Newt and Etta Cummings…”Let’s go to town tomorrow and get married.”

By Eva Hallam Solberg

Published in the PCN on February 14, 1980

I can stand anything for nine months, thought the young schoolmarm from the mountains of Colorado. Seeing her first school on the prairies forty-five miles south of Malta, Etta Beatrice Couglin braced herself for the months ahead. The country was so different from what she was used to.

Ouray, Colorado, the small mining town where she was raised, nestled in a bowl of mountains and proved an ideal playground for youngsters and adults alike, with summer and winter activities for all. Now her recreation looked like it would be riding horseback three miles each morning and evening to and from school. After the first two months, she moved into the teacherage, a cabin fixed up by the trustees.

Read the rest of the story in "Looking Back Again: Life Stories from the Prairies of Montana"
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