When Montana and I Were Young

`

When Montana and I Were Young

A Frontier Childhood

Margaret Bell
Edited and with an introduction by Mary Clearman Blew
With an afterword by Lee Rostad

Women in the West Series

251 pages

Paperback

September 2003

978-0-8032-6214-0

$17.95 Add to Cart

About the Book

Lost for almost half a century and never before published, When Montana and I Were Young is 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. Bell was barely seven when her mother died, and her stepfather, Hedge Wolfe, moved Bell and her three younger half-sisters far from their nurturing grandmother to the Canadian plains and a life of extreme poverty, hardship, and abuse.

Author Bio

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.

Awards

2003 Susan Koppelman Award, sponsored by The Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association, winner
 
2003 WILLA Literary Award, sponsored by Women Writing the West, memoir/essay category finalist
 
2003 Benjamin F. Shambaugh Award, sponsored by the State Historical Society of Iowa, memoir category finalist
 
2002 Handcart Award, sponsored by the Mountain West Center for Regional Studies at Utah State University, winner

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