Montana Memoir The Hardscrabble Years, 1925-1942 [Paperback]

I read the manuscript in a single sitting because I couldn't put it down.?Bill McGee's firsthand account?brought to such vivid life a world I knew of, but had never experienced. Thank you for writing this book.
-J. H.,?city boy and?early?reader

FROM THE BACK COVER

Bill McGee recaptures life growing up in the small cattle town of Malta, Montana, during the hardscrabble years of the Great Depression.

He sets the stage in the historical Prologue and takes the reader Westward Ho! as his pioneering forefathers, curious to see what was on the other side of the mountains, migrated west generation by generation until a pretty schoolteacher from Iowa (his mother) meets a wild and wooly cowboy (his father) on her brother's cattle ranch in 1919 Montana.

In his signature spare and straightforward style, Bill McGee then recounts his own coming-of-age story ... being farmed out to a neighboring rancher at age seven to work for his room and board, exploring the West?in his teens by thumb and rail, horseback riding with General George S. Patton in the Palm Springs desert, and working in the new Kaiser shipyards while waiting to turn seventeen, so he could join the fight.

I've always felt fortunate to grow up in Montana during the hardscrabble Depression years. We were always broke, but we never felt poor.
--BillMcGee

61 b/w photos and illustrations

William L. McGee's writing career has spanned six decades. He has written 22 books; nine of them with his co-author/wife Sandra McGee. Bill McGee has garnered critical praise for his World War II memoir, Bluejacket Odyssey, 1942-1946, and his cowboying memoir, The Cowboyin' Years, 1947-1950. Bill and Sandra are members of Western Writers of America.

Bill McGee is no armchair historian...He's lived what he writes about.
?--Barnaby Conrad, Founder of the Santa BarbaralÃç