In the late 1960s,
America was at a crossroads. It was divided over the
war in Vietnam. The counter-culture challenged the World
War Two generation. The Cold War held the threat of
nuclear destruction. The race to the moon was in full
swing. The sleepy cow town of Mineral Valley, Montana
was no longer as isolated from the rest of the country
as it once was. The culture war of the 1960s touched
the family of a thirteen year-old girl, Sam Matijevic,
growing up in this small town.
In the early 1900s, the Milwaukee
railroad was giving away land in central Montana to
entice settlers to work in the mines that supplied the
coal they transported to market. Sam’s grandparents
had immigrated from Austria-Hungarian to homestead near
Mineral Valley. Grandpa had worked as a coal miner to
sustain his ranch until an accident had killed him during
the Great Depression, which left Grandma a widow with
seven kids. Sam, as a second generation American, did
not experience her father’s life on the homestead,
but she felt it. Her father’s feud with his brothers
that drove him from the ranch left him with a hurt that
he held onto as if it were a legacy for his children.
He had tried to run a gas station at the edge of Mineral
Valley, but the business had failed. As his father had,
he took up the trade of a coal miner to hold onto his
dreams.
In 1968, Sam noticed that the
frequency of the trains on the Milwaukee railroad was
tapering off as the local mines were closing up. The
town, as well as this young girl’s life, was at
a crossroads. Sam was clinging to her childhood as she
was reluctantly growing into a woman. She watched her
two cousins, once close to her, slip away as they were
being seduced into the 1960s counter-culture. Meanwhile,
with the help of an understanding teacher and an elderly
artist, Sam was breaking the pattern of having her reality
defined by others. She was beginning to see what she
really saw, hear what she really heard, and feel what
she really felt.
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