Homesteading: A Montana Family Album

Homesteading is a first-person recollection of a pioneer family's attempt to carve a prosperous new life out of the harsh, "inexorable" land around Ismay, Montana, in the early years of this century. Told in a clear, straightforward style, this unsentimental narrative chronicles the backbreaking labors and simple pleasures of pioneer folk scratching out a living in a pitiless and uncooperative terrain. From such workaday details of life as the construction of a house, trapping and hunting, and courtships and funerals, to the encroaching signs of the outside world--county extension agents, the sinking of the Titanic, and the Great War--Homesteading is a rich and unflinching view of days past in the American West. Never thinking of publication, Percy Wollaston wrote his memoir in the 1970s for his grandchildren and handed the pages to his son, saying, "nothing much, probably not worth the trouble of reading." On the contrary, as Jonathan Raban discovered; the manuscript was one of the chief sources of his bestselling, award-winning Bad Land. Raban's eloquent Foreword puts Wollaston's narrative in historical and cultural perspective.