W W W. D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A . C O M
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WOMEN AWAY FROM THE RANGE
MILDRED WALKER (1905-1998) wrote 13 novels in Great
Falls from 1933 to 1950. Best known for Winter Wheat, e
Curlew's Cry, and If A Lion Could Talk, Walker came to Mon-
tana as the wife of a young doctor Ferdinand Ripley Schemm,
with an arrangement that she would write and he would pur-
sue medicine. She lived a divided life: doctor's wife and distant
mother on one hand; writer on the other. Her daughter, poet
Ripley Schemm, said her mother wrote and attended Junior
League meetings — her published books closeted away in her
study. Nevertheless Walker's complex female characters reveal
her keen insights about women's lives in Montana that so of-
ten tottered on the vagaries of weather, crops, and the fortunes
of their men.
By the 1960s, the confluence of the women's movement and
the environmental movement sparked Montana women to ques-
tion not only how their stories were told, but how they wanted to
shape their stories. Hence Dorothy Johnson who wanted nothing
more on her tombstone, than words that said, simply: "PAID."
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Mildred
Walker
