Hard Times

The year was 1929. Times were tough. If you had a job you would be well advised to hang on to it. But for Phil Caldwell, the lure of free government land was strong. He was almost 40 years old and had been working for other people all his life and didn’t have much to show for it, at least in his mind he didn’t. And so, in spite of his wife Martha’s pleas to the contrary, they left their relatively easy life in Lincoln, Nebraska for the desolate plains of eastern Montana to stake their claim to a 320 acre homestead. It was, according to the brochures distributed by the government and the railroad, a land of good soil and bountiful crops. That might have been true, had mother-nature cooperated, but that didn’t happen. Instead, hard times befell Phil and Martha taking their lives in a direction they’d never imagined going.