Archives West Finding Aid

Grace Stone Coates was born on 20 May 1881 on a farm outside of Ruby, Kansas. Although she never took a degree, she attended Oshkosh Normal, University of Chicago and the University of Southern California. In 1904, she was a school teacher in Butte. It was during this time she met her husband, Henderson Coates, who ran the general store and post office in Martinsdale, Montana. They were married in 1910 and moved to Martinsdale. Grace continued teaching in Martinsdale and was the Superintendent of Schools for Meagher County from 1919-1921. She began writing and her first poem was published in Poetry in 1921. In 1927, her poems started appearing in Frontier (a magazine of the Northwest out of Missoula) beginning a decade long relationship with the magazine. She became acquainted with the editor of Frontier, H. G. Merriam, and was hired as the assistant editor in 1929, a job she kept until 1939 when the Frontier and Midland went out of publication. In addition to her poetry, Coates published three works. Her first work, published in 1931, was Mead and Mangel-Wurzel, a collection of 130 poems. In the same year, Black Cherries, her only novel, was also published. Her final work, Portulacs in the Wheat, published in 1932, is a collection of 42 poems. She also edited two books, Riding the High Country by Patrick T. Tucker, and Jugheads Behind the Lines by Carl Noble. By 1935, her last poem appeared in Frontier. Coates did not, however, completely stop writing. She continued writing as a journalist for many of the local papers. She also helped write the state guidebook for the WPA Federal Writers Project. In 1963, she moved to the Hillcrest Retirement Home in Bozeman where she wrote "Hillcrest Highlights" for the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. She passed away on 25 January 1976.