title: Melinda and the Wild West: A Family Saga in Bear Lake, Idaho (Volume 1)
author:  Linda Weaver Clarke 
description: "Linda Clarke is a fresh new face in the fiction market. Her vivid descriptions, engaging characters, and clever word usage make reading her work a pleasure. I look forward to enjoying her books for many years to come." ---Betsy Brannon Green, best-selling suspense author<br /><br />"Such memorable characters! What an incredible blessing in the lives of her future readers ---Kerry Blair, best-selling mystery author<br /><br />"A writing style that opens the mind in a way that lets usfeel the thoughts and emotions of the characters. It is impossible to avoid becoming part of the story... She writes historical fiction as if she were taking the reader back in time." --- Lloyd E. Reid
zlib_text: ![](Images/image00156.jpeg)
  
    
  
  BITTERROOT LAKE
  
  A NOVEL
  
  Alicia Beckman
  
  ![](Images/image00160.jpeg)
  
    
  
   _For Ramona DeFelice Long in friendship and gratitude_
  
    
  
  > > It was already late
  
  > > enough, and a wild night,
  
  > > and the road full of fallen
  
  > > branches and stones.
  
  —Mary Oliver, “The Journey”
  
    
  
  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  
  Whitetail Lodge, Deer Park, and Bitterroot Lake are all fictional, though I
  have drawn heavily on the history of northwestern Montana and its logging, its
  mill towns, and its historic lakeside lodges. The region is home to a small
  lake called Little Bitterroot and a Deer Park Elementary, but their fictional
  namesakes live only in my mind, and I hope, yours.
  
  Women’s clubs were a critical part of life in the late 19th and early 20th
  centuries, often providing the only social opportunities some rural women had.
  While the Lakeside Ladies’ Aid Society is fictional, I suspect many
  organizations did good works that fell far outside their charter.
  
  Book research ta