Meetings with Mrs. Collins

Mary Bridget Collins survived the Irish Potato Famine and endured hard years of homesteading in Minnesota. In 1880, she set off with her young daughter Rose, and made her way across the Great Plains to Montana working as a cook for the Northern Pacific Railroad construction crew. Mary settled in the rough frontier town of Terry, Montana, where, in 1893, she befriended the aristocratic Englishwoman Evelyn Cameron and her ornithologist husband Ewen, who were escaping the confines of British society to create a new life as horse ranchers. Donna M. Lucey, author of Photographing Montana, 1894-1928: the Life and Work of Evelyn Cameron, states, "Colleen Carter has created an evocative portrait of frontier life by focusing on the unusual friendship between two strong-willed and accomplished pioneer women--one a well-born Englishwoman who came to this country in search of adventure and reinvented herself as a master photographer of the West; the other an Irish immigrant who had to escape starvation in Ireland and an abusive husband in Minnesota before becoming a successful entrepreneur and land owner in eastern Montana. Carter has opened a fascinating window onto the history of and settlement of the West and the central role women played in it."

Colleen Elizabeth Carter has degrees in anthropology and library science from the University of California, Berkeley.She has had careers as a librarian and as a teacher. She lives in Northern California.





“Colleen Carter has created an evocative portrait of frontier life by focusing on the unusual friendship between two strong-willed and accomplished pioneer women—one a well-born Englishwoman who came to this country in search of adventure and reinvented herself as a master photographer of the West; the other an Irish immigrant who had to escape starvation in Ireland and an abusive husband in Minnesota before becoming a successful entrepreneur and land owner in eastern Montana. Carter has opened a fascinating window onto the history of the settlement of the West and the central role women played in it.” —Donna M. Lucey, author of Photographing Montana, 1894-1928: The Life and Work of Evelyn Cameron