Book
Description
Tenting
To-Night is the lively account of a 1916 camping trip
through Montana’s Glacier National Park and Washington’s
North Cascades. Best-selling author Mary Roberts Rinehart
made the trip with her husband and three sons, and a
contingent of colorful horse wranglers, camp cooks, and
wilderness guides.
The Glacier journey included the first
known float trip down the North Fork of the Flathead
River, and the Cascade trip featured a precarious horseback
crossing of Cascade Pass. Rinehart had a friendly, unpretentious,
and humorous style that made her one of America’s
most popular writers. Her story-telling talent makes
Tenting To-Night a treasure of good reading.
About
the Author
Mary Roberts Rinehart’s two trips to Glacier National Park during the early years of the 20th century, well before the park was a popular destination, offer clear evidence of her venturesome spirit. Rinehart documented these two adventures in “Through Glacier Park” (1916) and “Tenting To-Night (1918).
Born and raised in western Pennsylvania, and trained as a nurse, Rinehart was an improbably adventurer – and best-selling writer. At a time when most middle-class married American women rarely worked for pay, Rinehart balanced her responsibilities as homemaker and mother with a remarkable career as one of America’s most popular authors.
Her biographer Jan Cohn notes, “She wrote more best-selling novels than any other American wrier and wrote them over a longer period than almost any other American writer.” During her almost 55 years as an active writer, millions savored her mysteries; her plays met resounding success on Broadway; the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines vied for the serial rights to her novels, paying her enormous sums; and Hollywood snapped up her stories for films and often commissioned her to write scripts.
Despite her growing fame and wealth, Rinehart retained a friendly, unpretentious, and humorous voice that her audience loved and trusted. Whether she was writing about trench warefare during World War I, travel in the American West, Mexico, and Europe, or the perils of breast cancer (which she survived), she made challenging subjects approachable, rendering the unfamiliar familiar and guiding her readers into new worlds.
Because of her ability to influence public opinion, Rinehart was often sought after as a spokesperson. In 1925, Rinehart accepted a commission from Louis Hill of the Great Northern Railroad to write the introduction to a Great Northern brochure that promoted vacations in her beloved Glacier Park. And during her first Glacier visit, elders of the Blackfeet tribe, aware of her notoriety as an intrepid reporter on the front lines of the Great War, told her of their previous winter, “one of starvation” because of disastrous federal policies, and they implored her help. The Blackfeet initiated her into the tribe, and in turn, she advocated on their behalf with the Secretary of the Interior. Because of her efforts, shipments of food were soon on the way to the Blackfeet reservation in Montana.
Best-selling author, chronicler of her time, public figure, and generous spirit, Rinehart was an exceptional American woman.
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