Horseback Schoolmarm Montana, 1953–1954 by Margot Liberty
In 1953, Margot Pringle, newly graduated from Cornell University,
took a job as a teacher in a one-room school in rural eastern Montana, sixty
miles southeast of Miles City. “Miss Margot,” as her students called her, would
teach at the school for one year. This book is the memoir she wrote then,
published here for the first time, under her married name. Filled with humor
and affection for her students, Horseback Schoolmarm recounts Liberty’s coming
of age as a teacher, as well as what she taught her students.
Margot’s school was located on the SH Ranch, whose owner
needed a way to retain his hired hands after their children reached school age.
Few teachers wanted to work in such remote and primitive circumstances. Margot
lived alone in a “teacherage,” hardly more than a closet at one end of the
schoolhouse. It had electricity but no phone, plumbing, or running water. She
drew water from a well outside. The nearest house was a half-mile away. Margot
had a car, but she had to park it so far away, she kept her saddle horse,
Orphan Annie, in the schoolyard.
Miss Margot started with no experience and no supplies, but
her spunk and inventiveness, along with that of her seven students, made the
school a success. Evocative of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s school-teaching
experiences some eighty years earlier, Horseback Schoolmarm gives readers a
firsthand look at an almost forgotten—yet not so distant—way of life.
