Horseback Schoolmarm: Montana, 1953–1954 by Margot Liberty (review)

This is a sweet memoir about freedom and adventure during one year in the life of a one-room schoolteacher in eastern Montana. Margot Liberty—or Miss Margot, as she writes her name in all caps on the classroom blackboard—comes to this small school on SH Ranch, sixty miles south of Miles City, because she is in love with a cowboy.

Miss Margot has seven students in four grades, "four tiny boys, two middle-sizers and an athletic giant in the seventh grade, and a girl," plus a border collie named Shorty, hop toads, goldfish, water bugs, a salamander, a mouse, and two kittens, who aren't very good company.

Miss Margot describes her fear and anxiety as she prepares for her first day. Seven students, four grades, ten different subjects—and a teacher with only six weeks of education courses the summer after obtaining her bachelor's degree in agriculture from Cornell. That could make anyone a bit nervous.

All involved finally settle into a routine, and it is clear Miss Margot loves her charges. She keeps finding ways to engage the students. They become a "fairly little harmonious family," on most days, anyway.

Margot Liberty's language echoes the very place she works and lives in that year—efficient, insightful, and yet somehow sparse. She never misses the truth and makes you feel like you know everyone she comes to know.

You feel the wide-open spaces she inhabits as well as the small ones: her tiny teacherage, a room at the back of the white clapboard school, which she paints a sagebrush color and later decorates with red curtains. She says, "It had electricity but no phone, no plumbing and no running water."

Liberty aptly describes the academic season for us—from that first conversation in the fall about snakes, the gumbo road after a rain, the issuance of the first report cards, the two out-houses, the Halloween play written by the students, and finally, to studying "How the Indians Lived" as spring arrives.

Yet what describes the book and Margot Liberty's time best is perhaps this line: "For Christmas is a time of miracles, and at the school we were making our own."

This endearing memoir brings us a timeless venture I did not want to see end. The book mentions that there were more than 900 one-room schools in Montana in 1953. In the 2016–17 school year there were only seventy-two. And yes, SH School is still in operation: first-year teacher Corinne Osendorf taught two students, a third grader and a fifth grader. And yes, Osendorf has a copy of Horseback School-marm and finds it "very interesting."