When I Came West is Laurie Wagner Buyer’s account of her terrifying and exhilarating years in Montana as she changes from a girl too squeamish to touch a dead mouse to a toughened frontierswoman unafraid to butcher a domestic animal. Living in a cabin far away from family and friends, with the nearest neighbor four miles away, Laurie finds herself caught up in two love affairs: one with the volatile Vietnam vet Bill and one with the untamed West—even as she recognizes, in the words of one neighbor, “It is plumb foolishness to love something that cannot love you back.”

A few books are still available on Amazon and from her publisher.

Laurie’s 1st Letter: (Sent to DK with Permission to print)

About this time, in January, thirty-five years ago I came West from the Chicago suburbs with a backpack and twenty-five dollars in cash left over after I paid for my one-way train ticket to western Montana.  I always knew, from the moment I received my first letter from a modern-day mountain man who called himself “Makwi Witco,” (Crazy Wolf, aka, Wild Bill or William F. Atkinson) that I would one day write a book about my experiences.  The book due to be released from the University of Oklahoma Press at the end of this month (January 2010) is not the book I thought I would write.  The book I wanted to write, that I hoped to write, will never be written.  Why?  Because the journey of those years (from 1975 to 1983) was fraught with impossible situations and uncanny mysteries, too much, in the end, for a young woman to process or carry into her mature years. 

Whenever I tried to write about my wilderness experiences on the Northfork of the Flathead River the emotional fallout consumed me.  For decades the letters that Bill wrote to me stayed hidden in a locked trunk with buckskin and furs, moccasins and beadwork, knives, and tomahawks.  I could not bear to reread the words we had written to each other because with every hope expressed and every dream envisioned I found fault with myself for the fact that we had been unable to manifest our desire for the original paradise:  a man, a woman, and a life on the land. 

It seems foolish to talk about all this now, but I want the readers of my book to know that the stories they read are the ones that survived the years.  Like rich cream, they floated to the top of my consciousness and were duly skimmed and saved. 

The rest, like milk that has soured, has been thrown away.