All But the Waltz: A Memoir of Five Generations in the Life of a Montana Family

by Mary Clearman Blew

Book Overview

In language reminiscent of the wild beauty of Big Sky Country, the author gives readers a glimpse into the lives of her family as she traces their connection to Montana's natural and human landscape. Beginning with her great-grandparents' arrival in 1882 in Montana--still a territory then--Blew relates the stories that make up her life. Illustrations.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670831085
• ISBN13: 9780670831081
• Release Date: September 1991
• Publisher: Viking
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.8" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

An unassuming American classic

To paraphrase what another reviewer has said: These people become your family. You love them as your own. Possibly you end up knowing them better, and more coherently than your own family from stories and memories you have pieced together. One senses an extraordinary effort on the part of the author to bring poetic exactness to, to reinvigorate the pain, the wind, the vast loneliness and silence, the indifference to ultimate human concerns of the Montana landscape.

Powerful stuff

Mary Clearman Blew pulls no punches in telling the story of the Hogeland and the Welch families and the tellingly tough times they faced in frontier Montana from the turn of the twentieth century onward. Drought, the Depression, inexperience, madness, bitterly cold winters and dust storms all conspire against these families, and yet they somehow managed to persevere, if not to prosper, at least to survive. Blew's finely wrought essays weave a tapestry that brings these people to life, from 1900 right up to the present day. Her own difficult marriages and fierce, almost ruthless, determination to succeed are not spared in the telling. This is one helluva good read, one which I will recommend highly. I have nothing but admiration for Mary Clearman Blew, both as a writer and as a woman.

Well-written, absorbing and sometimes harrowing

This fine book is a collection of essays that weave together remarkable accounts of four generations of the author's ancestors, from their settlement in central Montana in the 19th century to the latter years of the 20th. Pioneers of strong fortitude, originating in Pennsylvania, her father's family, the Hogelands, are among the first settlers along the headwaters of the Judith River. Good years, wise management, and a faith in the rewards of hard work serve them well - until the early death of the author's grandfather, followed by a decade of severe drought and then the Great Depression. While half of the homesteaders around them go broke and move on, her family continues to scrape a living from the land, the women on her mother's side of the family supplementing their incomes with teaching in remote one-room country schools. Reconstructing her family's story, the author brings vividly to life her father and mother, grandmothers, aunts, and her great-grandparents. She deciphers and transcribes the writings of her great-grandfather Abraham, interviews living relatives, and studies family photographs, many of which are included in her book. While the primary theme of the book is the survival of her family, she also has much to say about the role of women, focusing on the circumstances that invariably compromised their hopes and aspirations. There is her father's mother, Grammy, who does the work of a man while providing home and shelter for a live-in hired man without benefit of clergy. There's her mother's mother, who teaches school into her seventies to support her family and pay for her husband's care in a nursing home. There's the author's aunt Imogen, who remains unmarried and also teaches school. There's the author's mother, who marries a handsome cowboy and then struggles to make a place for herself in her husband's domineering family. Meanwhile, the men in her stories make equally interesting studies, especially her strong-willed father, Jack, who's a natural horseman and top hand; her mother's father, who cannot withstand the pressures of a lonely, hard life on the prairie; and a husband in later years, a wildcat oilman who is in complete denial that he is dying of pulmonary fibrosis. I highly recommend this well-written, absorbing and sometimes harrowing book that renders such a vivid picture of Montana homesteaders and the extremes of rural life. Thanks to the University of Oklahoma Press for keeping it in print. Readers of this book will also like Judy Blunt's memoir of growing up on a Montana ranch, "Breaking Clean."

liked this book particularly since we are Moving to Montana

While I enjoyed this book - it made me aware of just how fragmented my own family history is. How I wish my ancestors had written (or kept) diaries and especially wish they had written on the backs of all those old photos to know what states, counties, cities, villages they were in at the time of the photograph and what was the event or celebration, etc. Thanks for a good read, Ms. Blew

It's My History!

I am in this book