Montana Cattle Queen: The Phoebe Anderson Story

Montana Cattle Queen: The Phoebe Anderson Story

This book chronicles the life of Phoebe Anderson from her birth in the 1850s until her death in the 1920s. Phobe’s mother died in childbirth, and she was raised on a dirt poor farm in Missouri by her older brother of four years and father. The family moved to Kansas for a better life. Phoebe’s father and brother are killed in the slaughter by the Quantrill guerrilla raid on Lawrence. Armed with a hatred of the bushwhackers who killed her family and the ability to shoot the eyes out of squirrel at one hundred yards, she dresses as a boy and joined the Union Army as a sharpshooter. Later she goes out on her own to hunt down and kill bushwhackers. After being wounded, she heads for New Orleans. Using the poker skills she was taught by her father; she becomes a riverboat gambler. She quits the riverboat gambling lifestyle for a time and works in a hospital in New Orleans nursing wounded soldiers. She returns to gambling and wins half interest in a cattle ranch in a poker game and heads for Texas to go into the cattle business. After marrying the other half-owner, they move the entire herd to Montana and establish a ranch in the Beaverhead Valley. After her husband is killed, she endures harsh winters, Indians, cattle rustlers, and the isolation of living in 19th century Montana, to build a giant ranching operation and home for her children. Phoebe suffers the discrimination of the 1800s which denied women the right to even escort their own cattle to market.