ABSTRACT
Belvina Williamson, a newcomer from Iowa, was typical. She and her family were explorers “as adventurous as Christopher Columbus,” she wrote, not yet knowing just how apt her ocean metaphor was as the train car packed with the Williamsons' livestock, wagon, and sorghum barrels full of dishes and linens launched onto “uncharted seas to an unknown land.” Her older sisters, Ora and Ovidia, were wide-eyed at their prospects: “Will there be Indians?” Ovidia asked with concern. “Aw, who's afraid of Indians!” scoffed their brother. It was 1910, and already their imaginings of Montana were of a mythical Old West, and, as it turned out, an equally mythical new one. 1
