The long, long trail

the long version

Part history, part autobiography - Having lost all their money after the 1929 Wall Street crash, Virginia Johnson's family left their comfortable, upper-middle class life in Missoula and moved to an isolated ranch in central Montana. There, they hoped to run a successful dude ranch, augmented by trapping and panning for gold. Quite a change for a young woman who only a few years earlier had traveled to Paris with her grandmother. Johnson writes sympathetically of the Native Americans trying to scrape out a living on unfruitful reservation land, and tells as well the stories of the old-timers she met during her life in the wilderness.