NOTE TO TEACHERS: I used to write my own materials for my classes because textbooks had a deadening effect on student interest.
My students enjoyed the story of Nannie Alderson, who settled with her husband in Montana in 1883, at a time when it was a frontier territory. She saw whites and blacks flooding in and Native Americans forced to give ground.
My students enjoyed the story of Nannie Alderson, who settled with her husband in Montana in 1883, at a time when it was a frontier territory. She saw whites and blacks flooding in and Native Americans forced to give ground.
This selection is adapted from a book called
A Bride Goes West, written in 1942.
The author, Helena Huntington Smith sat down with Alderson in 1941, and spoke
with her at length.
The full text can also be found online for free.)
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Montana winters came be brutally cold. |
A
Bride Goes West
When Nannie Alderson was 81, she sat down with a young
writer named Helena Smith and laid out her life history. Nannie was born September
14, 1860, in Virginia. Her father, Hugh Tiffany, died at the Battle of Bull
Run, before she was a year old. Nannie’s mother remarried three years later.
Typical of most young ladies of her era, Nannie never
finished high school. When she was fifteen she and a stepsister ended their
education. “My stepfather decided Betty
and I had reached the stage where we had boys in our heads,” she recalled. “It was a waste of money to pay for any more
schooling for us.”
In 1877, she traveled to Kansas by rail, where she met
Walt Alderson. They married six years later and moved to Montana. Mr. Alderson
had just started a cattle business.
*
The young bride had spirit and a sense of humor, but not
much else to help her in her new life. “Before
I left Union [her home in Virginia],” she said, “a dear old lady taught me how to make hot rolls. Except for that...I knew
no more of cooking than I did of Greek. Hot rolls, plus a vague understanding
that petticoats [women’s undergarments] ought
to be plain, were my whole equipment for conquering the West.”
What follows is her story, recorded in conversations with
Smith in 1939. We begin with her arrival in 1883, in the rough frontier town of
Miles City, Montana:
I
had been prepared for Miles City...so I was not surprised by the horses hitched
to rails along the store fronts, the wooden sidewalks and unpaved streets. Nor
was I surprised that every other building was a saloon. Mr. Alderson had told
me it was a pretty hoorah [wild] place. He didn’t want me to go out alone, even
in daytime—not that I wouldn’t be perfectly safe, but I might run into a
drunken cowboy or a fight.
After a brief stop in town the newlyweds crossed a
hundred miles of unsettled land to reach their ranch. In the dry stretches of Montana,
Mrs. Alderson noticed, “Rivers, like
women, were few.” Her new home offered surprises good and bad. The house
was nothing more than a “dirt-roofed
cabin, hardly any taller than a man, with one door and only one window.” Still,
she was happy to see Mr. Alderson’s cowboys had already prepared supper. It
was, she remembered, one of the best she
ever ate. “That men could cook was something
new under the sun to me.” “These hardy [tough] Western men were nearly all
bachelors,” she laughed, “and so
cooked in self-defense.”
Montana’s natural
beauty impressed her from the start. But she was miles from a town and had to
adjust how she lived.
As
it was I was a hundred horse-and-buggy miles from a loaf of baker’s bread or a
paper [pack] of pins...There was no clothesline, so one of the [cow]boys
stretched a lariat[1]
in the yard. There were no clothespins either, and when a wind came up it blew
down half of the wash.
Every single necessity [except for a few
foods] came from Miles City. Once a year when the men went in to ship their
cattle [to market] they laid in supplies—hundred-pound sacks of flour and
sugar, huge tins of coffee, sides of bacon, evaporated [dried] fruits, and
canned goods by the case. What you forgot you did without.
Flour sacks were turned into
dish towels. Jelly and jam were preserved in any container Nannie could find. Once
she used an old teapot with the spout broken off. Walt came to her with an old
gray blanket and asked her to turn the material into a pair of pants. An empty
wine bottle served as a rolling pin when she made cookies. It was a trick she
learned from the cowboys.
Doctors were few, and when the boys got hurt it was
tough:
It wasn’t uncommon for a man’s horse to
fall with him, and he could lie out for a night with crushed ribs or a broken
leg before he was found, sometimes in the dead of winter...All the ranches kept
surgeon’s plaster [for casts] with which to bind up a broken limb, and so save
as much suffering as possible on the long, jolting journey [to town]. But that
was about the only thing we knew in the way of first aid.
Her own clothes were poorly
suited for life in a frontier cabin. Her dresses:
...all
had long trains [like the long end of a wedding dress], and I trailed them
around over my dirt floors, which became very dusty as the summer wore on... The
dust just couldn’t be kept down. I sprinkled it, and swept it, and even scooped
it up with a shovel. I did pin up my skirts to work in, and I wore aprons, but
still nothing more...impractical [difficult to use] can be imagined...After
that I just wore what I had until I wore them out.
Seven years earlier,
General Custer and his men had been wiped out not far from where the Alderson ranch
stood. Montana was wild when Nannie settled there.
I
heard from mother and Grandmother [by letter] too, but both of them seemed to
feel that they were writing to Mars...There were Indians all around us. Hardly
a day passed that they didn’t visit us and beg for food. Often the shack would
grow suddenly dark, and I would look up, to see the blanketed form of an Indian
blocking the window, shading his eyes with his robe to peer in. It never dawned
on me in that first year to be afraid of them, largely because I didn't know
enough.
She
later learned enough to worry and sometimes had trouble relaxing. “There is nothing a woman left alone on a
ranch can’t imagine when she is afraid,” she would say. In 1889 she visited
the site of Custer’s Last Stand. Thirteen years after the battle bones littered
the ground.
…The rains had washed them [out] and
coyotes disturbed them, and in many places they were lying on top of the
ground, all scattered about. I picked up a little bone from a hand one day, and
a link of backbone…I remember seeing the gold filling in a tooth in one skull.
She also learned that the Indians were ordinary human
beings, not much different from those she loved. Two Moons, an old chief, often
visited the Alderson cabin. His English was not good:
...seemingly
limited to “How,” “Yes,” and “No,” but when he came for a meal he would always
ask in signs how many horses my husband would take for me [to sell her]. Once
when Mr. Alderson held up one finger, Two Moons laughed long and loud...We concluded
he had a sense of humor, and that he asked the question more as flattery than
with a serious view [desire] to trade. Next time he asked for my prices in
horses my husband began opening and shutting both hands very rapidly. Two Moons
counted up to fifty or so and then said disgustedly, “God d---, too many.” It
was his longest English sentence.
Certainly, life was never dull. Nannie enjoyed many
chances to ride. It was, she said, like “having
a Wild West show in one’s back yard.”
Gentle
horses, as the term is understood in more civilized parts, were almost as rare
in Montana as kangaroos. Therefore it was routine operation, when I was going
riding, for one of the boys to get on the horse first with my side saddle and
skirt[2]
and “take the buck out of him,” after which I would get on and ride off.
Other creatures were no
so welcome. Walt warned her about rattlesnakes. One day, while working in the
cabin, she heard a noise:
Turning,
I saw two great snakes...crawling over the [fireplace] hearth toward me. I was
up and out of the house like a shot, calling my husband. He came and shot them
both from the doorway—only to find they were harmless bull snakes. I felt
rather foolish for raising the alarm. But my skin still crawled whenever I went
near the fireplace, and I continued to think that snakes, no matter how mild
their...[tempers], are not ideal company around the house.
*
Snakes were common. Female companionship was not. There were
no other women living anywhere for miles. Once, Nannie enjoyed a talk with a
woman whose family wagon broke down crossing a river nearby. “I believe she, too, was hungry to see one
of her own sex. We spoke of each other as neighbors, though we knew we should
see each other rarely, for thirty miles separated us.” On a rare trip to
Miles City, Mrs. Alderson met a storekeeper’s daughter. She was, said Nannie, “the only unmarried lady within a radius of
a hundred miles.” When dances were organized, she laughed, available
females were “danced half to death.”
Fortunately, the young
wife enjoyed the cowboys who worked for her husband. She found them
good-hearted and appreciated how careful they were about swearing in her
presence. She also came to see that their lives were not as exciting as we usually
imagine. “Packsaddle Jack” had a colorful nickname and a “reputation.” Nannie
discovered that he was a gray-haired fellow who rarely carried a gun. Another
cowboy made her mad with his lack of manners: “We had one...who always licked the spout of the syrup jug, after
pouring the syrup on his hot cakes every morning.”
Worst of all was the boys’ behavior when they went to
town:
Their
first idea was to get drunk and make a lot of noise. Their next was to squander
[waste] their money...Nice people in Miles City would as soon have thought of
inviting a rattlesnake into their homes as a cowboy. The only places that made
them welcome were the house of prostitution and the saloon.
Mrs. Alderson particularly liked a young cowhand named
Hal. But it was not long before his sense of humor led to serious trouble. One
day an Indian named Black Wolf came begging for food. Hal saw a chance for fun
when the native sat down near the cabin to eat. He told a friend:
“I’ll bet you five dollars I can put a hole
through that old Indian’s hat without touching his head.”
The other man of course replied, “I bet you
can’t.”
Hal drew his six-shooter and fired, just
nicking the Indian’s scalp. Black Wolf of course was furious; he could not and
would not believe Hal had not meant to kill him.
Soon after, while Nannie was
in Miles City giving birth to her first child, Indians burned down the ranch.
*
Most of the time, Mrs. Alderson found the natives
friendly and ready to help. One woman she called “Granny” would sit in Nannie’s
home for hours. The old lady rarely spoke more than a few words. But when
Nannie spanked her little girl one day her visitor shouted at her in Cheyenne
[her language], and pulled the child away. In her culture physical punishment of children was unacceptable.
Another red friend was the warrior Little Wolf. Nannie
recalled:
I
always felt as though I had a nurse for the children the day he came. He would
look around through the rocks for snakes before he would let the children sit
down and play; and together they would climb the hills to hunt for pretty rocks
for their play houses...Years after this when I was a widow...Little Wolf would
come twenty-five or thirty miles to visit me and my children every fall.
The winter of 1885-86 was legendary for blizzards and bitter
cold. Snow blanketed everything and smothered the railroad at Miles City. Travelers
knew they had reached town only when they spotted roofs poking through huge drifts.
Ranchers suffered heavy losses. Nannie saw places where cattle had crowded
together for shelter and died in frozen heaps.
As her family grew,
Mrs. Alderson appreciated her life
more and more:
There
was an old saying out west, to the effect that this was a great country for men
and horses, but hell on women and cattle...I would like to amend the first
part. It was a great country for men and children. Especially for children.
They had more freedom than many modern
children...and children thrive on freedom. Most of the time they were outdoors
and away from me, living and learning for themselves. For hours they roamed at
will, out of range of “don’ts.”
My children had so little human
companionship that their world was peopled with animals. Fay [her first
daughter] thought of nothing but horses, and had a herd of stick horses on
which she galloped around from morning to night...The stick horses had to be
rounded up daily, corralled, driven to water, and fed on little piles of grass.
Other pets included two wolf pups, “snarling balls of gray fur,” and a captured fawn [baby deer]. At
first, the fawn drank out of a baby bottle. As it grew it became more
dangerous. When it butted little Fay the Aldersons got rid of their unruly pet.
Christmas was a special time. Each year the Alderson
children studied the catalogues and made their wishes:
...their
order was ready by the time their father went to Chicago [by rail] with the
cattle [to sell]. Then he...bought a cheap packing trunk, and patiently filled
every child’s order; then brought the trunk back with him...What a time when
the trunk was opened!
On Christmas Eve we had a tree. The few
store-bought ornaments were a thrill, but there was still the more pleasant
excitement attached to the cookie horses...which the children cut out, baked,
and branded in our brands with
colored icing.
Mrs. Alderson had a
terrible scare once, when Fay was four and “disappeared.” The mother searched all the likely places. Then
she looked:
...in
all the ones I didn’t like to think about. I looked down the well, and in the stallion’s box stalls...I roamed over
the place, calling, calling, calling, and wondering as I did so if some Indians
had passed through the ranch that afternoon and picked her up.
...All this time Fay had been hiding in a
patch of big high thistles and ragweeds at the corner of the pigpen, where we
could have touched her. She had a naughty...habit of not answering when I
called. Just as Mabel [the oldest sister] finished her prayer [for Fay’s
safety], a bumble bee, which had been dining off a thistle, flew down and stung
Fay’s face. She let out the most piercing war whoop ever heard.
The relief was great, but I spanked her
anyway.
*
After several bad years, Mr. Alderson switched from
raising cattle to horses. The family sold the ranch and moved to Miles City. There
Nannie’s husband was killed when a horse kicked him in the head. The country
began to “fill up.” By 1902 the mail came twice a week. Fay began attending
high school. Sometimes she and a few girlfriends organized dances at the
Alderson home:
The
five or six girls would draw all the unattached boys from up and down the river
and over the divides [mountains]. Often there would be fifty or sixty horses
tied up to the hitching rack...The dances were held in our living room, and
there were always so many extra boys that some of them would have to tie
handkerchiefs around their arms and take the girls’ parts in the square dance.
Alderson and her four children tried raising cattle again
after her husband died. Her young son—and one daughter—helped most.
[He]
...started punching cows [herding cattle] at the age of eleven...[and] by the
time he was thirteen was a full-fledged cowpuncher drawing a man’s wages. He
ran the ranches [in the] winters...but most of the man’s work was done by
Patty, who rode and roped, fixed fences and pitched hay. As her brother said,
“She was the best hand on a horse I ever saw for a lady.”
In 1919 a run of bad weather and poor beef prices ended
Nannie’s ranching days. For the next twenty years she lived with her daughter,
Patty, and her son-in-law. These two decades were easy, she said, when relating
her story. Otherwise, “My friends tell me
I led a hard life.”
“Perhaps,” Nannie
Alderson added, “but I don’t think an
easy one is ever half so full.”
 |
One way of life vanished and another flourished. |
Your work:
1. Give five examples where the
people Nannie describes sound like us. For instance: why did her stepfather
take her out of school?
2. In what ways does her life
on the Montana frontier sound hard?
3. Describe the Alderson’s
relations with Indians. How were they good? How were they cause for concern?
4. Why might you want to live in
Montana, as it was when Nannie first settled there?
5. What evidence do we have
that women were rare in Montana in the days of the cowboys?
I own the rights to all of those.
[2] By
“dressing” as a woman and using a woman’s saddle, the cowboy prepared the horse
to accept Mrs. Alderson as a rider.
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