"Great-granddaughter of homesteaders in north-central Montana, Mary Clearman Blew grew up in one of the last vestiges of the rural frontier. Her girlhood chores - hauling water and rounding up cattle - were remote even to her town-bred classmates in the forties and fifties. It was a girlhood she now recalls realistically, with affection but without nostalgia."--BOOK JACKET. "Many others have written about this land, its people, and its history, and Blew examines portrayals of the West in some of their writing, including B. M. Bower's Chip of the Flying U and the novels of Dorothy M. Johnson and A. B. Guthrie, Jr."--BOOK JACKET.