Deep Roots

Out Where the Sage Grows So Tall

Can you be poor and happy? Find out as you follow a young girl living on a homestead in Montana’s Shields River Valley from 1910 to 1919 — quoted from her memoir, written several years before she died.

Lewis and Lizzie Stevens and their children learn the value of hard work in tough times, a legacy their solid, respectable heirs continue. A century later a team of archeologists comes to the Stevens homestead site to look for Meriwether Lewis’s lost journals.

The two stories, separated by a hundred years, reveal the consequences of alcohol then and hard drugs now. Both addictions are dark undercurrents that destroy lives and families — in Big Sky Country, or “the middle of nowhere,” where a family’s roots go so deep and sage grows so tall.