Hattie Big Sky

Hattie Big Sky
Author: Kirby Larson
Publisher: Yearling
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2007-12-26
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0375846417

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NEWBERY HONOR AWARD WINNER A classic YA novel about a teenage girl searching for a sense of home and family that celebrates the true spirit of independence on the American frontier. For most of her life, sixteen-year-old Hattie Brooks has been shuttled from one distant relative to another. Tired of being Hattie Here-and-There, she summons the courage to leave Iowa and move all by herself to Vida, Montana, to prove up on her late uncle’s homestead claim. Under the big sky, Hattie braves hard weather, hard times, a cantankerous cow, and her own hopeless hand at the cookstove. Her quest to make a home is championed by new neighbors Perilee Mueller, her German husband, and their children. For the first time in her life, Hattie feels part of a family, finding the strength to stand up against Traft Martin’s schemes to buy her out and against increasing pressure to be a “loyal” American at a time when anything—or anyone—German is suspect. Despite daily trials, Hattie continues to work her uncle’s claim until an unforeseen tragedy causes her to search her soul for the real meaning of home. This young pioneer's story is lovingly stitched together from Kirby Larson’s own family history and the sights, sounds, and scents of homesteading life.

Big Sky Rivers

Big Sky Rivers
Author: Robert Kelley Schneiders
Publisher:
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2003
Genre: History
ISBN:

To frame his story, Schneiders goes back to the nineteenth-century journals of fur traders and settlers and in the record of flora, fauna, floods, and human activity he finds evidence of rapid and disruptive change. Bison once had the greatest influence on the land, and Schneiders depicts an original bison and Indian trail networks on which were overlaid the first torts and towns and then the railroads, highways, and reservoirs that reconfigured the region forever.

Big Sky

Big Sky
Author: Kate Atkinson
Publisher: Little, Brown
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2019-06-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0316523100

Iconoclastic detective Jackson Brodie returns in a triumphant new novel about secrets, sex, and lies. Jackson Brodie has relocated to a quiet seaside village, in the occasional company of his recalcitrant teenage son and an aging Labrador, both at the discretion of his ex-partner Julia. It's picturesque, but there's something darker lurking behind the scenes. Jackson's current job, gathering proof of an unfaithful husband for his suspicious wife, is fairly standard-issue, but a chance encounter with a desperate man on a crumbling cliff leads him into a sinister network -- and back across the path of his old friend Reggie. Old secrets and new lies intersect in this breathtaking novel by one of the most dazzling and surprising writers at work today. "Thank goodness the long Jackson Brodie hiatus is over." --Janet Maslin, New York Times

Burning Sky

Burning Sky
Author: Rachel Pollack
Publisher: Gateway
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2013-07-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0575119462

BURNING SKY is a collection of twenty-seven short stories by award-winning author Rachel Pollack. These stories - many of which have remained almost wholly unknown until now - reflect the author's interests in unorthodox sexuality and subjectivity of experience, as well her wry sense of humor and impressive imagination.

Burning the Breeze

Burning the Breeze
Author: Lisa Hendrickson
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 423
Release: 2021-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1496228758

WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Creative Nonfiction Finalist, Evans Handcart Award In the middle of the Great Depression, Montana native Julia Bennett arrived in New York City with no money and an audacious business plan: to identify and visit easterners who could afford to spend their summers at her brand new dude ranch near Ennis, Montana. Julia, a big-game hunter whom friends described as "a clever shot with both rifle and shotgun," flouted gender conventions to build guest ranches in Montana and Arizona that attracted world-renowned entertainers and artists. Bennett's entrepreneurship, however, was not a new family development. During the Civil War, her widowed grandmother and her seven-year-old daughter--Bennett's mother--set out from Missouri on a ten-month journey with little more than a yoke of oxen, a covered wagon, and the clothes on their backs. They faced countless heartbreaks and obstacles as they struggled to build a new life in the Montana Territory. Burning the Breeze is the story of three generations of women and their intrepid efforts to succeed in the American West. Excerpts from diaries, letters, and scrapbooks, along with rare family photos, help bring their vibrant personalities to life.

Cardwell Ranch Trespasser & Big Sky Standoff

Cardwell Ranch Trespasser & Big Sky Standoff
Author: B.J. Daniels
Publisher: Harlequin
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2013-03-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1460310497

Cardwell Beware The Cardwell clan has a new, mysterious member. Dana Cardwell warmly welcomed her Justice cousin into the family fold and to the ranch for a reunion. But this cunning kin has other plans for Dana…and designs on her husband, Hud. Hilde Jacobson has known Dana too long to let her best friend get conned, or worse—killed. Unfortunately Hilde is no match for a skilled impostor who's duped everyone in the canyon. Only Deputy Marshal Colt Dawson believes Hilde's claims about the phony relation; only his strong arms have saved her from "accidents" intended to get her out of the way. Together can they convince the Cardwells a predator lurks in their happy home? Big Sky Standoff also included in this book!

The Book of Yaak

The Book of Yaak
Author: Rick Bass
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 211
Release: 1997-09-15
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0547349351

The Yaak Valley of northwestern Montana is one of the last great wild places in the United States, a land of black bears and grizzlies, wolves and coyotes, bald and golden eagles, wolverine, lynx, marten, fisher, elk, and even a handful of humans. It is a land of magic, but its magic may not be enough to save it from the forces threatening it now. The Yaak does have one trick up its sleeve, though: a writer to give it voice. In Winter Rick Bass portrayed the wonder of living in the valley. In The Book of Yaak he captures the soul of the valley itself, and he shows how, if places like the Yaak are lost, we too are lost. Rick Bass has never been a writer to hold back, but The Book of Yaak is his most passionate book yet, a dramatic narrative of a man fighting to defend the place he loves.

Blue Sky

Blue Sky
Author: Lynne R Johnson
Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2023-01-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1398471666

A baby girl is found by travelling Cheyenne. A brave and his wife bring Blue Sky up, as if she were their own, and she is happy to be one of the people, even after being told she was born of the white man. While only in her teens she performs a coup which gives her all she had hoped for, full acceptance into the tribe and a forthcoming wedding to the brave she loves. But a jealous rival has other ideas. She arranges Blue Sky’s abduction telling her mother and father that she has run away. Blue Sky is taken by an unscrupulous trader to a white man’s town. She is abused and enslaved but eventually finds help in the sheriff and school teacher. Despite the risks, she comes to the aid of the Indian residents of a nearby reservation and, in so doing, encounters a brave who plots their escape from the town and reservation. Then begins a long, dangerous and fateful journey home.

Under a Flaming Sky

Under a Flaming Sky
Author: Daniel Brown
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2016-02-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1493022016

On September 1, 1894 two forest fires converged on the town of Hinckley, Minnesota, trapping over 2,000 people. Daniel J. Brown recounts the events surrounding the fire in the first and only book on to chronicle the dramatic story that unfolded. Whereas Oregon's famous "Biscuit" fire in 2002 burned 350,000 acres in one week, the Hinckley fire did the same damage in five hours. The fire created its own weather, including hurricane-strength winds, bubbles of plasma-like glowing gas, and 200-foot-tall flames. In some instances, "fire whirls," or tornadoes of fire, danced out from the main body of the fire to knock down buildings and carry flaming debris into the sky. Temperatures reached 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit--the melting point of steel. As the fire surrounded the town, two railroads became the only means of escape. Two trains ran the gauntlet of fire. One train caught on fire from one end to the other. The heroic young African-American porter ran up and down the length of the train, reassuring the passengers even as the flames tore at their clothes. On the other train, the engineer refused to back his locomotive out of town until the last possible minute of escape. In all, more than 400 people died, leading to a revolution in forestry management practices and federal agencies that monitor and fight wildfires today. Author Daniel Brown has woven together numerous survivors' stories, historical sources, and interviews with forest fire experts in a gripping narrative that tells the fascinating story of one of North America's most devastating fires and how it changed the nation.

Incident at Big Sky

Incident at Big Sky
Author: Johnny France
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2017-03-21
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 1504043995

Edgar Award Finalist: The “exciting” true story of the abduction of biathlete Kari Swenson and the five-month manhunt to bring her tormentors to justice (The New York Times Book Review). Former rodeo cowboy Johnny France had been sheriff of Madison County, Montana, for three years when Kari Swenson, a Bozeman resident training for the World Biathlon Championship, went missing near Big Sky Resort in July 1984. Her friends feared that Kari had been attacked by a grizzly bear, but the truth was far scarier: She’d been kidnapped at gunpoint by father-and-son survivalists Don and Dan Nichols. The pair had been living in the wilderness off and on for years and hoped to make Kari a “mountain woman” and Dan’s bride. But the plan went horribly wrong from the start, and after a deadly firefight with rescuers, the kidnappers vanished into the rugged terrain of the Spanish Peaks. As Montana’s summer froze into brutal winter blizzards, SWAT teams, forest rangers, and antiterrorist units searched the backcountry but sighted the mountain men only once. Then came the call about a strange campfire on a slope above the Madison River. Sheriff France decided to go into the forest to face the fugitives—alone. The resulting showdown made him “perhaps the most famous Western sheriff since Wyatt Earp . . . a modern legend” (Chicago Tribune). Incident at Big Sky is an “amazing . . . exciting retelling of a modern crime” that made headlines around the world (The New York Times Book Review). In a voice as distinctive and compelling as the Montana landscape, France takes readers on a high-stakes adventure so bizarre and unforgettable it could only be true.