Letters from the Claim
Ruby Wachter's Montana Letters, 1912–1921
transcribed by her great-granddaughter, Susan Wood, of Billings, Montana

How I Found Them

Last October my mother moved out of the house on the north side of Billings where she had lived for fifty-one years and into an apartment with an elevator. My brother and I spent three weekends cleaning out her basement. On the last Saturday, behind the furnace, on a shelf I didn't know was there, I found a Florsheim shoebox tied shut with kitchen string. Inside were sixty-three letters, most of them in pencil, a few in ink, all of them addressed to "Mrs. Sol Swanger" at a rural route in Ohio, and all of them signed "your loving sister, Ruby."

Ruby was my great-grandmother. I knew her name, and I knew that the family had "come in from a homestead" before they settled in Billings, but that was about all anybody had ever told me. Mother remembered her only as a small, quiet old lady who kept a canary and made very good cinnamon rolls. She died in 1959, when I was eight. I remember the canary.

The letters were to Ruby's younger sister Mary, who stayed in Ohio and saved every one. When Mary died in 1962, her daughter mailed the whole box back to Montana, to Ruby's daughter Flora, my grandmother. When Grandma Flora went into the nursing home in 1978, Mother brought home a few boxes of her things, and this one must have gone onto the shelf behind the furnace. Nobody looked there for twenty years.

I have spent this year transcribing them, on evenings and Sundays, on the computer my son set up for me. I manage a dental office, so I'm used to reading difficult handwriting, but some of these took a magnifying glass and a whole pot of coffee. This page has twelve of them. I chose the ones that tell the story best. I hope to put more up over the winter.

I have typed them just as she wrote them. Ruby liked a dash, didn't care much for commas, and now and then capitalized a word she wanted Mary to notice. I've left all of that alone. Where I couldn't read a word, I've put [?]. My notes after each letter are in brown.

The Family

Ruby Wachter was born in northern Ohio in 1886, the oldest of five children on a dairy farm. She married Alonzo Wachter, called Lon, in 1907. He was a farm hand who wanted a farm of his own, and in Ohio there was no land left for a young man without money.

Their children: Flora, born 1908 in Ohio, my grandmother. Irving, born 1913 on the claim. Myrtle, born 1916 on the claim.

Mary Swanger, Ruby's sister, two years younger, married Solomon Swanger and farmed near their parents in Ohio all her life. As far as I can tell, the sisters never saw each other again after the spring of 1912. They wrote for forty-seven years.

The neighbors who come up most in the letters are Mose and Anna Wooster, an older couple from Iowa on the claim to the south; Ted Vowell, a bachelor who filed the same week Lon did; and Lina Metcalf, a young woman who proved up a claim of her own and taught the school.

A Little History

I didn't know any of this before I started, and I've spent a lot of my lunch hours at the public library downtown finding it out. In 1909 Congress passed the Enlarged Homestead Act, which let a settler claim 320 acres of dry land instead of the old 160, because out here 160 acres won't feed a family. Eastern Montana filled up with people almost overnight. The railroads advertised all over the Midwest and promised that anyone who learned the new "dry farming" methods could raise wheat out here.

For the first few years they could. Then, in 1917, the rain stopped, and for most of the next five years it hardly came at all. Thousands of families gave up and left. The Wachters were one of them. These are the letters of the people who came, and stayed as long as they could.

Time Line

If you have family who homesteaded in eastern Montana, I would love to hear from you, especially if anyone knew the Wachters, the Woosters, Ted Vowell or Miss Metcalf. I have not been able to find the claim on a map yet. Ruby never wrote down the township and range, because Mary didn't need to know, and the town of Tullis she mentions doesn't seem to be there anymore.

Visitors since February 1999:


Susan Wood · [email protected]
Last updated September 12, 1999