This book about Lillian Weston Hazen will appeal to grown up girls who loved the heroines of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Willa Cather.
Joyce Litz's meticulous research not only into her grandmother's diaries but also into such arcane information as weather patterns leads to fascinating insights about the micro experience of settlers. She showed how temporarily high water levels led pioneers to settle on land only to find they were fighting a back breaking but ultimately losing battle with nature. The story of the West is as much a story of risk taking and failure as it is of hard work and success.
This book was many years in the writing. The inspiration was the inheritance of a trunk full of her grandmother's life long diaries by a remarkable granddaughter who, despite three children and a career, worked toward authorship of this book for decades.
Litz's great grandfather Edw. Payson Weston was a phenomen, a world class pedestrian. Lillian seemed destined for an equally brilliant life as a pianist, world traveler and columnist in New York newspapers. She was also lovely looking She married badly and rather late to an irritable young man who looked good on paper. Instead of pursuing her own talents, she set out on the adventure of being the wife of a mining accountant in Montana and eventually matriarch of a struggling farm family in Montana.
Joyce Litz inherited her great grandfather's stamina, the writer's soul of her grandmother's and added her own perserverence. She comes across as a wise and thoughtful woman whose own life experience informs this book.
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The Montana Frontier: One Woman's West by Joyce Litz
Kathleen Frommelt, January 8, 2007
This book about Lillian Weston Hazen will appeal to grown up girls who loved the heroines of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Willa Cather.Joyce Litz's meticulous research not only into her grandmother's diaries but also into such arcane information as weather patterns leads to fascinating insights about the micro experience of settlers. She showed how temporarily high water levels led pioneers to settle on land only to find they were fighting a back breaking but ultimately losing battle with nature. The story of the West is as much a story of risk taking and failure as it is of hard work and success.
This book was many years in the writing. The inspiration was the inheritance of a trunk full of her grandmother's life long diaries by a remarkable granddaughter who, despite three children and a career, worked toward authorship of this book for decades.
Litz's great grandfather Edw. Payson Weston was a phenomen, a world class pedestrian. Lillian seemed destined for an equally brilliant life as a pianist, world traveler and columnist in New York newspapers. She was also lovely looking She married badly and rather late to an irritable young man who looked good on paper. Instead of pursuing her own talents, she set out on the adventure of being the wife of a mining accountant in Montana and eventually matriarch of a struggling farm family in Montana.
Joyce Litz inherited her great grandfather's stamina, the writer's soul of her grandmother's and added her own perserverence. She comes across as a wise and thoughtful woman whose own life experience informs this book.
(2 of 2 readers found this comment helpful)