April 11, 2002

Plains Folk: Montana and I

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

Memory is the currency of my life as a historian of the plains. The study of the past is no science but rather a conversation, and a work in progress, for as we converse with our past, we change it and are changed by it.

Judging by my mail, I have two main sorts of readers for this column. There are those whom Wallace Stegner called "the stickers," long-time residents of the region who enter the conversation because they are living this stuff. And then there are the expatriates, people who have departed the plains for distant places of opportunity or repose, who still get their home-town newspapers from the prairies, and who are proud or fearful that it is the prairie experience which has defined them, wherever they are now.

Memoir happens when a person struggles with memory; wrestles it into a position where it will serve, or at least can be lived with; and sets it down it writing, so that it will hold still for a while. That was what Margaret Bell did with her girlhood in Montana. The result is a truly notable memoir, long lost but recently published by University of Nebraska Press: "When Montana and I Were Young: A Frontier Childhood."

The subtitle reference to "frontier childhood" ties "Montana and I" to an ongoing debate about what it was like to grow up in the west of settlement times. If you believe Elizabeth Hampsten in "Settlers’ Children," then pioneer children lived pretty miserable lives, robbed of true childhood by overwork and deprivation.

On the other hand, if you believe Elliott West in "Growing Up with the Country," then pioneer children got along pretty well. While their parents pined for the old country, they grew up with the new, reveling in early responsibility and western landscapes. This is not a question that can be settled. Reading the histories, it seems to me that how historians see the children of the frontier depends more on their own personal views of life than on the preponderance of evidence.

Peggy Bell’s memoir falls on the dark side. She had it hard. Her mother was an Irish immigrant who followed her brother to Montana. She married a ne’er-do-well cowboy, the father of Peggy, born in Great Falls in 1888. Following a divorce, Peggy’s mother married a man named Hedge Wolf, who proved to be the most nightmarish of stepfathers.

Through the years of Peggy’s girlhood this fellow Hedge trailed the family -- Peggy, her mother, and the daughters of the new marriage -- through a series of locales in Montana and Saskatchewan. Every attempt to settle failed on account of Hedge’s laziness, misbehavior, and downright meanness. Every time the mother managed to get together a little herd of cows, or put together a tolerable home, Hedge blew the money, and the household had to leave town just ahead of creditors.

Or just ahead of authorities, who now and then sensed that there was abuse in the household, especially after Peggy’s mother died. Peggy was constantly out tending stock in dangerous conditions. Once she was befriended by the artist Charlie Russell, which made such a powerful impression on her that the effect of the account is sad. At home, meanwhile, the abuse was much worse than just hard or even dangerous work.

Eventually Peggy was situated in a convent school, and sought to enter the order, but ended up going back to her mother’s kin. The memoir ends on a hopeful note, but the research of editors Mary Clearman Blew and Lee Rostad shows that her life thereafter had only interludes of content. Her marital life was unhappy, her relationships with her children strained. Still, Peggy Bell carried herself with dignity into old age in Great Falls, won the respect of her neighbors, and even was fairly renowned as an honored old settler.

There came upon her the irresistible desire to write, to tell what had happened to her. She shows flashes of that happy-child-of-the- frontier image, but they do not hold. In this memoir Peggy Bell is trying to find resolution and peace. I hope she found it. May we all.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, tom@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Tom Jirik, (701) 231-9629, tjirik@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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