OPINION:
HORSEBACK SCHOOLMARM: MONTANA, 1953-1954
By Margot Liberty
University of Oklahoma Press, $24.95, 127 pages
The one-room school house is something we associate more with the Age of Lincoln and the log-cabin-to-White House era than with the early years of the Eisenhower administration. The same holds for the iconic figure of the American horseback schoolmarm who was copied in other frontier societies like Australia and South Africa.
Yet, as we learn from Margot Liberty in this memoir of her extraordinary year fulfilling precisely that role in a remote corner of Montana in 1953-4, such phenomena lingered long after we might have expected them to be extinct: “In Montana in 1953, more than nine hundred such one-room schools continued in session each winter, in districts so remote and thinly settled that consolidation seemed impossible.” Her school, located on the SH Ranch, had been moved there only “two or three years before I arrived there … the owner … wanted to retain his hired hands when their children reached compulsory school age.”
Armed with a newly-minted Bachelor of Science degree, Ms. Liberty’s teaching credentials were minimal:
“At Cornell University in my day there was a prevailing opinion that courses in education were a waste of time. Students of four-year programs in liberal arts, the sciences or agriculture were thought to have acquired sufficient knowledge in various subjects to be able to teach in elementary schools. All they needed was a modicum of teacher training gained in a short course that encompassed the main points of technique and method.”
Of actual teaching experience she had none, this six-week course was all she had to prepare her for her task. Fortunately, “the director of our Cornell program during this time … was a wonderful teacher and mentor to all students. I kept in touch with her from the wilds of Montana during that entire first year I spent teaching in the one-room school on the SH Ranch.”
This would probably have been woefully inadequate for a job teaching in a regular elementary classroom, but she had to teach “four children in Grade One, one in Grade Two, one in Grade Three, and one in Grade Seven.”. No wonder her first instinct was to decline, but various factors, including a boyfriend in Montana and lack of other teaching options for her there, led her to take on this daunting task.
Just getting there was tough enough, involving such hazards as clouds of dust on gravel roads and “experience[ing] the alarming sensation of driving a car off a sloping bank into a wide swirling river.” And she really did need that horse in the schoolyard, since her car had to be parked a mile or so away. The bare “teacherage” where she had to live had electricity but no plumbing, heating or running water, which had to be drawn from a well. Learning how to bank a coal stove was necessary to cook, bathe and not freeze to death in the harsh winter to come. Equipping it with only necessities took much time and effort — the nearest town for shopping was 60 miles away — and was only possible due to emergency funds provided by her family. And all this was just preliminary to the main event: the really difficult task of teaching so variously to diverse ages and levels in such close proximity.
As she expected, this was not easy and her duties were not all strictly educational, including such delights as detaching a frozen toilet seat in the face of urgent need by a pupil. Being placed in a particular grade was no guarantee of its being appropriate. Seeing the inability of her seventh-grader to cope with the syllabus, she tried the sixth-grade on him only to find that he was scarcely less equipped to deal with that. The children’s antics while her attention was focused on others make for amusing reading, but must have been less so to the struggling educator. But the warmth of their affection for “Miss Margot,” as she insisted on being called, was genuine, as was some measure of parental gratitude and support. These must have gone a long way to making life in that bustling overcrowded schoolroom bearable and, astonishingly enough, even at times enjoyable.
Ms. Liberty’s relationship with the boyfriend who had led her west did not last, but she did end up marrying another cowboy named Forrest Liberty and bearing him two children in their seven years together before moving on to a busy and prolific career as an author and anthropologist. Not surprisingly, one of her specialties is ranching culture. This intensely personal fresh account of that first year teaching in Montana was actually written in the summer of 1954 and lost for 60 years. We must be grateful for its discovery and publication, for it is an invaluable testament to a forgotten way of life and a fascinating slice of rural life to boot.
• Martin Rubin is a writer and critic in Pasadena, Calif.
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