The Montana Frontier: One Woman's West

Joyce Litz

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.

Winner of a Willa Award for Best Nonfiction Book from Women Writing the West, 2005.

"The Montana Frontier is not only a labor of love, but also a tale about a truly amazing woman, in a truly amazing time in the life of our country."--Big Sky Journal

"The Montana Frontier will appeal to fans of narrative history. . . . It illuminates a woman's life on the Great Plains. . . . Litz is an excellent storyteller who fills a niche historians often neglect."--Great Plains Quarterly

"Lillian's story is compelling, a study in individual courage and faith."--Roundup Magazine

"Litz provides historians with a nuanced, complicated character, both in love with the West and challenged by it--a woman trapped by the cultural and economic constraints of the time in which she lived. Lillian Hazen reminds us that the individuality of the western character is, perhaps, its only true unifying character."--Montana Magazine

"This well written book held my attention from first page to last and along the way I learned a lot about turn-of-the-century New York and Montana."--The Herald Journal, (UT)

"Through Lillian Hazen's letters, diaries and stories, life in early Lewistown area emerges, especially the struggles women had in those years. Because Hazen was a journalist, trained to notice details others might miss, hers is a particularly revealing account of that life."--Lewistown (MT) News-Argus

"We cannot help but admire Lillian and all the other women who built homes and raised families in the harsh, unwelcoming environment of the American West."--H-Net Book Review

"[Lillian's] story enlivens the history of the waning frontier."--The Bloomsbury Review

Joyce Litz was born and spent her first fifteen years in Lewistown, Montana, with Lillian. Before she retired in 1995, she was the political action committee coordinator for a non-profit association in Washington, D.C. She now lives in Albuquerque and writes full time.

6 x 9 261 pages 23 halftones, 1 map