Fitzgerald in Montana

An interesting tidbit about our new friend F. Scott Fizgerald. He visited Montana in 1915, where he worked on a cattle and sheep ranch. A far sight from the fancy homes and parties of East Egg:

In July 1915, a fresh-faced young man got off a train and presented himself at a working cattle-and-sheep ranch in the North Fork of the Smith River, a few miles outside of White Sulphur Springs, Montana. He was slender – about 5’8,” 150 pounds – and handsome, with champagne-colored hair and blue-green eyes. He carried himself so lightly on the balls of his feet that his wife later wrote, “There seemed to be some heavenly support beneath his shoulder blades that lifted his feet from the ground in ecstatic suspension, as if he secretely enjoyed the ability to fly but was walking as a compromise to convention.”

The ranch hands must have been astonished at the sight. F. Scott Fitzgerald had arrived in Montana. In the summer before his junior year at Princeton University, the boyish, eighteen-year-old Fitzgerald had traveled west to visit the Castle Mountain Livestock Company, the ranch owned by the family of his wealthy prep school and college friend, Charles W. Donahoe. In the ensuing weeks, Fitzgerald would do what easterners visiting Montana often do: he went native. He outfitted himself in boots, brandished a pistol, rode horses, drank bad whiskey, played cards with cowboys, flirted with daughters of neighboring ranchers, and took but one bath a week.