Judith Steininger

Judy Steininger‘s story, “The Girl(s) from Montana” published in Montana Quarterly received Honorable Mention in CWW’s Kay W. Levin Short Nonfiction contest. Here are Judy’s thoughts about her work receiving recognition and how that came about, followed by a reprint of her story.

Getting published these days is a big deal given the shrinking number of venues. So, I celebrated when Montana Quarterly accepted “The Girl(s) from Montana”. When an email popped up recently informing me the Council for Wisconsin Writers had awarded my work an Honorable Mention in the Kay W. Levin Short Non-Fiction category, I celebrated twice as much. CWW has been boosting the spirits of writers like me since 1964; I feel honored to be in the company of all.

Writing anything about Montana is intimidating because of its beauty and vastness as well as its iconic status as The West with everything those two words connote.

I’m grateful to Editor Scott McMillion for publishing the story of how the book The Girl from Montana, written by Grace Livingston Hill of Philadelphia, came to be. The author and her helper were an unlikely duo. I know the area around Malta where young correspondent Virginia Cowan lived in the early 1900’s, even now it is rough. Cowan’s life was hard.  I read a lot of obituaries to find her descendants to get specific information. At last I hit pay dirt with Cowan’s surviving grandchildren. I was pleased to resurrect this book which has passed into the public domain; I want the girl from Montana to keep riding.

The Girl(s) from Montana 

One, the fictional creation of Grace Livingston Hill, found readers worldwide. The other, an actual young woman from Malta, might have been lost to history if not for heirs who hold memories of her.

BY JUDITH STEININGER

Only a girl from Montana could bury her parents and brother, board up the homestead cabin in the mountains, fend off bad men, ride out of the mountains at night, and meet a handsome stranger along the trail, who deserts her on the Malta train platform. Alone, she proceeds to ride her horse across the Plains, through the streets of Chicago, finally arriving in Philadelphia where she reunites with her mother’s family. Seriously!

That girl is still riding on the shelves of libraries and bookstores across the world. Published in 1908, The Girl from Montana by the prolific Grace Livingston Hill (1865–1947) is the thirteenth of 117 novels by the incredibly successful writer. It has been published in several languages and all possible formats: audio, large print, hardback and paper, digital and print on demand. Numerous publishers, beginning with The Golden Rule, J. P. Lippincott and Grosset and Dunlap, made serious money from it.

Now in the public domain, The Girl from Montana is published singly, as part of sets of Hill’s work and in collections of Western fiction. A first edition was illustrated by Sears Gallagher, a commercial artist whose works have been shown in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Find one of those on eBay, and it will set you back a pretty penny.

This novel exists because of three women: Hill, a young widow living in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania; Elizabeth, the fictional character from the wilds of northern Montana; and Virginia Cowan, a flesh and blood stripling of a girl living on a homestead along Cottonwood Creek near Malta, Montana. The book is dedicated to her.

The book was written long before we had research tools like the internet, telephone or interlibrary loans. Had such technology existed, Virginia Cowan—the modest daughter of a preacher—would not be known. Fortunately, she has surviving grandchildren to contribute remembrances of her life: Judy Gorham of Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, and Dan Dunkin of Lakeside, Montana.

Here’s how it all went down.

The two real women behind this book had similarities, but Hill became a literary star and Cowan lived a hard life never knowing anything about the book’s trajectory and her important part in it. The Cowan grandchildren recall the family owned one copy of the book. All correspondence between Hill and Cowan was somehow destroyed.

Hill was born in to the very religious Livingston family in Wellsville, New York, on April 16, 1865. She was precocious and, like many in her family, enjoyed writing. With little formal education, she began teaching at Rollins College when the family wintered in Florida in the late 1880s. She married Frank Hill, a Princeton-educated Presbyterian minister in 1892; they had two daughters. Frank died following surgery for a ruptured appendix in 1899, and Grace became a widow at the age of 34. She had published several successful novels, but those had been intellectual diversions for the bright young woman and pin money for a preacher’s wife.

Now she needed a job and income, and writing would be the answer. All her books prior to 1907 had a gospel message. The heroines are virtuous young women who encounter difficulties but defeat them by acting in the best Christian way. They were set in numerous locations along the East Coast. Hill began considering how she might tap into other popular genres. Her eye landed on the rising star Zane Grey, who would later write such Western myth makers as Riders of the Purple Sage. Hill had never traveled west of Cincinnati where she attended art school for one semester; and as any good writer knows, description and setting are essential.

Born July 12, 1891, Virginia Cowan was 26 years younger than Hill. Her family moved to Montana from Allenwood, New Jersey, in 1902. She and her two younger brothers lived near Cottonwood Creek outside Malta with their mother Mary and father Horace Greely Cowan, a preacher who had been recruited to minister to early homesteaders in the area. The family was seriously religious. Reverend Cowan wrote a book entitled The Parson of Cow Creek, a tract outlining his beliefs and disdain for his parishioners’ lifestyles. The book is still available in digital format.

In 1907, Cowan was 16. She and other young women answered a newspaper ad placed that year by Hill, asking for western correspondents. To those who responded, Hill wrote back asking for a description of their sitting room. Virginia won that essay contest. She could have had no idea where her words and name would travel.

According to a biography (Grace Livingston Hill, 1986) by Hill’s grandson Robert Munce, Hill and Cowan became
great pen pals. Hill was no slouch when it came to churning out books. For the rest of her life, she averaged three per year. She was so intense that days before her death she roused herself to write a few words for a new novel.

Hill achieved national acclaim and, through her writing, a comfortable lifestyle. She served dinner on Spode china lit by silver candlesticks. She was ogled for her capacious hats. She traveled, giving speeches and book presentations. She married a much younger, ne’er-do-well, piano-playing man. He soon departed, leaving behind the five pianos purchased for their house. On the other hand, Virginia’s life was hard, like that of so many early homesteaders in the state.

On June 28, 1914, at age 23, she married Harry L. Patterson. They had met at the Mauer Ranch near Dutton, Montana, where Virginia was teaching school. Their grandson Dan Dunkin recalls stories of Patterson as a hardworking cowboy and rancher who also led pack horses in to Glacier Park for construction of the lodges being built by the railroad.

The couple began ranching along the Big Bend of the Milk River near Malta and had three sons and a daughter.

Dunkin says Virginia cooked “on a wood stove, gardened and made all food from it and the animals they raised.” Sewing and quilting were the easy parts of her life. Judy Gorham still has a crocheted pink-and-white shawl her grandmother made.

The Pattersons moved to Idaho during the Depression to ranch. Like Hill, Virginia became a widow at a relatively young age: Harry was killed in a well-digging accident in 1938, when Virginia was 47, after which she went back to Malta to work for her brother at his freight company, Cowan Transfer.

That hard life left its marks. Gorham recalls her grandmother as a tall stern woman who came on a Greyhound bus to visit them in Dillon. “We thought she was 7 feet tall because she was so impressive and stern. No one disobeyed her. She spent a great deal of her later life caring for sick people. She also earned a living as a cook during summers at the GP Bar Guest Ranch in Cora, Wyoming; in the winters, she cooked at a ski resort near Truckee, California.”

Little is known about Virginia’s time teaching in rural Montana schools except for a brief mention in a document kept by the Phillips County Museum in Malta. She qualified by attending the Montana Normal (Teaching) College, which has since undergone many iterations.

What about Elizabeth, the young girl Hill made into a famous heroine? Who wouldn’t like her? She carries herself with “quiet dignity.” She also wears holstered pistols and carries a knife. She can shoot a sage hen in flight when food gets scarce on the trail. A mighty frisky rattlesnake also gets plugged by her. She wears coarse calico but … has beautiful eyes. The man who figures largely in the tale thinks of her like a flower that has “blossomed in the wilderness.” Her lack of education cannot mask her tremendous native intelligence.

The arduous trip Elizabeth took was to find her maternal grandmother in Philadelphia from an address on a scrap of paper saved by her mother. Elizabeth must, like the pilgrim in John Bunyan’s allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, dodge temptations of the seven deadly sins as she travels through her own Vanity Fair. Elizabeth prevails, even escaping a kidnapping madam running a brothel in Chicago. Our plucky Elizabeth picks up a chair, busts open a window and screen, and leaps out through the shards and on to the back of her horse Robin.

Spoiler alert. She makes it to Philadelphia, locating both maternal and paternal grandmothers. Grandmother Bailey is particularly well off. Robin is tethered in the backyard. Hill uses the Montana ingénue to create a gracious smart creature by contrasting her to the ditzy city cousin, Lizzie, and ambitious Aunt Nan. She learns about Christianity by attending Christian Endeavor classes (a national organization at the time), works at a sundries store, retrieves her pistols to stop some workplace harassment, and gets an education.

Wait! There’s more.

The handsome stranger from the trail who left her at the Malta train station coincidentally lives near Grandmother Bailey! After many a complication, she and George Benedict, a very wealthy man, reunite and elope. Their honeymoon is in Montana, retracing her harrowing journey. Before returning to Philadelphia, they turn the old homestead into a church and build a home for missionaries. The End.

Because of Virginia’s descriptions, readers who know Montana will recognize animals and scenes along the trail and maybe the sheer precipices of a river gorge hike on a summer afternoon. Thankfully, Grace Livingston Hill felt an obligation to Virginia. The Girl from Montana’s dedication reads as follows:

Dedicated to Miss Virginia Cowan Of Cowan, Montana, Whose Bright, Breezy Letters Aided Me In Writing Of Elizabeth’s Experiences In the West

Grace Livingston Hill died of cancer at the age of 82 on February 23, 1947. The funeral at the large Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia was attended by multitudes. She is buried in the Livingston family plot in Jamestown, New York. Virginia Cowan Patterson died of cancer at the age of 75 on August 6, 1966. Graveside Episcopal services were held on August 13 at the family plot in Salmon, Idaho. Pallbearers included her three sons, two of whom were saddle-bronc rodeo riders, and three of her grandsons. But Elizabeth, The Girl from Montana, lives on. Neither cancer nor faddish current stars can touch her. This strong, fearless, sunburned, youthful person still climbs back up on her horse every time a new reader opens the book.