Am I Not an Ordinary Woman?

by Val Nerlin Hillers, James K. McCool (Illustrator)

The stories of many immigrant women have been lost in history. Only isolated notices of births, marriages, and deaths remain. Mary Nelson Nerlin, a Swedish-American immigrant, has been waiting for over a century for someone to reclaim her history. This is her story.

Join Mary, who, in 1886, leaves her family and native land of Sweden behind, crossing the Atlantic Ocean with little more than the clothes on her back, in search of the American Dream. But the New World isn’t all she’s expected it to be. The devastating economic crash of 1893 leaves her out of work, marrying a man she hardly knows, and joining the homestead movement out west. The couple settles on land taken from the Crow reservation in southern Montana. Homesteading on Poverty Flat is tough even in a good year. From the threats of hunger, accidents and illness on the Montana frontier to raising four “American” children, Mary faces her challenges with grit and determination.

This is the extraordinary story of Mary, but also the story of so many immigrant women who came to America to build a better life for themselves and their children.

364 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 13, 2013

Reviews

[Sharon Huether · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a story of Mary Nelson Nerlin a Swedish Immigrant that settled on a homestead in Southern
Montana.
She arrived in America in 1886. In 1893, the economic crash left her with out work. She married a man Andrew Nerlin, who she hardly knew.
The story is in a series of letters to the sisters, brother and her mother on the West Coast. The letters continued when her four children were grown and on their own.

[Tomi Alger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mary Nerlin thought herself just an ordinary woman. And in some ways, she was. She did what other women did in the late 1800s and early 1900s when living on a farm without running water: you haul the water you need, you grow a garden to keep your family fed, you sewed the clothes they needed, and making do with living in a one-room dirt floor cabin. But she was not ordinary to me, in that she did all these things with out complaining and she helped one of her daughters survive serious burns, and later in life, she willingly moved back into that one-room cabin after experiencing homes with running water and electricity. She was quite a woman.

[Naomi J · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed

As a Montanan and granddaughter of Swedish immigrants, I found this book quite enjoyable. The style is simplistic but informative. Some stories seem repetitive but that was the life of the homesteaders!