Take It as It Comes, A Montana Oral History * Olivia Hildahl * (Paradise Alley Publishing 2025)
Olivia grew up in a series of Milwaukee RR section houses in Central Montana in the 30s and 40s. Her dad started working as a water boy for his father at 12 years old in the 1920s. Her grandfather ran the multi-ethnic crews that carved railroad beds and laid track through some of the most treacherous geography on the planet.
Olivia's book is full of old photographs and fascinating stories. If you love 20th Century history - the railroads - the West - family folklore – you’ll love this.
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SYNPOSIS
"In the face of loss, hardship, and the turbulence of early 20th century Montana - they persevered."
Born during the fleeting prosperity of World War I, Dan and Esther both grew up in the harsh realities of Montana’s environmental disasters and economic collapse. Their vivid, sometimes visceral accounts of life in early 20th century Montana paint a dissonant landscape. But Take It as It Comes is more than an oral history. It is a collective, multi-generational ethnography that offers a vivid and deeply personal lens into the struggles and triumphs of what it means to carve out a decent life despite great odds. Read it as a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and a reminder that history is not just something that happens to nations, or leaders, or the rich and famous; it is lived in the day-to-day mettle of people like Dan and Esther, who take it as it comes.
*****
REVIEWS
“A vividly recalled, precisely documented account of one family’s experiences in the early twentieth century and depression-era West, especially in central Montana.”
Mary Clearman Blew, Waltzing Montana (Bison Books, 2021)
“In Hildahl’s artfully packaged oral history of her family’s remarkable struggles to exist in the primitive reaches of America’s northern plains, we meet life’s most brutal challenges. Threadbare lives stitched together along railroad routes blazed by underpaid workers of all races and creeds. These are stories that ache yet are ablaze with human grit and the redeeming interventions of grace.”
Tim Connor, Spokane writer and author of Beautiful Wounds (Countryman Press, 2022)
“The author has woven a unified tapestry of recorded oral histories, her own remembrances, photographs and genealogical documents into a structure for the beautiful yet sometimes harrowing narrative. It illustrates the special kind of people who populated the post-frontier rural areas of Montana. A frank, collective surmise that drives living folklore and oral history of all sorts. …a lovely model for any family historian anywhere.”
Philip Hiscock, PhD, Department of Folklore (retired) Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, NL (Canada)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Olivia is a local family folklorist, writer, fabric artist and active octogenarian. She was born in a dust storm in Lewistown, Montana in 1937 and grew up in a series of Milwaukee Railroad section houses in small towns dotted along the Montana line. She describes her childhood as growing up amongst storytelling adults. Her mother’s and father’s stories were not the first she recorded on tape. She interviewed and recorded the story of a WAC who had served in World War II which she published in the Statesman Examiner (Colville, WA), and a lumberman, who at the age of nine, left home to ride the rails during the Depression. Her love of story was precious time spent listening and asking questions of anyone who had a story to tell. She has written a few fictional stories of her own, but states this is her first publication. She can live with that. Her only regret is all the stories she’s missed.
Books will be available for sale at the event.
