Hattie Big Sky (23 page)

Perilee's Wartime Spice Cake

1 cup brown sugar, firmly packed

1 1/2 cups water

1/3 cup shortening or lard

2/3 cup raisins

1/2 teaspoon each ground cloves and nutmeg

2 teaspoons cinnamon

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

2 cups flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

Boil brown sugar, water, shortening, raisins, and spices together for 3 minutes. Cool. Dissolve baking soda in 2 teaspoons water and add with salt to raisin mixture. Stir together flour and baking powder and add to raisin mixture one cup at a time, beating well after each addition. Pour into a greased and floured 8-inch square pan and bake at 325 °F for about 50 minutes.

(Adapted from Butterless, Eggless, Milkless Cake, in
Recipes and Stories of Early Day Settlers;
and from Depression Cake, described in
Whistleberries, Stirabout and Depression Cake: Food Customs and Concoctions of the Frontier West.
)

Hattie's Lighter-than-Lead Biscuits

3/4 cup cooked oatmeal, cooled

1 1/2 cups wheat or rye flour

4 teaspoons baking powder

3/4 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons lard, shortening, or butter

1/4 cup milk

Mix oatmeal with sifted flour, baking powder, and salt. Cut in lard, shortening, or butter. Add milk and mix, forming a soft dough. Do not overmix. Roll out on lightly floured surface to 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick. Cut with floured biscuit cutter (or drinking glass) and bake on an ungreased cookie sheet at 425 °F for 12 to 15 minutes.

(These are what Hattie served to Rooster Jim in Chapter 17.)

Author's Note

When I heard that my great-grandmother Hattie Inez Brooks Wright had homesteaded in eastern Montana by herself as a young woman, I found it hard to believe. Tiny and unprepossessing, she was the last person I'd associate with the pioneer spirit. But I was intrigued and played detective for several weeks, without much luck, trying to find out more. One day I stumbled onto the Montana Bureau of Land Management records. The thrill I felt when I discovered a claim number with her name attached! A query to the National Archives soon put into my hands a copy of her homestead application paperwork. I was hooked.

Though my great-grandmother didn't keep diaries or journals, other “honyockers” did. I ordered them up through interlibrary loan (God bless our librarians and our library systems), reading them by the dozen. The reasons for heading west were as varied as the homesteaders themselves. But common themes stitched their way through these stories: endless work, heartache, loss, and, incredibly, fond memories of those hardscrabble homestead days.

Before I even realized what was happening, I had a book started, thinking it would be “just” a story about homesteading in the days of Model Ts rather than covered wagons. My research quickly showed me I could not set a story in 1918 without speaking to the issue of anti-German sentiment. Many of the incidents in
Hattie Big Sky
were based on actual events, including the mob scene with Mr. Ebgard.

This book and the Iraq war started at nearly the same time. On the very day that I read of merchants renaming “sauerkraut” and calling it “liberty cabbage” in 1918, I heard of restaurants changing “french fries” to “freedom fries” in 2003. The more I studied life in 1918, the more I saw its parallels in the present.

After all is said and done, however, I wrote this book to share a woman's homesteading story. What dreams did the real Hattie hope to fulfill in leaving Arlington, Iowa, for a homestead claim shack near Vida, Montana? I wish I knew. But I was ten years old when she died; at ten, I couldn't imagine that frail white-haired ladies had lives beyond baking snickerdoodles for their great-grandchildren.

My great-grandmother proved up on her claim, but I couldn't let “my” Hattie keep hers. Most honyockers went bust; the railroad men
did
promise too much of eastern Montana, as the fat man on the train complained. Though one succeeded and one failed, both Hatties found something priceless during their time on the Montana prairie: family. And what happier ending could there be than that?

Further Reading

For those interested in reading more about the Montana of Hattie's story, here are several favorites from my research:

Bad Land: An American Romance,
by Jonathan Raban, Pantheon Books, 1996.

The Generous Years: Remembrances of a Frontier Boyhood,
by Chet Huntley, Random House, 1968.

Homesteading,
by Percy Wollaston, Penguin, 1997.

Photographing Montana 1894–1928: The Life and Work of Evelyn Cameron,
edited by Donna Lucey, Mountain Press Publishing, 2001.

Riders of the Purple Sage,
by Zane Grey, Grosset and Dunlap, 1912.

The Stump Farm,
by Hilda Rose, Little, Brown, 1928.

A Traveler's Companion to Montana History,
by Carroll Van West, Montana Historical Society Press, 1986.

When You and I Were Young, Whitefish,
by Dorothy M. Johnson, Montana Historical Society Press, 1982.

Wolf Point: A City of Destiny,
by Marvin W. Presser, M Press, Billings, Montana, 1997.

Learn more about World War I at
www.firstworldwar.com
.

Learn more about your own family and state history at
www.usgenweb.com
.

About the Author

Thanks to her eighth-grade teacher, Kirby Larson maintained a healthy lack of interest in history until she heard a snippet of a story about her great-grandmother homesteading by herself in eastern Montana. Efforts to learn more about Hattie Wright's homestead times felt like detective work; why hadn't anyone told Kirby research could be this much fun? Her three years' work on
Hattie Big Sky
, winner of a Newbery Honor, involved several trips to Montana, one by train, as well as countless hours in wonderfully dusty courthouse records rooms and newspaper morgues.

Kirby Larson lives with her husband, Neil, in Kenmore, Washington, where they are both active in the community. Their son works in the film industry in New York; their daughter is an interior designer. When she's not reading or writing, Kirby is teaching, gardening, traveling, or drinking lattes with friends.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. In the first chapter, Hattie is given a “wonderful opportunity.” What do you learn about her as a person when she says yes to going to Vida?

2. When Hattie arrives in Wolf Point, she meets with Mr. Ebgard (Chapter 3), who explains more fully the requirements of proving up on a claim. One requirement is to build a house, but fortunately for Hattie, Uncle Chester has already done that. The other tasks include setting 480 rods of fence (which is 7,920 feet; picture 587 VW Beetles in a very, very long row) and planting crops on one-eighth of the claim, or in Hattie's case, 40 acres (picture an area nearly as big as 40 football fields). How would you have reacted to this if you had been in Hattie's shoes?

3. On Chapter 5, Hattie copies out a humorous poem about the trials and tribulations of rationing and other wartime deprivations. She sends it to Charlie to give him a laugh. How do you think people really felt about being deprived of such essentials as flour and sugar? How might people today respond if a war or other events necessitated rationing?

4. After Violet's tail becomes a snack for the wolf, Hattie goes to visit with Perilee and learns that Karl is being required to register as a “resident alien.” What is Hattie's response to this? How does her reaction compare to Perilee's?

5. Charlie's letters to Hattie start out full of bravado. She says he is “full of spit and vinegar” when he's issued his bayonet (Chapter 3). Over the course of the story, the tone of his letters changes. Near the end, he writes, “I always bragged about killing some Germans. Killing is nothing to brag about. Nothing at all” (Chapter 18). What might have contributed to Charlie's changed perceptions of the war?

6. At one point in the story (Chapter 10), Hattie realizes that she and Traft may have more in common than she'd like to admit. What traits does she think they share? Do you agree with her assessment?

7. In her May “Honyocker's Homily” (Chapter 14), Hattie writes about the lessons she's learning on the prairie and how they “pertain more to caring than to crops, more to Golden Rule than gold, more to the proper choice than to the popular choice.” Discuss what she might mean by this.

8. Even though homesteaders worked long, hard hours, they still made time to write to friends and family back home. Hattie's letters to Uncle Holt become the basis for her column, “Honyocker's Homily,” in which she shares her story of life on the prairie. Letter writing isn't as common today, but people still reach out to one another through the written word. Can you think of other, contemporary equivalents of letter writing? Why do you think it's so important for us to tell our individual stories?

9. One nickname for eastern Montana is “next year country,” as Hattie tells Uncle Holt in her letter to him dated June 22, 1918 (Chapter 17). Based on the story of
Hattie Big Sky,
does this seem like a fitting nickname? Why or why not?

10. When Hattie stumbles upon the men harassing Mr. Ebgard, she wonders why no one comes forward to stop them. Then she realizes: “There was no ‘anyone' at a time like this. There was only me” (Chapter 17). What gives her the courage to step forward?

11. After Hattie fails to prove up on Uncle Chester's claim, Rooster Jim tells her “things have a way of working themselves out…there's reasons for our valleys and for our peaks” (Chapter 22). What is he trying to tell her? Do you think things will work themselves out for Hattie?

In Her Own Words

A Conversation with
KIRBY LARSON

A Conversation with KIRBY LARSON

Q: Your great-grandmother's experience as a homesteader inspired
Hattie Big Sky.
Is this your great-grandmother's story?

A:
I do know that my great-grandmother homesteaded near Vida, Montana, and that she proved up and later sold her claim. And I found a newspaper article that said she had dinner with a Vida family one Sunday—big news! But our family doesn't know much about her early life, before she married my great-grandfather when she was thirty-seven. This book is more a re-creation, based on reading and research, of what her time on the prairie and at the homestead might have been like.

Q: Have you always been interested in history?

A:
Not at all! I detested memorizing dates and facts when I was in school; I thought that was what history was. When my daughter was in junior high, she introduced me to historical fiction and I became an avid reader, thoroughly enjoying books like
The Dreams of Mairhe Mehan
by Jennifer Armstrong,
Catherine, Called Birdy
and
Matilda Bone
by Karen Cushman, and
Our Only May Amelia
by Jennifer L. Holm. As much as I enjoyed reading those books, it never occurred to me that I could write historical fiction. It took two women who never went beyond eighth grade—my grandmother Lois Brown and my great-grandmother Hattie—to teach me to love history.

Q: How much of
Hattie Big Sky
is fact and how much fiction?

A:
I spent three years researching
Hattie Big Sky
and worked hard to get enough information to accurately re-create another time and place. Many of the names, events, et cetera, are factual, but I've tweaked them so that they make a more engaging story. For example, I did read one journal entry where a woman reminisced about seeing a wolf bite off a calf's tail when she was a young girl. That was such a delicious incident, I knew I would have to include it in
Hattie Big Sky.

Q: Which character is most like you?

A:
My daughter says Hattie sounds exactly like me at times! And, truth be told, there's a lot of Violet in me, too.

Q: Hattie is based on a real person; are any of the other characters based on real people?

A:
No doubt there is a touch of people I know in each of the characters I create. And I did use names of real people—the postmaster, August Nefzger, for example—to honor the Vida pioneers. I also used names of some of my family members. (They know who they are!) But the characters in the story are created solely out of my imagination. The Hattie in the story is not my great-grandmother. And though people want to believe Charlie is real, he, too, is a created character. The letters he writes to Hattie, however, were inspired by letters my husband's grandfather, Myron Hawley, sent home when he was a young man fighting in World War I.

Q: Why does Mattie have to die?

A:
More people died from the Spanish influenza than died in the battles of World War I. Because of this, I felt that I couldn't write a story set in 1918 without an influenza death. To be completely honest, I had planned for another character to be the one to die. When I wrote the scene where Hattie comes to the cabin and Perilee and the girls are all sick, I suddenly realized that it wasn't going to be that other character but Mattie. I cried the whole time I wrote the scene; in fact, I still get teary about it. But it was the right thing to do for this book.

Q: There are a lot of parallels between this story and current events. Did you write it to get a message across about war?

A:
I'm a quote collector, and one of my favorite quotes is from Samuel Goldwyn, about making movies. To paraphrase Mr. Goldwyn: If you want to send a message, call Western Union. I don't think I can write a good story if my sole motivation is to get a message across. I tried to tell this story as best I could from Hattie's point of view. My hope is that I left enough room for readers to figure out for themselves what this story means to them.

Q: Does Hattie marry Charlie?

A:
Everyone asks me that! To be honest, when I finished
Hattie Big Sky,
I thought I was finished with Hattie's story. But so many people have been writing to me asking what happens next that I've begun to think about writing a sequel. And I won't know until I write it—if I write it!—what happens between Hattie and Charlie.