Proving Up: Hattie Big Sky by Kirby Larson

Most of us think that the homesteading era ended back in the "Little House on the Prairie" days, but I was attracted to this story because my own uncle's family were homesteaders in Alaska in the 1950's, and like Hattie Inez Brooks, the Hattie Big Sky of this Newbery Honor book, built a home and made a crop to prove up their claim down the road from North Pole, near Fairbanks, Alaska. Their wonderful letters were funny and sometimes scary and full of their adventurous spirit for those of us "back East."

Kirby Larson's story, inspired by her great-grandmother (the real Hattie Brooks), is the story of an orphaned girl, shuffled from willing to unwilling relatives, until she felt she was "Hattie Here-and-There", belonging nowhere. In 1917, when a long-lost uncle dies and leaves his claim in Montana to her, sixteen-year-old Hattie leaves Arlington, Iowa, and with her small inheritance from her parents stakes her life on being able to put up 480 rods of fence and plant 40 acres in crops to prove her claim on Uncle Chester's 320 acres.

Accompanied only by Mr. Whiskers, the cat that Uncle Chester's letter warned her to bring, Hattie finds little to cheer her when she arrives. A drafty shack heated by buffalo chips and well stocked with mice for Mr. Whiskers, a good horse and a cranky cow, fencing supplies (unpaid for, as Hattie soon learns) and a good, deep well are all the inheritance that awaits her. But Hattie is also welcomed by wonderful neighbors, Perilee and her German-born husband Karl and their children, who meet her at the train and are always ready to help, Rooster Jim, who teaches her chess and gives her hens and a rooster, and Leafie, the local midwife and horse trainer who teaches her much about getting along in life.

In letters back home to her Uncle Holt and to her school chum Charlie, now serving in wartime France, Hattie describes surviving the below-zero, snowed-in winter, the gumbo mud spring, and the oven-hot summers, building the fencing, clearing stones and weeding the fields, praying for rain, and finally seeing her harvested wheat and flax crops destroyed in a monster hail storm. In the midst of all this wearing work and worry, Hattie also watches hatred against the Kaiser drive away her German-born neighbors and feels the anger of the local patriotic vigilantes turn on her for her loyalty to her friends. All of these defeats pale before the 1918 influenza epidemic which kills many in the small community.

At last Hattie is forced to sell out and take a job in a nearby town to pay off her debt, but with the resiliency of the young pioneer that she is, she finds her time under the Big Sky well spent:

"I was beginning to see that there were bigger things in life than proving up on a claim. I was proving up on my life.

Leafie had been amazed at all that I packed up to take with me. 'Do you need all them books?' she'd asked. But there was one thing I'd left behind: Hattie Here-and-There. I wasn't going to miss her. Not one bit.

I settled myself in and faced west."

Hattie Big Sky is as big and wide open as the Montana sky. It's impossible to read it and not feel your own heart opening wide too. It's Kirby Larson's family story, but it is our own story as well.