Latest / Stories That Live In Us / Montana: Love, Loss, and Everything In-Between (with Mary Anne Mercer) | Episode 78

Transcript

Montana: Love, Loss, and Everything In-Between (with Mary Anne Mercer) | Episode 78 · Stories That Live In Us

• 0:00
  Mary Anne Mercer: They had moved the truck, a truck, grandma's trunk, so Grandma Florrie's trunk, that Grandpa, just when she died, he just left everything in it.
• 0:08
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know, everything went in his trunk.
• 0:10
  Mary Anne Mercer: And so it was this, it was this amazing museum of 1915.
• 0:14
  Mary Anne Mercer: Stories.
• 0:16
  Crista Cowan: That Live In Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present and future.
• 0:23
  Crista Cowan: I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist.
• 0:27
  Crista Cowan: Counting down to the upcoming celebration of America's 250th birthday, you'll meet families from each state whose stories are woven into the very fabric of America Tales of immigration, migration, courage and community that remind us that when we tell our stories, we strengthen the bonds that connect us.
• 0:47
  Crista Cowan: So join me for season two, as we discover, from sea to shining sea, the stories that live in us.
• 0:56
  Crista Cowan: Do you remember back in 2020, when we were all on lockdown for COVID, I happened to live in a basement apartment, and let me tell you that those first few months were kind of rough.
• 1:07
  Crista Cowan: I live alone.
• 1:09
  Crista Cowan: I had the Zoom connection to the world, like many of us, but the isolation kind of got to me, and that summer, after about four months in that condition, a dear friend of mine asked if I wanted to run away for a few days Straight up I-15, about 10 hours to Montana, and I had spent some time in Montana different parts of the state during college, but I had never been to Glacier National Park, and so that's where we decided to go, and for the first time in four months, I could breathe.
• 1:46
  Crista Cowan: Montana is big sky country.
• 1:49
  Crista Cowan: It is exactly what it says to be, and it is beautiful and awe-inspiring, but also, interestingly enough, a little isolated.
• 1:59
  Crista Cowan: It was a great place to go during the COVID summer because there weren't a lot of people around even now, so I can only imagine 100 years ago how isolated it must have been for some of the people who lived there.
• 2:14
  Crista Cowan: But when you talk to people from Montana, they love it.
• 2:20
  Crista Cowan: They love the wide open spaces and the opportunity to spread out.
• 2:26
  Crista Cowan: My guest today is a woman named Marianne Mercer.
• 2:29
  Crista Cowan: She is an author, she was a nurse by profession and she has lived all over the world, but Montana is home and as she talks about her home on the range, I hope you'll enjoy her story.
• 2:45
  Crista Cowan: Thank you so much for joining me.
• 2:48
  Crista Cowan: I'm excited to get to know you and your story a little bit better.
• 2:52
  Crista Cowan: It's not often I get to interview people I don't know or have not talked to before, so thank you for your time.
• 3:00
  Crista Cowan: Thank you, so I would love to know a little bit about just you and where you grew up and your family of origin and what you want to share about yourself and your career.
• 3:13
  Mary Anne Mercer: I grew up on a ranch in eastern Montana Farming ranch, but ranching was the main part of it.
• 3:20
  Mary Anne Mercer: It also has also grew wheat.
• 3:22
  Mary Anne Mercer: I had six siblings part of it.
• 3:28
  Mary Anne Mercer: He also has also grew wheat, had six siblings, um, and I lived on on the ranch.
• 3:30
  Mary Anne Mercer: My grandfather and his, his what they called a maiden, maiden aunt, you know, the unmarried sister lived with him, was his housekeeper and and that was so, that was so.
• 3:40
  Mary Anne Mercer: We had a community of you know there were like quite a few of us and then when, when we had, you always had one hired man, so that was 10 people at least, you know, in our little household Grandpa had a separate house very near ours, and so you know, I grew up, I went to a one-room country school with my siblings.
• 4:00
  Mary Anne Mercer: At one point we were six of the 12 students in the school.
• 4:04
  Mary Anne Mercer: So then I went to high school.
• 4:07
  Mary Anne Mercer: I went on, decided I wanted to be a nurse, went on to college, did nursing, worked for you know, a few years, but I'd always kind of wanted to go overseas.
• 4:19
  Mary Anne Mercer: I kind of always.
• 4:20
  Mary Anne Mercer: I just had my mom was kind of a vicarious traveler as well.
• 4:23
  Mary Anne Mercer: I think I got it partly from her.
• 4:24
  Mary Anne Mercer: My mom was kind of a vicarious traveler as well.
• 4:29
  Mary Anne Mercer: I think I got it partly from her.
• 4:31
  Mary Anne Mercer: So at one point in time I had this opportunity to go to Nepal.
• 4:34
  Mary Anne Mercer: I was living in San Francisco.
• 4:35
  Mary Anne Mercer: I looked at the paper, I was looking at the Sunday paper, and it just said nurses wanted Nepal and I thought, ooh, nepal, that sounds exciting.
• 4:43
  Mary Anne Mercer: And I thought, oh, nepal, that sounds exciting.
• 4:46
  Mary Anne Mercer: Three weeks later I was on a flight to Nepal, which is, you know, in the Himalayas north of India, and so I spent two years in this very different setting, being useful because I was skilled.
• 4:58
  Mary Anne Mercer: I was actually a nurse practitioner at that point and, you know it, just after that my career was international health or, as we call it now, global health.
• 5:08
  Mary Anne Mercer: So when I came back, I came back from my two years there, I thought I don't think I.
• 5:13
  Mary Anne Mercer: I don't think I know enough about what I'm doing here.
• 5:15
  Mary Anne Mercer: I know medicine, but I don't really know this whole area of global public health.
• 5:18
  Mary Anne Mercer: So I went to Hopkins, did a master's, then I stayed on and did more, get a graduate degree, you know, doctoral degree.
• 5:26
  Mary Anne Mercer: So that kind of set me for.
• 5:29
  Mary Anne Mercer: So in, in a way, it was two different directions.
• 5:31
  Mary Anne Mercer: One was academia, because when I moved here to Seattle years ago now, I I sort of gravitated immediately to the University of Washington, which had an international health department.
• 5:44
  Mary Anne Mercer: So it was academia, but it was also the practice of being out there in the field and doing health for people, working in public health, for people from other countries and other cultures.
• 5:58
  Mary Anne Mercer: Basically, during your educational career?
• 5:59
  Crista Cowan: did you have the opportunity to go abroad other times During your educational career?
• 6:02
  Crista Cowan: Did you have the opportunity to go abroad other times?
• 6:05
  Mary Anne Mercer: Well before I moved here, when I was still at Hopkins, I had a program.
• 6:08
  Mary Anne Mercer: This was back in the late 90s, early 90s, I'm sorry.
• 6:15
  Mary Anne Mercer: I was the director of a program for prevention of AIDS in Africa.
• 6:20
  Mary Anne Mercer: Oh wow, big job, right.
• 6:22
  Mary Anne Mercer: I mean it was very, very interesting.
• 6:25
  Mary Anne Mercer: Oh wow.
• 6:52
  Mary Anne Mercer: Obviously at this point we're talking late 80s, early 90s.
• 6:53
  Mary Anne Mercer: So what I realized my job was was to convince the people that work for these little nonprofit groups, you know Save the Children, care, those kind of groups.
• 6:57
  Mary Anne Mercer: Aids is not like everything else.
• 6:58
  Mary Anne Mercer: You can't just assume you know what to do about it.
• 7:00
  Mary Anne Mercer: This is a new problem.
• 7:00
  Mary Anne Mercer: People understand it as a.
• 7:01
  Mary Anne Mercer: They understand it very differently than you understand it as a health, you know, medical person.
• 7:05
  Mary Anne Mercer: So it was really interesting.
• 7:07
  Mary Anne Mercer: Then I came here and started also continued.
• 7:10
  Mary Anne Mercer: When I moved to Seattle I also continued to work in, you know, not in AIDS but in parts of Africa and Asia in health.
• 7:28
  Crista Cowan: Wow, that is quite the both academic career as well as career of service.
• 7:30
  Crista Cowan: And learning yeah, learning yeah, for sure.
• 7:31
  Crista Cowan: So much.
• 7:33
  Crista Cowan: So how did you go from international health to writing and exploring family history?
• 7:39
  Crista Cowan: That seems like kind of an unusual bridge A bridge.
• 7:43
  Mary Anne Mercer: Well, you know, the first writing was Beyond the Next Village Because after I, you know, I kind of finished most of my academic work I was still teaching, but I had time and I had a journal from you know that was this thick from my time in this rural area and it was just.
• 8:05
  Mary Anne Mercer: It was such an incredible experience that I kept a pretty detailed journal and I finally said I've got to do something with this, I've got to write this up.
• 8:13
  Mary Anne Mercer: So that's Beyond the Next Village, which is the book that I wrote, you know, published probably 10 years ago now.
• 8:21
  Mary Anne Mercer: So that sort of made me realize that I had that book in me and I moved on from that and it was kind of the Montana book was the same thing it was.
• 8:34
  Mary Anne Mercer: I had this book in me, I knew.
• 8:36
  Mary Anne Mercer: So I just I felt so invested in my family history and my Montana roots and all that that you know, I just had to write that book too.
• 8:47
  Crista Cowan: So during all of this time your time in Nepal, your time at Hopkins, your time in Africa, you know, going through this process of academic and career, did you keep in touch with your family, like are you a close family?
• 9:01
  Crista Cowan: Are you spread out all over everywhere?
• 9:03
  Crista Cowan: Did you have other siblings who were following similar or different paths?
• 9:07
  Mary Anne Mercer: Pretty much.
• 9:08
  Mary Anne Mercer: My brother was in the Air Force actually, so he traveled around.
• 9:11
  Mary Anne Mercer: But very different, yeah, I was really the only one that had this.
• 9:15
  Mary Anne Mercer: I think, like my mom, just this fascination for other cultures and for living in other cultures and really understanding, you know, totally different parts of the world.
• 9:27
  Mary Anne Mercer: And so I'm really I'm the only one that I'm the only one that went that direction, and I think it was partly because my mom's my mom had this.
• 9:36
  Mary Anne Mercer: There's a set of books they're old books that I think came from the 20s or 30s.
• 9:40
  Mary Anne Mercer: It's called the Stoddard Lectures and it's lectures of this guy who traveled through Europe and wrote books about all these ancient sites in Europe, and so I don't know why we had this book.
• 9:54
  Mary Anne Mercer: But my mom, this set of books, like about six or eight books mom read them all.
• 9:59
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know she wanted to go to Europe, she wanted to know this history.
• 10:02
  Mary Anne Mercer: So you know, as I say, I think I came by it.
• 10:04
  Mary Anne Mercer: Honestly, I think my mom was the main source of all this sort of fascination with other places and a little bit of wanderlust in her A little bit of wanderlust.
• 10:16
  Crista Cowan: yeah, the Montana connection.
• 10:18
  Crista Cowan: Is that through your dad's side of the family or your mom's, or are they both from there?
• 10:22
  Mary Anne Mercer: Both from there.
• 10:22
  Mary Anne Mercer: Okay, mom grew up in a town in a small area close to the.
• 10:31
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know they were in the same, living in the same County, so they so they, yeah met there and both of them their their parents.
• 10:39
  Mary Anne Mercer: My grandpa was actually from Missouri, but my mom's parents lived, had lived in in this part of Montana for quite a while.
• 10:44
  Mary Anne Mercer: So you've got some some deep roots there.
• 10:47
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, yeah, really, as you were growing up then did you have relationships with both sets of grandparents?
• 10:54
  Mary Anne Mercer: That was the interesting part.
• 10:55
  Mary Anne Mercer: My, my mother's family lived basically the other side of town, you know, and the name of this the book that book that I wrote is book that I wrote has to do with crossing the Yellowstone, because it really is a thing to go from south of the Yellowstone River to north of the Yellowstone River.
• 11:17
  Mary Anne Mercer: So my parents got married, moved to the south of the Yellowstone River, didn't get to sea, it was just a big thing.
• 11:23
  Mary Anne Mercer: I mean, there was no bridge until I think it was the early 30s.
• 11:26
  Mary Anne Mercer: So my parents were married and you know it was a big thing to go into town and you had to take a ferry across the river and all that.
• 11:33
  Mary Anne Mercer: So anyway, growing up I was not terribly close to my mom's family, who were just north of town, not that far away, but my grandfather and great aunt, katie, who was grandpa's sister, lived right, I mean, not the same house, they lived in the original ranch house but it was, you know, 50 yards away from our house.
• 11:53
  Mary Anne Mercer: So he's the one and they're the ones that I got to know, you know, as growing up they were the ones.
• 12:00
  Mary Anne Mercer: They were the family that I and they were, I think, the inspiration Well, obviously the inspiration for my writing this book, because it was.
• 12:10
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know they had fascinating stories of the earlier days.
• 12:14
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know it was.
• 12:16
  Crista Cowan: And as you were growing up, what number are you?
• 12:18
  Crista Cowan: You said out of six children.
• 12:20
  Mary Anne Mercer: I have seven children and I'm the oldest girl.
• 12:22
  Mary Anne Mercer: I have an older brother, okay.
• 12:23
  Crista Cowan: So so you probably, as the old I'm also the oldest granddaughter on both sides and, like you, have more time with, I think, your grandparents than some of the younger ones do yeah, both, because there are as many of you when you're young and also because you know just length of life.
• 12:41
  Crista Cowan: And so how are those stories transmitted Like?
• 12:45
  Crista Cowan: Was that something that was part of your family culture, part of family dinner?
• 12:48
  Crista Cowan: What did that look like?
• 12:49
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know what, what it really was, and and and I didn't understand.
• 12:53
  Mary Anne Mercer: I didn't really appreciate this at first.
• 12:56
  Mary Anne Mercer: For many years, actually, my mom was such a historian in her mind, she just absolutely loved history and and there's a book this thick that she was the editor of in our little county that's just full of stories of all the pioneers from this little county.
• 13:15
  Mary Anne Mercer: And she was, you know, so that's my mom.
• 13:17
  Mary Anne Mercer: So it kind of you know, it kind of stuck with me.
• 13:20
  Mary Anne Mercer: And she had interviewed my grandfather, you know, who was an old cowboy, came from Missouri in the late 1800s and, you know, traveled all over and went to the World's Fair in St Louis back in 04, you know just, really a character.
• 13:39
  Mary Anne Mercer: But my mom interviewed him and got all these stories of where he had been and what he had done, you know, all of his travels, et cetera, how he met my grandmother on a train, you know.
• 13:49
  Mary Anne Mercer: So so I had the.
• 13:50
  Mary Anne Mercer: I had this outline of.
• 13:52
  Mary Anne Mercer: I had a pretty clear outline of a story of what his life had been.
• 13:57
  Mary Anne Mercer: So that part of it was you know, that part of it was just, it was like it just had to be written down.
• 14:05
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, what a gift from your mom, and for her to have done that work.
• 14:09
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, yep, so you weren't necessarily raised with that knowledge or those stories.
• 14:16
  Crista Cowan: You came to them later.
• 14:19
  Mary Anne Mercer: Sort of Not so much.
• 14:20
  Mary Anne Mercer: We met, you know they were family and I knew a lot.
• 14:24
  Mary Anne Mercer: There was actually two other siblings Grandpa's brother and sister also lived in town, and so there would be talk, there would be stories, and it was a second cousin that lived in the area.
• 14:33
  Mary Anne Mercer: But I learned much more from just what my mom you know, my mom's interviews with grandpa.
• 14:38
  Mary Anne Mercer: Wow, there was the other side of it, my grandmother, grandpa's wife, who I never knew because she died in 1915 when my dad was born.
• 14:50
  Mary Anne Mercer: So then the question was how do I get to know her?
• 14:52
  Mary Anne Mercer: How can I put her as a person in this book?
• 14:55
  Mary Anne Mercer: And what I had was her diary.
• 14:58
  Mary Anne Mercer: That's all I had.
• 14:58
  Mary Anne Mercer: I had mementos, I had things, but I had a several-year diary, dr Anneke Vandenbroek that went right up to the time actually that she and Grandpa got married.
• 15:07
  Mary Anne Mercer: So I had, you know, I could, I met her, I kind of met her that way, and that's how I was able to put really put her into the book in a way that was I felt like it was fairly real, you know, because she was pretty, she was pretty open in her, in her diary about.
• 15:23
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know, it wasn't a lot of, it wasn't long.
• 15:26
  Mary Anne Mercer: It was short, little pieces for each day, but you've got a picture of what was going on in her life.
• 15:31
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 15:32
  Crista Cowan: Did you know that diary existed as you were growing up, or is it something you discovered later in life?
• 15:39
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know, when I was probably in my I don't know late 20s, 30s, I went with my mom.
• 15:48
  Mary Anne Mercer: They had moved Grandma's trunk, the truck, grandma's trunk, so Grandma Florrie's trunk, that Grandpa, just when she died, he just left everything in it.
• 15:56
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know, everything went in this trunk and so it was this.
• 16:00
  Mary Anne Mercer: It was this amazing museum of 1915.
• 16:03
  Mary Anne Mercer: And in it.
• 16:04
  Mary Anne Mercer: So I went through it one time, I was going through with my mom and went through it and found, you know, found several things, including this incredible velvet dress that I took a picture.
• 16:17
  Mary Anne Mercer: I had to get a picture of myself wearing it because it was elegant.
• 16:21
  Mary Anne Mercer: And this diary and it was, you know, the diary was such a, you know, I said Mom, can I take this, can I take this?
• 16:30
  Mary Anne Mercer: She said, sure, sure, sure.
• 16:31
  Mary Anne Mercer: So I did, and it was.
• 16:32
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know, it was a treasure trove of getting to know this person.
• 16:37
  Mary Anne Mercer: That, of course, you know, I only knew them.
• 16:40
  Mary Anne Mercer: I only knew her, in a way, just from my dad.
• 16:43
  Mary Anne Mercer: I knew who my dad turned out, but my dad never knew her either.
• 16:47
  Crista Cowan: So it was just yeah, we would.
• 16:48
  Mary Anne Mercer: Was your dad, her only child yeah, yeah, yeah, first child, and he was a month old when she died, so he never knew her either.
• 16:57
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know it was uh, but the but the diary was was bad.
• 17:01
  Crista Cowan: yeah, yeah, and you think there's not even any older siblings to pass down stories about his mom, and so your only connection to her was your grandfather, who, it sounds like maybe just closed everything down.
• 17:13
  Mary Anne Mercer: It's really talk about her.
• 17:14
  Mary Anne Mercer: I mean, when mom, you know, asked details, he would talk about how we met, been on the trains.
• 17:19
  Mary Anne Mercer: I had a lot of that.
• 17:20
  Mary Anne Mercer: I had some pretty good detail of you know the sort of the facts of it, but I you know.
• 17:25
  Mary Anne Mercer: But of course, yeah, he didn't, he wasn't, he wasn't, he wasn't a chatty guy.
• 17:35
  Crista Cowan: Well, so it's so interesting because it sounds like you.
• 17:37
  Crista Cowan: You know you have these little pieces you collected as a child and a young adult, and then you know you have this, this writing that your mom did.
• 17:45
  Crista Cowan: What moment was the spark that you just decided I'm going to put all this together and tell their story?
• 17:52
  Mary Anne Mercer: Well, part of it was, you know, I finished the Nepal book and that was, you know, that was satisfying, just because it was this thing in me that had to come out.
• 18:00
  Mary Anne Mercer: But I think it was going over her diary.
• 18:03
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know, thinking I mean I knew I had, I knew I had a lot of information that Mama gathered about Grandpa.
• 18:10
  Mary Anne Mercer: But when I really got around to looking at this diary and just thinking I know this woman, you know, I know this woman, I can write from her point of view because she really did this in her diary and that was what you know, it sort of completed the picture.
• 18:27
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know, I knew my Grandpa, I knew my great-aunt, Kate, who lived with him, who was a deer, who I adored, and I knew my parents and so I could write all those from having known them.
• 18:39
  Mary Anne Mercer: But with Florrie it was just I could do it because I had the diary.
• 18:44
  Crista Cowan: I love that.
• 18:44
  Crista Cowan: So if you I mean, I know you've written this, but I would love for you to just tell the story of Florrie in a few minutes, like how you would describe her and her journey to Montana.
• 19:11
  Mary Anne Mercer: London in a place called Croydon, I think it was a fairly low-income area.
• 19:13
  Mary Anne Mercer: But she decided to become a nurse.
• 19:14
  Mary Anne Mercer: She went to a nurse's school, I'm sure, in London, and sought her fortune in the West.
• 19:18
  Mary Anne Mercer: And she gets to the East Coast and it turns out that there's lots of private duty jobs for nurses.
• 19:25
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know, she would be hired by a rich, wealthy people to take care of the old man who was getting kind of sickly.
• 19:35
  Mary Anne Mercer: That was an interesting part of her diary list, to see who she was taking care of, and sometimes the woman that just drove her crazy was this very neurotic woman.
• 19:46
  Mary Anne Mercer: But she just felt like she, you know, she felt like she had to take care of this woman because she needed her.
• 19:53
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know just that whole series of working with people and she liked it.
• 20:01
  Mary Anne Mercer: But at the same time you get a sense, as the diary goes on, that she really wanted her own family, she really wanted something else, and and so she took this.
• 20:13
  Mary Anne Mercer: She was on a train and I'm sure she was with one of her wealthy patients, but met my grandpa on a train because he would take his cattle back to usual I think it was either Chicago or Minneapolis to sell in the fall.
• 20:26
  Mary Anne Mercer: So they would.
• 20:28
  Mary Anne Mercer: So she met him on a train and they just corresponded.
• 20:32
  Mary Anne Mercer: For they corresponded for at least two years before.
• 20:35
  Mary Anne Mercer: Oh wow.
• 20:35
  Mary Anne Mercer: Finally, you know, he sent her tickets and said I want you to come out and see me.
• 20:40
  Mary Anne Mercer: Do you want to come and see me?
• 20:41
  Mary Anne Mercer: And so she did, and she was only there for it looked like from the diary it looked like maybe 10 days, and at the end of that time they were engaged, you know.
• 20:51
  Mary Anne Mercer: So I think she just was ready for another kind of life and this was another kind of life.
• 20:56
  Mary Anne Mercer: I mean, this was a very different kind of place at that point in time.
• 21:00
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know, the ranch where Andy had my grandpa had, you know, started.
• 21:07
  Mary Anne Mercer: I mean, it was a fully functioning ranch with several, several ranch hands.
• 21:12
  Mary Anne Mercer: We didn't have to be there all the time but it was, you know, across the yellowstone and and it was kind of out there in the sticks, and even the little town of sydney, which is the town that my grandpa started.
• 21:24
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know he was trying, he was a bit of an entrepreneur, he wanted to kind of build this and that he had a sal saloon, he had an ice cream shop, he had things like that.
• 21:34
  Mary Anne Mercer: I thought at first that they probably were going to live on the farm, but they didn't.
• 21:39
  Crista Cowan: He built her a house in town easy to romanticize, right Like to romanticize this poor girl from London and she, you know, comes to America and makes her way out West, and yet there were probably a lot of hardships living in such an isolated place.
• 22:00
  Crista Cowan: Is there any hint in her journal of feeling that?
• 22:05
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know she stopped writing her diary after they were married.
• 22:09
  Mary Anne Mercer: There was only, it was only a period.
• 22:10
  Mary Anne Mercer: They were married in 1913.
• 22:12
  Mary Anne Mercer: She died in 1915.
• 22:14
  Mary Anne Mercer: And she had a.
• 22:15
  Mary Anne Mercer: She had a kidney disease that probably she'd had for a long time and I think what happened was over the period of, you know, those two years.
• 22:23
  Mary Anne Mercer: Well, she got pregnant and pregnancy makes makes you know, as often makes kidney disease a lot worse.
• 22:28
  Mary Anne Mercer: And so my guess is that she was from the headline story in the Sydney Herald, the little paper.
• 22:41
  Mary Anne Mercer: It was written by the editor, and it was this very sweet story about her and how she had become such a part of the community and how you know they were.
• 22:50
  Mary Anne Mercer: This was the day she died.
• 22:51
  Mary Anne Mercer: I mean, it was the day after she died that everybody knew it, and so you got a sense that she really had, you know, that she really had done a reasonable job of fitting into this very different culture than she was used to.
• 23:03
  Mary Anne Mercer: But at the same time, you know, she had two years and that was it.
• 23:08
  Mary Anne Mercer: Did you know?
• 23:08
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know she had two years and that was it.
• 23:10
  Crista Cowan: Did you know growing up that she had been a nurse, and did that inform your choice of occupation at all, or was that?
• 23:16
  Mary Anne Mercer: a happy coincidence.
• 23:18
  Mary Anne Mercer: I did know she was a nurse because for one thing I had, you know, we had these very and I'm sure I've seen them when I was little.
• 23:24
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know nurses would carry with them their own works, right, so needles and a little you know boilable syringe and all that, and there were little things around that had been hers.
• 23:36
  Mary Anne Mercer: So I don't, maybe I assume that was had something to do with it.
• 23:41
  Crista Cowan: Well, it's interesting that when you think about, like, choosing a life and living a life, and yet this practice of reflecting on the lives of those who came before you, it's such an interesting exercise to engage in.
• 23:54
  Crista Cowan: And so to do that with Florrie, who you didn't know, is probably an interesting exercise.
• 23:59
  Crista Cowan: But then you also included, of course, your grandfather, andy, in this story, and you knew him, and so how did the process of writing this story change your perspective of him that you had from growing up?
• 24:14
  Mary Anne Mercer: The thing is that growing up, you know, he didn't talk much, as I said, he was just very taciturn, not grumpy exactly, but he would just sit there smoking his pipe and playing solitaire.
• 24:24
  Mary Anne Mercer: I mean I knew what he was like.
• 24:26
  Mary Anne Mercer: I mean I knew what he was like.
• 24:27
  Mary Anne Mercer: I do remember one time when for some reason, I was a little hole in the wall just listening.
• 24:32
  Mary Anne Mercer: But he had an old friend from his days in Wyoming when he was a cowboy and he was living this was an era when it was all kinds of it was Butch Cassidy and you know that was the days of you know, lots of drama, you know Old West kind of drama, and he was down there and so this guy came to visit and he were talking about the whole.
• 24:54
  Mary Anne Mercer: I just remember the whole New All Gang.
• 24:56
  Mary Anne Mercer: I don't know who it was, but that was you know.
• 25:03
  Mary Anne Mercer: They just were kind of reminiscing about those days because he knew it was somebody that he knew when he did his cowboy days in Wyoming and other than that.
• 25:13
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know he didn't talk to me, you know talk to my mom when my mom asked him specific questions.
• 25:15
  Mary Anne Mercer: But I just don't remember that much detail about what he.
• 25:16
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know about him, him talking about his life.
• 25:18
  Mary Anne Mercer: So it was kind of an interesting, almost a dichotomy, yeah.
• 25:22
  Crista Cowan: We had a woman on the podcast talking about Wyoming and I think it was her grandfather that was part of the hole in the wall gang.
• 25:28
  Crista Cowan: Oh, interesting Right.
• 25:31
  Crista Cowan: So I love that too.
• 25:33
  Crista Cowan: Like when you think about, you know, just even just a few short generations ago, these isolated places, there are people who knew each other that two or three generations later, their families have no idea that they have those connections.
• 25:47
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, one generation later, yeah, their families have no idea that they have those connections One generation later?
• 25:50
  Crista Cowan: yeah, yeah.
• 25:50
  Crista Cowan: So talk to me about the ranch in Montana.
• 25:52
  Crista Cowan: Your grandfather established this.
• 25:54
  Crista Cowan: It sounds like he did a beautiful job of creating this.
• 25:57
  Crista Cowan: You know legacy in this place.
• 26:00
  Crista Cowan: What has?
• 26:04
  Mary Anne Mercer: how has that continued in the family?
• 26:04
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know so I grew up on the ranch and he was as I think about it now.
• 26:10
  Mary Anne Mercer: I mean, when I go back now, buildings are falling down.
• 26:12
  Mary Anne Mercer: It doesn't look anything like I remember, but what I remember of it was quite an establishment.
• 26:18
  Mary Anne Mercer: He had a big granary, big granary, and even now the granary is fine.
• 26:24
  Mary Anne Mercer: And you climb up a ladder to the loft and the grain ring.
• 26:28
  Mary Anne Mercer: Here's just tons and tons and tons of horse collars and and a bunch of the.
• 26:33
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know the trappings of of um, you know the harnesses and stuff that they use for the workhorses still there, you know, still there today and and you know just so.
• 26:45
  Mary Anne Mercer: So the that, and right next to it is the old shop and that was a lot of the old, old tools that they used and the horseshoes and you know shoeing of horses and all that.
• 26:55
  Mary Anne Mercer: Oh, and then there's a little.
• 26:57
  Mary Anne Mercer: There was a little blacksmith's shop, kind of a little hut that was covered.
• 27:01
  Mary Anne Mercer: I don't remember what the, what it was like, but but it had an anvil that a forge she'd had.
• 27:06
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know we go in there and play and we'd roll the forge around and the breeze would go out in the you know, just old stuff like that and the chicken house and you know, and of course, lots of barns and the milking barn, and so it was just I had a look at kind of what it was like, I think from where my dad was growing up.
• 27:27
  Mary Anne Mercer: It changed because we, you know, they didn't, we didn't have chickens after a while.
• 27:33
  Mary Anne Mercer: We had chickens when I was little, but then grandpa wasn't able to take care of them after a while.
• 27:38
  Mary Anne Mercer: It was, you know.
• 27:39
  Mary Anne Mercer: So I had that, I had his, I had what he, what he did.
• 27:44
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know I saw what he had done to build this, to build up this ranch.
• 27:48
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know, I saw what he had done to build this, to build up this ranch, and that kind of was part of it just felt like it was part of.
• 27:54
  Mary Anne Mercer: It felt like it was a part of my story, was definitely the family story and that's what I just kind of wanted to get it.
• 28:00
  Mary Anne Mercer: I wanted to make it a little more real to people that had never been there, had never seen, it had never, you know, had never been there, had never seen, it had never, you know, had never, and, and, and so many people of course haven't experienced anything like it, because it's an old ranch yeah yeah, is it still in the family?
• 28:19
  Mary Anne Mercer: yeah, my brother, my brother, um they he actually, when he married he moved to a a house on another part of the land because things had gotten a little messy.
• 28:30
  Mary Anne Mercer: There was a lot of old equipment and all that sort of stuff.
• 28:32
  Mary Anne Mercer: He wanted kind of a new start.
• 28:33
  Mary Anne Mercer: But it's still there and the house that I grew up in is still there.
• 28:37
  Mary Anne Mercer: Wow, you go and visit it once in a while, and actually one of the reasons I like to go back, I like to go back to that house we have a room in the basement that when my grandpa's house, which is this old ranch house, started falling down basically it was just, you know, nobody was living in it we moved grandpa's books into the family house, down into this room in the basement, and I love going there.
• 29:06
  Mary Anne Mercer: He was a reader and I love going there.
• 29:08
  Mary Anne Mercer: He was a reader.
• 29:09
  Mary Anne Mercer: He bought books.
• 29:09
  Mary Anne Mercer: I'm sure every time he went to Chicago or Minneapolis he brought home books, because there are hundreds of books, you know, of all kinds and shapes.
• 29:21
  Mary Anne Mercer: In fact, I brought some of them back with me here, you know, just thinking some of these might be valuable, and I looked just really quite recently, last month I was looking at this book called.
• 29:31
  Mary Anne Mercer: The name of the book is UGRR, underground Railroad Published.
• 29:38
  Mary Anne Mercer: This book published in 1872.
• 29:43
  Mary Anne Mercer: So I start looking it up on the web and it's a big deal.
• 29:45
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know, it is a big deal.
• 29:46
  Mary Anne Mercer: Now there's a museum in Philadelphia that would like it, so they're going to send some kind of special, you know, carrier, so I can tell it to them.
• 29:55
  Mary Anne Mercer: But you know he did that, he just had these old, he had these.
• 29:58
  Mary Anne Mercer: He had a whole bunch of Zane Gray books and you know, and Teddy Roosevelt had books.
• 30:04
  Mary Anne Mercer: Why did he always Teddy Roosevelt had books.
• 30:05
  Mary Anne Mercer: So you know it just yeah, that he had this interest, he had such interest in the rest of the world.
• 30:17
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know, and that's one way that sitting out, even.
• 30:19
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know, once my grandmother died, you know he had been, he they had a house in town and he was, you know, planning to, he had building things and all that.
• 30:28
  Mary Anne Mercer: He just moved out to the ranch but he still.
• 30:30
  Mary Anne Mercer: But he still had, but he still got books.
• 30:33
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know he'd still read, he still had some contact with the world and just looking at this range of books is kind of mind-blowing.
• 30:41
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know, I think I'm a reader.
• 30:44
  Crista Cowan: I wasn't a reader as much as he was.
• 30:46
  Crista Cowan: Well, and yeah, for him to just use that place, to then use those books as a window out into the world.
• 30:53
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, yeah right exactly.
• 30:56
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, wow, that does give you another sense of him as a person into the world.
• 31:01
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, yeah, right, exactly, yeah, wow, that does give you another sense of him as a person, doesn't it?
• 31:05
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure it did.
• 31:07
  Crista Cowan: Are there any traditions or anything you connect with Montana or with your family from growing up that persists today, either in your life or in the life of your broader family?
• 31:16
  Mary Anne Mercer: There were all kinds of traditions from my growing up that I don't get to see much of anymore.
• 31:23
  Mary Anne Mercer: Branding was a big one.
• 31:26
  Mary Anne Mercer: Branding was you know the day that, you know all the neighbors.
• 31:30
  Mary Anne Mercer: So we had the acreage that our cattle were.
• 31:33
  Mary Anne Mercer: Grandma had well it was.
• 31:34
  Mary Anne Mercer: My dad too had about, I guess, 150 cattle and each with calves, and they would be out in this rather large, several thousand acre um hills.
• 31:44
  Mary Anne Mercer: They would.
• 31:44
  Mary Anne Mercer: That was the pasture, and so they had to get all rounded up in usually it was june or around then to.
• 31:51
  Mary Anne Mercer: The calves were big enough that they could be branded, but that's a big job with thousands of acres to try to bring all these cattle in, and so it's a community thing.
• 32:00
  Mary Anne Mercer: And so at least it seemed like there was usually about six or seven of the neighbors knew they would have a role.
• 32:09
  Mary Anne Mercer: I mean they knew what part of the pasture they would go through.
• 32:12
  Mary Anne Mercer: Everybody mounted up early, early in the morning.
• 32:15
  Mary Anne Mercer: They brought their horses from you know wise away and within you know two or three hours they were able to take, take over their part of the pasture, bring in the cattle and bring them into a to a corral and, you know, go on with the rest of the day.
• 32:30
  Mary Anne Mercer: But all that kind of you know, all that kind of thing I don't, it's not, it's not something that I have.
• 32:37
  Mary Anne Mercer: The only thing that that came close was our, and I think was one reason that I decided I had to have the house at Elbow Creek.
• 32:45
  Mary Anne Mercer: Elbow Creek is the place in Montana where it's an old ranch of small, much, much smaller than the one I grew up on, but it is a ranch or had been a working ranch for, for for many, many years, and the neighbors were the old timers that really did the ranching.
• 33:03
  Mary Anne Mercer: And so, you know, it just was so nice to be able to, to have a place that I would go to.
• 33:10
  Mary Anne Mercer: And they're still, the neighbors are still there and I always see them when I'm there.
• 33:13
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know, you know it was, it was, it was, it was like going home, and home is different now because there's, you know, very, very different community of people than when I was there.
• 33:24
  Mary Anne Mercer: But Elbow Creek, which is where we have our little, it's a little, it's kind of a shack, but it's, we love it.
• 33:31
  Mary Anne Mercer: But that, but Elbow Creek is is is much more like home than you know, when I was growing up.
• 33:43
  Crista Cowan: So that's been.
• 33:43
  Crista Cowan: That's been kind of fun to have that.
• 33:44
  Crista Cowan: I love that.
• 33:44
  Crista Cowan: It sounds like that draw back to Montana.
• 33:45
  Mary Anne Mercer: You've been able to kind of recreate that.
• 33:46
  Mary Anne Mercer: Yeah, that's exactly right.
• 33:47
  Mary Anne Mercer: That's exactly right.
• 33:48
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know, I, I, I yearn to go.
• 33:51
  Mary Anne Mercer: If I can't get back, I just yearn to go back and see, you know, meet the neighbors and just sit out and listen to the, you know, the nothing, I mean the nothing, a little bit of breeze, because we're pretty far off any roads that are used very much, and so, you know, it's just a, it's great, it's quite a, it's a little step back in time, you know, which I enjoy.
• 34:16
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, you know, I've been to Montana a few times.
• 34:18
  Crista Cowan: It's straight up I-15 from where I am and I always feel that stillness but also just that expanse of peace.
• 34:28
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, exactly yeah.
• 34:31
  Crista Cowan: Montana is a beautiful place and what a place to grow up and to be able to tell the stories of that place.
• 34:37
  Crista Cowan: Thank you for putting that out into the world, thank you, I mean it's.
• 34:44
  Mary Anne Mercer: it is true that it's something you know.
• 34:46
  Mary Anne Mercer: You don't want it, you want to lose it.
• 34:48
  Mary Anne Mercer: You know you don't want that way of life to be totally lost and there are certainly books about it, but you know ours is special.
• 34:59
  Crista Cowan: Montana is a unique place, though, because it still has some of the feel of a generation or two ago.
• 35:06
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, some of the other states have lost, yeah, and it's a unique family story, the story of Florrie and her journey to get there and Andy and his journey to get there.
• 35:20
  Crista Cowan: Like, and then just capturing a little bit of of what your growing up was, and thank you for sharing that with us.
• 35:27
  Crista Cowan: I love it oh, that's quite.
• 35:30
  Mary Anne Mercer: It's quite, it's quite enjoyable, I have to say.
• 35:32
  Mary Anne Mercer: Studio sponsored by ancestry.