"I read the manuscript in one sitting because I couldn't put it down ... Bill McGee's firsthand account brought to such vivid life a world I knew of, but had never experienced. Thank you for writing this book."-J. H., early reader Bill McGee recaptures life growing up in the small cattle town of Malta, Montana, during the hardscrabble years of the Great Depression. He sets the stage in a historical Prologue and takes the reader "Westward Ho " as his pioneering forefathers-curious to see what was on the other side of the mountains-migrated west generation by generation, until a pretty school teacher from Iowa (his mother) meets a wild and wooly cowboy (his father) on her brother's cattle ranch in 1919 Montana. In his signature spare and straightforward style, Bill McGee then recounts his own coming-of-age story ... being "farmed out" at age seven to a neighboring rancher, exploring the West in his teens by thumb and rail, horseback riding with General George S. Patton in the Palm Springs desert, and working in the new Kaiser shipyards in Vancouver, Washington, while waiting to turn seventeen, so he could join the Marines and "get into the fight." "I've always felt fortunate to grow up in Montana during the Depression. Those tough years gave me and my family-strength." -Bill McGee William L. McGee's writing career has spanned six decades. He has written 22 books (nine of them with his co-author/wife Sandra V. McGee), including four World War II military histories and eight memoirs. Bill and Sandra are members of Western Writers of America. PRAISE "Bill McGee is no armchair historian...He's lived what he writes about." -Barnaby Conrad, Founder of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and author of Matador "Though too young to have experienced an era firsthand, Sandra McGee captures in her writing the essence of a time that seems now like part of a bygone culture-a past more colorful than the present (but most everything is these days)." -Charles Champlin, former film critic and arts editor of The Los Angeles Times