Myrna Loy Read Online Free

City, Virginia, and the California Sierras, before making his way to Austin, Nevada. There he met his future wife, Ann Morgan Davis, she of the auburn hair, tilted nose, green eyes, and freckles that Myrna would inherit. To convince Ann and her immigrant Welsh parents that he would make a trustworthy husband, Williams went into business hauling freight from Salt Lake City with two four-horse teams. Having impressed his future in-laws, he married Ann in Toole, Utah, but the couple did not linger there. After their first child was born, they switched from hauling freight to ranching and moved to Elk City, Idaho, where they raised cattle and horses and had a second child. The enterprising and tireless D. T. had his eye on the open range of Montana Territory, which offered cheap land for homesteaders, lots of it, and was booming. Now that gold seekers were flocking to the mining camps, they would need horses for transportation, herding cattle, and plowing. The newcomers would be hungry for beef and bread, as would the settlers at military forts and Indian agencies. Boardinghouses would need milk and butter. The recently arrived cowboys and farmers would be donning leather chaps, vests, and boots, all of which made horse and cattle ranching and wheat farming seem to him winning undertakings, despite the relentless toil and hardship they entailed. D. T. and Ann set out in 1870 for Montana’s Crow Creek Valley, each driving a wagon. The pregnant Ann drove their two children and her blind mother, along with blueberry and gooseberry bushes and apple tree seedlings to transplant in Montana ( BB , 4–5). When Myrna revisited the ranch a final time in the early 1980s, a few of Ann’s gnarled apple trees were blooming in what used to be her orchard. 10
    Whenever Myrna recalled stories about her frontier forebears, she wondered at their grit, can-do spirit, resourcefulness, and courage. She did not share the scathing opinion voiced by her father’s friend, the celebrated western painter Charles Russell, that the pioneer should be seen as a despoiler, a desecrator of virgin land who “traps all the fur, kills off all the wild meat, cuts down all the trees, grazes off all the grass.” She hailed Grandfather Williams for his up-by-the-bootstraps rise from the poverty of his boyhood and for accumulating enough Montana land and stock to render him one of the wealthiest men in his county (which was Jefferson County first, then became Broadwater after 1897). Under the 1862 Homestead Act, which Abraham Lincoln had signed, in 1870 the newcomer D. T. Williams could and did acquire 160 acres of public Montana Territory land in the Crow Creek Valley, land that had long been a buffalo hunting ground for migrating Flathead, Shoshone, Blackfoot, and Crow Indians and, since the coming of Lewis and Clark to the Missouri River headwaters in 1805, had seen an occasional white trapper, hunter, fur trader, or mountain man. With the advent of the gold rush, farmers, other ranchers, and a few merchants and innkeepers were beginning to join the miners invading the area, the only valley of the Missouri River. 11
    To take title to the 160 acres, D. T. Williams had to “prove up.” That meant he had to live on the land for five years and make improvements on it. He built a log house, chicken coops, a barn, corrals, and split-log fences. Fifteen years later, under the Desert Land Act, he bought another two hundred acres for twenty-five cents an acre, parts of which he had to irrigate with ditches, for despite the Crow Creek, the land was often dry. He planted acres of wheat, displacing wild grass, buffalo berry, brush, pine, cedar, and willow trees. Myrna boasted that by the time Montana became a state, in 1889, her grandfather owned fifteen hundred head of cattle, many horses, and most of Crow Creek Valley’s acreage ( BB , 6–8). He held stock in several mines, as well.
    For all her pride in the prominence of D. T. Williams and the craft and industry of