Tom Keith has never lived in Montana, but he has written a fine novella about the adventures of a man seeking a new life in Montana Territory in 1882.
The self-published book, “When Everything Changed,” is very loosely based on the life of Keith’s great-grandfather, Mell Keith—named Daniel McHarg in the book—who arrived in Fort Benton aboard the steamboat Red Cloud in 1881.
In just 84 pages, McHarg falls in love, prospects for gold, barely survives after being shot by a vengeful Blackfoot, nearly dies again in a blizzard and makes a start on a Teton River homestead.
I have learned to be wary of self-published books, so often full of typos, blowsy writing and frightful grammar, but here the writing was uniformly good and I didn’t find a single typo, a distinction this short article you are now reading might not earn.
I especially liked Keith’s account of his character’s courtship of and eventual marriage to Nellie Sage, who is also on the Red Cloud, accompanied by her mother and sister. That really was his great-grandmother’s name, but Keith says he invented her personality.
She comes across as headstrong and independent, a well-off cabin passenger who boldly telegraphs her attraction to the man with the infectious laugh sleeping with the commoners on the lower deck. She later goes with her family to Helena and moves out of her father’s house after he objects to the prospect of her marrying Daniel McHarg.
Here’s how Keith describes the break: “The next day at breakfast, Nellie calmly announced that she was leaving. She planned to take a room of her own and to support herself with her small savings and her earnings from teaching piano. It would be enough, she thought, to sustain her until the time when she and Daniel would be married. Her mother begged her to reconsider, while her father stoically sat in silence, perhaps more upset by the loss of control over his family than by his daughter’s departure.”
My only complaint with the book—and I’m sorry if this sounds like one of those canned book blurbs—is that it was too short. I liked Daniel and Nellie and the other characters enough that I wanted to know a lot more about all of them.
Keith, who works for a landscape planning and design firm in Fort Collins, Colorado, laughed when I told him I wished his book was longer.
Keith said he was born in the Boston area and “had grown up with stories of Mell. They had some powerful effect on me.” The stories were a bit sketchy—he basically knew that his grandfather had looked for gold and had witnessed the last of the buffalo on the plains—and he didn’t know where in Montana his ancestor lived.
Keith graduated from college in Maine in 1971 and moved to Colorado to work. In the late 1970s he made his first trip to Montana to canoe the Missouri River from Fort Benton to Fort Peck with a party of eight.
“I’ve been sort of haunted by the area ever since,” he said. He would only learn years later that his great-grandfather, who was born in New Brunswick, Canada, had first gone to Fort Benton and then filed on some land along the Teton River.
Armed with that information, Keith was in Helena on business 10 years ago and decided to stay an extra day to explore the archives of the Montana Historical Society. Concentrating on the years he thought Mell Keith was around Fort Benton, 1882-1886, he went through unindexed microfilm files of the Fort Benton River Press and was lucky enough to find several articles that mentioned his great-grandfather.
That was more or less the beginning of what would become this novella. He did more research over the years, including several trips to Fort Benton, where he fleshed out the details of life in Montana Territory, and where he read newspaper accounts of adventures that he would weave into the tale of his great-grandfather.
The story of Daniel McHarg being shot by a Blackfoot Indian, for example, was based on a real incident in which a cowboy was shot and killed after stumbling on a group of Blackfeet slaughtering a cow.
In a slightly altered form, Keith quotes a couple of River Press articles referring to his great-grandfather, including one that salutes him on his marriage to Nellie, ending with the words, “The happy couple are comfortably housed in their new home on the Teton, and River Press joins with their friends in wishes for a happy life.”
Keith said his first attempt at writing arose from his connection to Mell Keith’s second wife, who was born in Minnesota and whose family was caught up in the Dakota War of 1862, also known as the Sioux Uprising. He wrote a 10-page account of his family’s involvement in that war and it was published in a collection of similar essays.
He said he definitely plans to do some more writing, possibly a mix of history and historical fiction, and he may even expand on the story of Daniel McHarg’s adventures in Montana Territory.
He is already working reduced hours, he said, and plans to ease further into semi-retirement over the next year or two, giving him more opportunities to pursue his writing career.
Details: Print and Kindle versions of “When Everything Changed” are available on Amazon. You can also write to Keith at familykeith@hotmail.com for more information or to order a book directly from him.
