Montana Book Roundup

Norman Maclean, author of A River Runs Through It, observed that writers in Montana seldom have to look very far-or very hard-for story ideas. "There are characters and situations here everywhere you look," he said.

Maclean must have known Christy Leskovar's family. Leskovar is the author of One Night in a Bad Inn (Pictorial Histories Publishing Company, Missoula, Mont., 2006), a tribute to her maternal grandmodier, Aila Hughes Thompson. Thompson was a woman of strong character, a hard worker, and above all, "a lady," despite the influence of her parents, Andrew and Sarah Hughes, who both "did time" for such crimes as grave robbing and insurance fraud and of her husband, an Irish gambler, drinker, and brawler.

We meet Thompson early on in the book and follow her and her siblings to the state orphanage where they live while their parents are in prison, and later when she works in her mother's Butte boardinghouse, attends high school, and rebuffs her alcoholic mother's attempts to force her into prostitution. In one dramatic scene, the young Aila is sent to a boarder's room to deliver a meal; when he opens the door naked, it's obvious he's been promised more than dinner by his landlady. Later in the story, an angry Sarah prevents her daughter from attending college by tearing all of Aila's clothes to shreds while telling her "You'll never amount to anything. . . . You could make plenty of money for me right here in this house if you weren't so high and mighty" (p. 345).

There's much colorful Montana history to learn from One Night in a Bad Inn. Unfortunately, at 571 pages, the book is so long that my attention flagged, especially in the mid-section where the author revisits World War I for over 150 pages. I think the book's length resulted from Leskovar's desire to use everything she learned. I know what that is like from personal experience, so I'm somewhat sympathetic, but there are several places where some judicious editing could have moved the story along. (And it was somewhat disconcerting to find Jeannette Rankin's name misspelled twice, and Kalispell spelled without the final "1" in a book published in Montana.) One Night in a Bad Inn is, however, a handsome hardcover book, profusely illustrated, and bargain priced at $24.95.

In a reverse situation, new editions of two terrific travel guides have come out with additional information to enrich and inform visitors about Glacier National Park-and sites along the Nez Perce Trail. Place Names of Glacier National Park by Jack Holterman is now in its third edition, brought out in 2006 by Chris Cauble at Riverbend Publishing in Helena, who is doing so much to keep important Montana material in print. This book contains fascinating facts, legends, and speculations about how familiar names came to be bestowed on mountains, lakes, roads, and way stations in Glacier. When possible, Holterman cross-references mentions of these spots to other works that many of his readers will know-or will want to, such as the entry for "Marias River and Pass," which not only includes a suggestion of the pass being haunted-certainly a draw for young tourists who usually relish ghost stories-but also directs adults to an early Montana author: "About 1879 Andrew Garcia fled through here or near here (perhaps a little south) and had to bury his beloved Nez Perce wife, fatally wounded by Blackfeet, in the 'wild Marias Mountains'" (p. 135). This 240-page book is a gem, and its ninety-yearold author is a true Montana treasure. I can hardly wait to revisit Glacier with this informative and reasonably priced ($12.95) paperback guide in hand.

The second edition of Cheryl Wilfong's Following the Nez Perce Trail (Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 3006,513 pages, $39.95 paper) also makes readers want to jump in the car to retrace all or some of the 1,500-mile route taken by the Nez Perce in their attempt to evade capture as they tried to reach Canada. Chief Joseph's story is well known, but this marvelous guide fleshes out the other people involved with its personal accounts, photographs, chronologies of the events, historical vignettes-plus extremely helpful directions for voyagers with three different travel styles: mainstream (taking the family car-and the family); adventurous (again, the family car, but following dirt or gravel roads); intrepid (travel On "narrow bumpy roads . . . out on the middle of nowhere"). This makes it possible for any traveler, from the timid to the fearless, to plan a historically enriching trip. Highly recommended!

To travel through the history of medicine in the early West, Volney Steele's Bleed, Blister, and Purge (Mountain Press Publishing Company, Missoula, Mont., 2005, 358 pages) is the perfect vehicle. Steele, a doctor himself, explores the extraordinary methods used by early "doctors," some of them self-proclaimed, to "cure" or improve the health of their patients. He pays well-deserved tribute to some of the first practitioners of the healing arts in the West, from Indian healers and William Clark ("favorite physician" of the Walk Wallas) to those fronder physicians who literally learned through trial, error, and experience. (Some of the methods and medicines described are not for the faint of heart-or stomach.)