In 1892, Maggie Halbert left her home and the newly-settled farmlands of North-central Kansas for the rugged and unsettled regions of the new state of Montana. She bravely ventured from a reasonably-civilized community into rough-hewn and hastily-built mining and ranching habitations resting in the valleys and on the mountainsides around Wise River, Montana. The youngest of seven children, Maggie faced this unknown and untamed environment to take her first teaching job, fresh out of high school.

Maggie Halbert Hand was a contemporary of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the "Little...