by Bill H. Ritchie (Contribution by), Harlene Jessie Reeves (Author)
Reeves gives us her authentic account of growing up around Jardine, Montana (today a virtual ghost town) near Gardiner. Her stories are sometimes funny: a runt pig, miraculously waxing fat after eating the crankcase oil from of a Model T Ford. Sometimes awful, like "the worst day" in her life when her brother blew off his hand by hammering a dynamite cap with a rock. Another brother almost died from eating carbide powder cookies. This girl had an unusual childhood, growing up near a dying mining town on the edge of Yellowstone Park. Her book is a must-read if you are interested in the disappearing Wild West as seen through the eyes of a little girl.
Author Biography
Harlene Jessie Reeves Ritchie was born in 1916 in a log home near Jardine, Montana, on a cold, snowy night with no one to help her mother except her 13-month old sister. Her dad struck out on snowshoes to get the doctor, but he didn't get back in time. In her memoirs, giving an account of her growing-up years in those hills, she left her family with a vivid and mostly humorous description of what it was like to be a little girl, living like a pioneer, but caught between a world that was dying and a world struggling to be born. She lived until 2001, but a few years before she died, she saw her handwritten notes turn into a handmade book, produced by two of her daughters and her older son. Relatives pitched in and sent hundred-dollar bills to buy her book. Harlene didn't live long enough to see her book become a paperback, but the work went on despite her passing. In fact, her passing underscored the value of her stories for future readers both in the family and for people everywhere. At the end of her story she tells about moving from Montana to Washington State. The rest we know: at 18 she married Bill Ritchie, son of a farmer in central Washington, and she followed him through his struggles in depression-era jobs in construction and row crop farming. She bore six children and outlived two. By the time she and Bill were in their seventies, they had risen from living in a rat-infested shack in a former pig pasture to a house on a hill overlooking a beautiful valley, with Mount Adams and Mount Rainier in the distance. From her kitchen window she no longer looked out on forlorn fields of corn and a weedy pasture, but over the meandering Yakima River; and, beyond that, the little town of Selah. It was in a nursing home in Selah, burning with fever, fighting her last round of pneumonia, that she passed away on October 7, 2001-unaware of the events of the previous month that so occupied the minds of everyone. She hd listened to encouragement from her children, who believed that-with her writing skill-she could produce a book and make a name for herself. She demurred: "I'm just an old farmer's wife," was what she said.