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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 endeavoured 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.

A Short Season: Story of a Montana Childhood A Short Season is Don Morehead's bittersweet story of growing up on a Montana ranch during the 1940s. In 1941, his parents eagerly took up residence on a ten-thousand-acre sheep ranch in northern Montana. The entire family was soon caught up in the natural rhythm and grueling work of ranch life, meeting those challenges with energy, patience, and humor. The driving force behind the ranch and family was the father, Bill Morehead, the "hub around which activity spun." Don especially was drawn into his father's world, rarely leaving his side, and becoming known as his "small partner." When his father died suddenly in 1948, Don was left with lingering, irreducible grief and loneliness. Replete with marvelous details of ranching life, Don Morehead's story is also a sobering and moving meditation on childhood and the special relationship that can develop between father and son.

In These Hills After a lifetime spent writing and working on his family's cattle ranch outside of Helena, Montana, Ralph Beer has gathered his best magazine essays into one collection called "In These Hills". In thirty-three essays, he provides a moving and elegiac tribute to lives now passed, an often humorous homage to the provincial, and an attempt "to fathom the place where we live... to decipher who we are," as he writes in his introduction. Beer, praised as one of the finest writers in the West, offers an authentic literary voice paired with a lifetime spent exploring a particularly beloved piece of land. From his first experience with a wheat harvest, to the winter rebuilding of a 1947 Dodge Power Wagon, to his moving exploration of an old family mystery, these essays slice sharply under the sod of our embedded romanticism, exploring not only the brute hardships of a living made from cattle ranching, but the inextricable satisfaction of it as well. As Beer himself says in the final pages of this collection, "Stories outshine instruments of gold. Stories outlast stone." Ralph Beer has worked as a ranch hand, swamper, clerk, cannon cocker, logger, heavy equipment operator, battery rat, carpenter, and whiskey taster.

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