Bride Goes West

Nannie T. Alderson was born in Union, Virginia (later West Virginia), in 1860 and grew up in a genteel southern family. In 1883 she married Walt Alderson, a cowboy she had met while visiting relatives in Kansas, and they moved to Montana to start a cattle ranch. Helena Huntington Smith was a journalist and contributor to the Saturday Evening Post, Reader’s Digest, and other magazines. Her books include We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher and The War on Powder River. Jeanie Alderson is the great-grandniece of Nannie Alderson and is a fourth-generation rancher from Birney, Montana.

“A Bride Goes West still has much to tell us about white women’s resilience and community during Montana’s pioneer era. [Alderson’s] narrative provides an alternative to overly romanticized male accounts of frontier life and calls attention to the overlooked stories and histories of the eastern region of the state.”-Randi Lynn Tanglen, coeditor of Teaching Western American Literature “After reading, as a very young woman, the Western American classic A Bride Goes West, what a great pleasure in my later years to hear Nannie Alderson’s voice again in this new edition and to reflect on the many changes that have occurred in the West since Nannie’s time, the time of my first reading, and the present.”-Mary Clearman Blew, author of All but the Waltz: A Memoir of Five Generations in the Life of a Montana Family “Among hundreds of books written by and about range men, there are hardly a dozen valid ones concerning women. I pick A Bride Goes West . . . as [one of] the two best books pertaining to ranch life by women with a woman’s point of view dominating.”-J. Frank Dobie “A charming vignette of ranching life in Montana during the mid-1880s.”-Choice