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Thanks to Mrs. Erickson, my eighth grade Social Studies teacher, I never liked history. Then, one day my grandmother told me about her mother homesteading by herself as a young woman in eastern Montana. "The only time Mom was ever afraid," my grandmother said, "was in the winter, when the wild horses stampeded." When my grandmother told me this story, she was in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's disease. She had told me many stories during my weekly visits, some pretty wild. This sounded like another one of them. My great-grandmother had been a timid, tiny woman. There was no way she could've homesteaded by herself. Or could she? I decided to see if I could find out. Thanks to a good friend who was a whiz at genealogical research and a project called USGenWeb, I was not only able to discover that my great-grandmother, Hattie Inez Brooks, had homesteaded near Vida, Montana in 1914, I was able to obtain copies of her homestead paperwork. Suddenly, I got interested in history - the history of ordinary people, not of dates and battles and power.
Now why was Hattie afraid of those stampeding horses? Check out my blog for the answer, as well as more about the writing of Hattie Big Sky, due out in fall 2006 from Delacorte/Random House.
Order via bookstores or from Delacorte/Random House.
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