144 pages
6 photographs, index
In the memoirs of her long and dramatic life, Magee recounts many interesting aspects of early Montana:
-Her father’s experiences as a free trader in the Rocky Mountains.
-Her mother’s tales of her Shoshone ancestors.
-Her memories of her life as a mixed-blood child in the Missoula Valley during the nineteenth century.
-Her father’s and other relatives’ role in the Nez Perce War of 1877.
-Her travels with her first husband through the Upper Flathead Country and the Thompson Falls area of Montana and High River, Alberta.
-Her move with her second husband to the Flathead Indian Reservation and her impressions of the impact of allotment and the new irrigation system on the reservation community.
-Her daughter’s life in the boarding school at St. Ignatius Mission in the early twentieth century.
Ida S. Patterson (1903–54), a young relative of Emma Magee, recorded this reminiscence in the late 1940s. It was published as a historical column in the Montana Farmer-Stockman in 1950. Some of her poetry was also published during her lifetime. She died in Polson, Montana, of complications from rheumatism.
