Dream Chasers of the West B. L. Wettstein East Glacier Park Rudyard High Line Homestead Woman

Buy this exciting book to relive the daily life of a homestead family in their quest for survival as they chased their dreams in Glacier Park.

In 1913, unmarried and alone at the age of thirty, Clara Augusta Miller left her family in Minnesota and went to Rudyard, Montana, to file on a homestead. Impervious to the dangers that awaited her, a woman of few material possessions but an infinity of dreams, she prepared herself to accept the challenge of a lifetime.

When Abraham Lincoln signed the first Homestead Act in 1862, land-starved families surged forward to settle the West. Realizing that vast tracts of Montana continued to be uninhabited, the Three Year Homestead Law of 1912 was passed in which settlers could prove up on a homestead in three years and be absent from their land five months of the year. The land-hungry people did not question why the law had changed. They did not stop to think that perhaps they might need five months to find other employment to meet their basic needs. They were not discouraged, they were encouraged, and the homestead hopefuls came by the thousands across the grassy plains aboard the Great Northern Railroad where the good-will ambassadors of James J. Hill welcomed them with inexpensive loans and cheap, one way transportation.

Clara’s undeterred ambition to own a piece of that land determined her destiny.

· History buffs of the “good old days”

· Descendants of Montana homesteaders

· People chasing a dream