal winters and dry summers and endeavored to raise cattle and chickens by trial and error. Lillian was an assiduous diarist who included details of her turbulent marriage challenged by Frank's bad business deals. The details of birth control and child rearing, gambling and prostitution, education and health care are all part of this story, offering glimpses into everyday life that often go unreported in the larger story of western expansion.
Format:Hardcover
Language:English
ISBN:0826331203
ISBN13:9780826331205
Release Date:April 2004
Publisher:University of New Mexico Press
Length:261 Pages
Weight:1.15 lbs.
Dimensions:1.0" x 6.0" x 9.0"
Customer Reviews
1 rating
Little House and Little Women for Grownup Pioneer Girls
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 20 years ago
If you grew up gobbling down books about inspiring, independent women with pioneer spirit, you will enjoy reading this loving and learned biography of the author's grandmother born in 1865. Ms. Litz' research fleshes out the economic and social circumstances only slightly apparent in the books of our youth. Lillian Weston Hazen was a successful syndicated columnist in New York City in the late 1900s when she married a promising, rich Dartmouth graduate. The Depression of 1893 bankrupted them and dried up job prospects in the East. The only position her husband could find was bookkeeper for a mining company in a rough frontier town called Gilt Edge near Lewistown, Montana. Despite tremendous physical hardships and economic setbacks, they made a life for themselves and a surviving son where many were ground down and dropped out. Despite heavy ranch labor, Lillian carved out time to write and published in Scribners and some farming journals. Her lasting legacy will turn out to be the trunk of diaries and clippings that Joyce Litz found in 1949 following her death.
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