As a young college student in the early 1970s, Laurie Wagner had never camped out, never gone hiking, and never lived without electricity or indoor plumbing. Yet she walked away from these comforts and headed for the wildest reaches of Montana to live with a man she had not met in person.
When I Came West is Laurie Wagner Buyer’s account of her terrifying and exhilarating years in Montana as she changes from a girl too squeamish to touch a dead mouse to a toughened frontierswoman unafraid to butcher a domestic animal. Living in a cabin far away from family and friends, with the nearest neighbor four miles away, Laurie finds herself caught up in two love affairs: one with the volatile Vietnam vet Bill and one with the untamed West—even as she recognizes, in the words of one neighbor, “It is plumb foolishness to love something that cannot love you back.”
While her relationship with Bill grows precarious, Laurie forges a lasting relationship with her surroundings: the rivers, the wildlife, and the people who inhabit such remote corners. Peeling away the romance of escaping to the wilderness, When I Came West reveals the brutality and bounty of a world far removed from modern urban life.

When I Came West

Biographies & Memoirs

Buyer, Laurie Wagner

Community & Culture

University of Oklahoma Press

When twenty-eight-year-old Laurie Wagner hired on at the O Bar Y Ranch in western Wyoming, she was a novice to ranching life but no stranger to isolated locations. As revealed in her celebrated memoir When I Came West, Laurie had already spent years living in a rustic cabin in the Montana wilderness with a troubled Vietnam veteran. Rough Breaks recounts the next chapter in her life, beginning with her painful break from Bill Atkinson, and unfolding into a modern-day saga of life on a remote cattle ranch.  Written in the author’s trademark lyrical style, Rough Breaks is based on the diaries Laurie kept for nearly six years as she lived and worked on the O Bar Y. Central to the story is Mick Buyer, a cowman stubbornly committed to holding onto his beautiful piece of land in the Wyoming high country and continuing the way of life he learned from his father and grandfather. As his marriage begins to fail, Mick and Laurie develop an increasing affection for each other, even as she also becomes close to his wife, their children, and neighboring ranchers.  With grace and wit, Buyer evokes the joys and travails of life on a ranch―cutting and baling hay, repairing old vehicles and machinery, fixing fences, birthing calves, tending to beaver dams and elk herds, and struggling to pay the mortgage and endless veterinary bills. In the spirited tradition of Teresa Jordan and Mary Clearman Blew, Rough Breaks is a uniquely honest and heartfelt contribution to the realm of memoir by contemporary women ranchers.

Rough Breaks: A Wyoming High Country Memoir

Spring's Edge reflects life during one season on the modern-day Colorado cattle ranch Laurie Buyer once called home. Her diary recounts the day-to-day toil and the challenge of trying to find time to write while continuing to help with outdoor chores, cooking, cleaning, balancing the books, and working for a neighboring ranch.
Chronicling a time of deep personal change, Buyer struggles with her role as a ranch wife, faces the diminishing vitality of an agricultural way of life, and nurses her father through a terminal illness. Buyer tries to bridge the gap between the rural world she cherishes and the inevitable encroachment of urban sprawl. Meanwhile, her writing of landscape and weather, livestock and wildlife, loneliness and intimacy capture the innate rhythms of relationships, the resilience of love, and the astonishing beauty of life on the land.

Spring's Edge: A Ranch Wife's Chronicles

University of New Mexico Press

Glass-Eyed Paint in the Rain (Poetry of the American West)

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

High Plains Pr

A new collection of poems by acclaimed western writer Laurie Wagner Buyer. Including her award winning Poem "Until I run out of thread."

Red Colt Canyon

Westcliffe

Side Canyons

Side Canyons, a fictionalized account based on journal notes taken during a trip on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, is a tale of intimate relationship with the earth and the personal evolution of an impressionable woman in nine challenging, life-changing days. The grandiose, inspirational setting of the river and the canyon, coupled with an intricate drama of the human heart, provides an unsurpassed story revealed through daily narrative, poetic musing, and prose reflection. Side Canyons is a sensual slice-of-life adventure about exploration, discovery, recognition, and acceptance of both internal and external landscapes, a journey into unknown territories where even the most sedate reader will be swept away.  Laurie Wagner Buyer currently lives in Woodland Park, Colorado, where she's working on poetry, creative nonfiction and fiction manuscripts, presenting workshops for writers and speaking at various venues across the country.

Contemporary

Five Star

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