Beech, Montana, 1925

In 1925, the fictitious frontier town of Beech, Montana, symbolizes the West’s larger movement into the twentieth century, a “future so vast it left [the townspeople] breathless.” (26). “Beech, everyone knew, sprung up at the junction of two railroads, was bound to grow” (26). Surveyors work out the lay of the town ensuring the promise of rapid construction and growth. Against the forbidding openness of the Montana landscape, the settlement of Beech represents the first stirrings of industrialization and urbanization that will within a generation mark the end of the American West. As such, the town is little more than a promise, a collection of ill-matched service and general goods stores as well as the inn where Rose and Johnny Gordon initially set up shop, for her the inn itself, for him his general practitioner’s doctor’s office. Beech testifies to the future of American West. Now, the...