Picturesque and
nostalgic as the pioneer era might seem in hindsight, to be a
prairie woman must have been, on most days, pure hell. But that
story is sometimes absent from the pioneer literary history, a
genre written largely by white men, about white
men.
Until now. If you continue west from the
stage for O.E. Rolvaag’s classic sodbuster Giants in the Earth, you
arrive on the high arid plains of Phillips County, Mont., near the
Missouri Breaks, the setting for Judy Blunt’s fine new memoir,
Breaking Clean.
Like Giants in the Earth,
Breaking Clean is brooding, psychologically heavy and stark, a
reflection of the rocky and treeless plains that form this stretch
of cattle country. Blunt is a third-generation Montanan, but her
saga focuses not on defending ranching culture as an extension of
one’s dream, but on quitting it to find a
future.
Raised in a patriarchal culture resistant
to the idea of women as equal intellectual and economic partners,
Blunt marries when just out of high school and soon has
children.
“I was the daughter of a good rancher,
wife of another, daughter-in-law on a corporate ranch,” she writes.
“I could do it all – I could play their game until I dropped – but
I would never own a square foot of land, a bushel of oats or a bum
calf in my own name.”
Finally, after divorcing
and moving to Missoula, Blunt discovers she cannot go forward
without again confronting the land and the people she left behind.
Ultimately, Breaking Clean is a magnificent breakthrough book and
in many ways a universal story about how small-town individuals
must break the bondage of their common mythology before they find
an identity. It elevates Blunt’s voice to the distinguished realm
of Mary Clearman Blue, Terry Tempest Williams and Ivan Doig.
Todd Wilkinson lives in Bozeman, Montana, and is a
regular contributor to High County
News.
Copyright © 2002 HCN and Todd
Wilkinson
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline She left the ranch to save her soul.
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