ABSTRACT
On the last day of August 1932, when first snow powdered the tops of the mountains east of Great Falls, Montana, a family of five loaded their tent, bedrolls, camp stove, and other belongings on an already old, square-bodied Studebaker and left, not on a pleasant camping trip, as they had often done before, but to flee eastward and southward from a bankrupt family business and hard times. Family camping, which was his idea, found the five of us in a small, square bell tent gazing up in July at snow on its top or noticing the etched edging of ice on a trout stream in October. Camping was learning how to clean out a natural spring for our water supply, or constructing, well away from camp and hidden, a latrine. Recently the federal government had officially named that still wild stretch of the upper Missouri a "wild river" and put certain limitations upon visitors.
