first 160 acres on the American River out of Harlowton, where
both my father, William Asher, and his younger sister, Esther, were
born. As soon as their first homestead was titled, after a five-year
prove-up period, the family sold and moved again, first to Billings
and Fort Benton and then to homestead land near Blackleaf Can-
yon, west of Bynum, that was available under the Enlarged Home-
stead Act. My father's younger brother, Dubs, was born at Billings
in 1916.

The family survived the dry years on the steady income my
grandmother brought in from her town job. Every Sunday night
she rode the bus to Great Falls, where she worked for six days in the
Rainbow Hotel, returning each Saturday after work for a single day
at home with her family. My grandfather was a horse trader and a
bootlegger whose solution to hard times was an enterprising if
sometimes makeshift self-reliance. He kept a herd of livestock and
a flock of chicks, planted a big garden each summer, dug an elabo-
rate root cellar where he stored potatoes and hung onions, turnips,
and beets, put up some hay to sell, and, of course, traded horses
and sold booze. Good-natured, gregarious, and easy-going, he en-
joyed people, maintaining friendships that lasted his lifetime.

In contrast, my grandmother was a stern and nervous woman
who put duty above even family life. She was brought up to work,
like most of the women who came west to make their lives. Spared
an early death in childbirth, by her mid-fifties she had become a
spent and broken soul, left alone by the death of her husband and
the marriages of her children. After a minor gall bladder operation
in the spring of 1937, she became disoriented and depressed; that
fall she collapsed and died from a cerebral hemorrhage. I never
met either of my paternal grandparents. Asher died in 1932, Mary a
few months before I was born.

I did know my mother's parents, Dewitt and Cynthia Seekins,

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