Posted by (+281) 15 years ago
The Miles City Speaker's Bureau will host two presentations of author Christy Leskovar's lecture entitled, "An Irish Doughboy from Butte in the 'Powder River Gang', The Montana Soldiers in the 91st 'Wild West' Division in the First World War" on Wednesday, September 24th. The first talk will be at a brown-bag lunch gathering at noon at Miles Community College in room 106. The second presentation will be at 7pm at the Custer County Art & Heritage Center.
Drawing from the riveting war narrative in her non-fiction book One Night in a Bad Inn, Leskovar will follow Irish doughboy Peter Thompson, her grandfather, from Ireland to the Butte mines to the bloody battlefields of the Western Front where he saved a man's life, at great risk to his own, and was decorated for doing so. She will speak about the heroism and tremendous accomplishments of the Montana soldiers and the horrors they faced in that brutal war. Two thirds of the men in Peter Thompson's regiment, the "Powder River Gang," were from Montana. They were part of the 91st "Wild West" Division. If you have a family member who joined the army in the First World War from one of the western states, chances are he was in the 91st, and this is his story too.
"For the war narrative, I wanted this to be the story of the foot soldiers. I wanted the reader to feel he was right on Peter's heels slogging through the mud in the Argonne," said Leskovar. "To do that, I needed ground-level details which are difficult to find." To search out the details necessary to give the story texture and depth, while keeping to the facts, Leskovar visited the battlefields in France and Belgium and combed through box after box of dusty archives at the Military History Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania; the National Archives, Fort Lewis, Washington and the Montana Historical Society. Stowed away in those boxes she found memoirs, letters, operations reports, and the actual field messages and field orders written by officers right on the battlefield. She was even able to track down a 107-year-old former Montana soldier. Leskovar relied heavily on first hand accounts written by the soldiers. From all this, she was able to piece together a very vivid and personal narrative.
Leskovar will also speak about the turmoil at home in Butte during the war years-labor unrest, martial law, immigrant groups unhappy about which side we went in on-a fascinating and tumultuous time in American and specifically Montana history.
Christy Leskovar was born in Butte and raised in Kennewick, Washington. She graduated from Seattle University in 1982 with degrees in mechanical engineering and French. During a visit to her hometown of Butte in 1997, she learned startling news about her Montana ancestors, so startling it prompted her to abandon her engineering career, uncover the rest of the story, and write a book about it - One Night in a Bad Inn which was a finalist for the 2007 High Plains Best New Book Award.
This program is sponsored by the Miles City Speaker's Bureau including the Custer County Art & Heritage Center, Miles City Public Library and Miles Community College with contributions from the Montana Cultural Trust and American Association of University Women of Miles City. For more information, please contact the Art Center at 234-0635.
Drawing from the riveting war narrative in her non-fiction book One Night in a Bad Inn, Leskovar will follow Irish doughboy Peter Thompson, her grandfather, from Ireland to the Butte mines to the bloody battlefields of the Western Front where he saved a man's life, at great risk to his own, and was decorated for doing so. She will speak about the heroism and tremendous accomplishments of the Montana soldiers and the horrors they faced in that brutal war. Two thirds of the men in Peter Thompson's regiment, the "Powder River Gang," were from Montana. They were part of the 91st "Wild West" Division. If you have a family member who joined the army in the First World War from one of the western states, chances are he was in the 91st, and this is his story too.
"For the war narrative, I wanted this to be the story of the foot soldiers. I wanted the reader to feel he was right on Peter's heels slogging through the mud in the Argonne," said Leskovar. "To do that, I needed ground-level details which are difficult to find." To search out the details necessary to give the story texture and depth, while keeping to the facts, Leskovar visited the battlefields in France and Belgium and combed through box after box of dusty archives at the Military History Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania; the National Archives, Fort Lewis, Washington and the Montana Historical Society. Stowed away in those boxes she found memoirs, letters, operations reports, and the actual field messages and field orders written by officers right on the battlefield. She was even able to track down a 107-year-old former Montana soldier. Leskovar relied heavily on first hand accounts written by the soldiers. From all this, she was able to piece together a very vivid and personal narrative.
Leskovar will also speak about the turmoil at home in Butte during the war years-labor unrest, martial law, immigrant groups unhappy about which side we went in on-a fascinating and tumultuous time in American and specifically Montana history.
Christy Leskovar was born in Butte and raised in Kennewick, Washington. She graduated from Seattle University in 1982 with degrees in mechanical engineering and French. During a visit to her hometown of Butte in 1997, she learned startling news about her Montana ancestors, so startling it prompted her to abandon her engineering career, uncover the rest of the story, and write a book about it - One Night in a Bad Inn which was a finalist for the 2007 High Plains Best New Book Award.
This program is sponsored by the Miles City Speaker's Bureau including the Custer County Art & Heritage Center, Miles City Public Library and Miles Community College with contributions from the Montana Cultural Trust and American Association of University Women of Miles City. For more information, please contact the Art Center at 234-0635.