Growing up on the family ranch, Linda Finley fought hard to gain the acceptance and respect as a ranch hand that her brothers took for granted. Arlene Pile barely remembers learning to ride a horse and run machinery--she was so young. She learned to drive on an 8N Ford tractor with a buck rake. Lee Jacobsen became the first woman in the state licensed to artificially inseminate cattle. Meet these and other Montana women passionate about caring for their land and determined to make the lifestyle their own. Many never doubted for a moment that they would spend their lives in agriculture, while others speak of their surprise and delight to find themselves living on the land. All agree that they wouldn't be happy doing anything else.

No part of our nation has been more celebrated, glorified, and mythologized than the West. Here is a book on the women who are still shaping those myths. Raised on a ranch in Montana that she still works, Barbara Van Cleve eloquently describes the life of women ranchers in words and pictures in Hard Twist. Her images and text document these women on the range and around their ranches, evoking their labor, their commitment, and the breathtaking landscapes in which they live.

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 endeavored 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.

This book gives a taste of Montana women's imprint on agriculture and land conservation through edited and condensed excerpts from many of the original oral histories collected by the Montana Conservation Districts in the oral history project From the ground up: Montana women and agriculture.

In this first book featuring the breadth of Barbara Van Cleve's subject matter, readers experience her other themes, including Rodeo as Dance, striking night scenes, the Great Montana Centennial Cattle Drive series, and documentation of the Spanish Mission Trail in Baja California, Mexico.

An account of one woman's life in the West during the second half of the nineteenth century from growing up on the Montana mining frontier to her ascent to young womanhood on a farm in southern California.