As you can see, my first blog post ever was today. You can probably see it is dated July 8, 2020. Actually, the origins of this project go back much further than that. Besides publishing a book and professoring, my creative impulses for the last few years have been stifled by my probably overwrought concern about the direction of the place I love and call home — the United States of America. While my concerns as a citizen have not vanished, they ebbed yesterday as the U.S. inaugurated its forty-sixth president, Joseph R. Biden Jr.
I felt and continue to feel pretty good about things and those creative juices have been starting to circulate a bit. My great-grandmother, Lottie Estelle Steele, who followed her husband from Iowa to Montana in 1901, kept a daily diary from (as far as I have discovered) March 1914 to her death in August 1939. I have long wanted to produce a regional history of northeastern Montana focused around the entries of what are mainly the mundane observations of an extraordinary woman. In an effort to further that project and climb out of this pit of procrastination, I will be attempting to record some of it here in the form of her diary entries, commentary on the historical day, and my own observations. I thought yesterday would be a good day to start this thing, but it got late — and as I pointed out earlier, it was a good day.
People called her Lottie, or Stella, or Estella . . . or, mostly, Mrs. Steele. She wrote this on January 20, 1921:
“This was a fine day. we did up the work. & went & called on Mrs. Good & Martha Rogers & Mother Hunt. went home & had supper & we all five went to the show & had lots of fun at Mother Hunts till 11:00 O. C –”
I made it to 11 last night. Actually, kind of early for me. Of course, they were not up late watching the celebration of a new president. There was one that year, but Warren Harding (a previously despised national leader) would not be inaugurated until March 4, a shortcoming in the country’s constitution it tried to remedy with the Twentieth Amendment. Of course, now we see the shortcomings of delaying a presidency any longer than it need be possible to validate an outcome.
Anyway, in the future watch for periodic posts in my Mick’s Missives series and, hopefully, daily updates to Lottie Steele’s Diary.
