ABSTRACT
An elderly Indian woman living on the Crow Reservation in southeastern Montana, bent and wasted by time, yet constitutionally cheerful, told her story to a sympathetic white listener, Frank B. Linderman, in the 1930s. A spare, hard-used, but undiminished and mannerly white woman told the story of her life to a sympathetic writer, Helena Huntington Smith, in the 1940s on a ranch near Sheridan, Wyoming. The tellers of these life stories did not know each other; it would have been impossible. Yet their lives slipped past each other under the same sky, upon the same ground. The two writers, transcribers of these lives, suppressed biases and sometimes preserved the words, and at least the honest attitudes, of the two different existences, an Indian woman who remembered the tribal life, a white woman who was part of the beginning of ranching life. Nannie Alderson was a survivor, an endurer, as another contemporary woman was, a woman she would never know.
