Review of 'Lady's Choice: Ethel Waxham's Journals and Letters, 1905-1910', 'Homesteading: A Montana Family Album'
- By Emily d'Aulaire
- Smithsonian magazine, December 1997, Subscribe
(Page 2 of 3)
John Love found no fault with the new schoolteacher. From the day he met her, he worked doggedly to win her, continuing the courtship by mail after Waxham left the ranch. Regarding his letters, Waxham wrote, "'No' was 'no' to other men, but not to him. . . . I was nearly as stubborn in refusing as he was in insisting."
Nearly, but not quite. It's not clear what persuaded Ethel Waxham to accept John Love's proposal, but in the end Love--and love--won out. Perhaps it was her disillusionment with the teaching profession that began at the prison-like convent school in Wisconsin and deepened with the tedium of a high school French class in Pueblo, Colorado. Surely the pure, deep devotion that shines through Love's letters must have played a part.
On June 20, 1910, Ethel Waxham and John Love were married, and the new bride moved back to Wyoming and a life that even her earlier stay hadn't prepared her for. It was, as she described, the "ranchiest kind of ranch life," with no electricity, phone or indoor plumbing. But as her granddaughters noted in the epilogue, "Plato and Proust and the New York Times were just as easily enjoyed by kerosene lantern . . ."
In a foreword to the book, writer John McPhee observes of Waxham that "the admiration and affection I came to feel toward her is probably matched by no one I've encountered in my professional life." After reading Lady's Choice, one can understand why.
Percy Wollaston moved from the Dakotas to the plains of eastern Montana in 1910, the year that Ethel Waxham married. Then 6 years old, Wollaston remained on the family homestead until 1924 when he took the train west, and away.
Wollaston married and settled in Thompson Falls--the wet side of Montana--and, seemingly, forgot the heartache of his parents' struggle where "the land itself was inexorable." For years he did not speak of his childhood to his own children.
Then, in 1972, Wollaston's wife died. That year, he began writing about those early homesteading years in a memoir meant for his grandchildren. "My account can be only the recollections of a child or boy, hazy and distorted by time. . . ." he writes. But he was wrong. His memories flow as naturally as his writing, and the reader is transported back to the day when a 6-year-old stepped from the train into a new life. "The day was chilly, a drizzling rain was falling and a general gloom seemed to have settled over the land."
Not all Wollaston's memories are so grim. "The clearest recollections center around that old lean-to kitchen," he writes of the house his father built on the 320-acre claim. "The crackle of juniper kindling, the rasp of coffee being ground in the mill, the clink of stove lids . . . and the sizzle of frying bacon."
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