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They had worked hard to turn their small-business dream into a reality. Then they accepted government loans, and unwittingly set off down a grim road to catastrophe.

American dreams can die hard, stubborn deaths. And few dreams burned brighter while they lasted, were tougher to snuff out or ended as shockingly as those harbored by Maureen O'Boyle and Thelma Lee, found dead by their own hands in April, after a long and bitter battle with bankers, bureaucrats and judges over a chicken business that almost -- but never quite -- took flight.

Known as "the girls" or "the chicken ladies" by neighbors in Montana's Flathead Valley, O'Boyle, 51, bright, boisterous and in charge, and Lee, 67, gentle and reserved, worked their hands raw carving out a life they could live on their own terms. But that hard-won world unravelled, and everything in it was lost when, tempted by a helping hand from the Small Business Administration, or SBA, they surrendered their independence to the less-than-tender mercies of big government, local lenders and a justice system turned steamroller.

Described by family and friends as honest, industrious, compassionate and "the salt of the earth" the girls seemed paradigms of the kind of citizens our government and courts are designed to protect. Some involved in the case see their end as simple tragedy. But for others in "the Flathead" it's a cautionary tale, confirming dark suspicions about the impersonal forces our society stacks against the individual and the cruel incongruities of a government that offers help with one hand and creates madding obstacles with the other.

Worried about their apparent absence from a decaying compound that the girls rarely left -- surviving on whatever they could scrape from their garden and without heat or hot water through two Rocky Mountain winters -- neighbors pried open a garage door on April 14 to find the pair inside, dead for three weeks, along with the bodies of their three dogs and more than a dozen cats.

The ignition of their pickup was on and its gas tank empty. According to locals, this was their final act of defiance against a system that failed them, their last avenue of escape from the dead end into which they had wandered. It wasn't, of course, supposed to end this way.

Although all who knew them expressed shock at the suicides, in hindsight many recalled portents of the tragedy. The girls joked with neighbors Billy and Joe Howell about the possibility of ending it all, and Maureen's uncle, Bernard "Bud" Sullivan, a retired Catholic priest in Helena, remembers his resolute niece telling her mother: "I'm going to live and die on this land."

"We wanted them to leave long ago and get out of here," Billy Howell recounts. But the girls, gritty and determined, were optimistic until the end that justice would prevail and wrongs be righted -- even if it meant taking it to the Supreme Court themselves. "I'm not walking off this land" Howell remembers O'Boyle declaring.

And walking off the land was literally what O'Boyle and Lee would be doing if the government had its way, since everything there -- the barns and equipment, furniture and animals, the second-hand law library and personal computer they used during a decade of court battles fought without a lawyer, even the beautiful view across Blanchard Lake -- all of it was by then the property of the U.S. Small Business Administration.

A federal judge recently had authorized U.S. marshals to evict the women forcibly. In the final days, marshals had been cruising through the property intimidating the ladies, friends say, and even padlocked them onto the land for three days last winter, mistakenly believing they had abandoned their home.

But until April 14, giving up on anything was not in character.

The two feisty women moved to the Valley 25 years ago from Los Angeles, where they were nurses, and took jobs at the nearby aluminum plant, toiling on the former all-male potline to earn and save enough to buy 100 raw acres on the lake. They cleared the land and built their home and grew most of their food; snowshoed in and out when the drifts grew too deep to plow; and began a small organic poultry business they called the Naughty Pines Chicken Farm -- a playful wink at locals who whispered about, or privately wondered, what two unmarried women were up to out there.

By the early 1980s the business was humming. Nearly 20 employees enjoyed above-market wages, profit sharing, and the kindness of hands-on business owners who genuinely seemed to care about their welfare, say former employees. And their organic poultry was in demand -- "You couldn't keep it on the shelf," more than one observer told Insight.

But everything changed one day in 1985 when a local banker and admirer of their product, Craig Scott, asked if the ladies would be interested in expanding their business. Thus began what the Coleman Report, a banking-industry newsletter, calls a "fatal dance of destruction" in a just-released examination of the case titled: "How Not to Make an SBA Loan."

By 1988 the business would be dead in the water. By 1998, its owners, too, would be dead.

Much of what happened here remains a matter of dispute and formed the basis of allegations by the chicken ladies that actions by the bank and SBA ruined their business. Interviews, court records and internal SBA documents obtained by Insight provide this broad outline of the basic story:

Naughty Pines farm received two SBA-guaranteed loans through First National Bank of Whitefish totaling $550,000 in 1986 and 1987. Most of it was used to construct the facilities required for U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA, approval -- a necessity if the chicken business was to grow fast enough to pay the loans.

A series of disputes soon arose concerning administration of the loans by the bank. In court documents, O'Boyle and Lee alleged (among many things) that conditions of the loan were changed after it was partially dispersed, causing delays that drove up the cost of capital improvements (and one fall forced them to slaughter their entire stock rather than see the birds freeze in an unfinished budding). They also alleged that the bank began advancing funds as bait before a loan application was even filed with SBA; that the project was woefully undercapitalized from the start; and that the bank reneged on verbal promises to back up their business expansion with private loans if the cost of expansion exceeded SBA lending caps.

Compounding matters and raising tensions between bank and borrowers, cost overruns on the project were spiraling, largely driven by unanticipated meddling by the local, state and federal governments. Expensive additions to the wastewater-treatment plant were demanded by the county, which although later rescinded caused a temporary shutdown and resulted in bad publicity.

Special electrical wiring was required for the chicken coops by the federal government, adding tens of thousands more to the costs. Then came a demand from USDA that the parking lot be paved. "The federal licensing requirements force you into significant expenditures that mean you can't just grow your business incrementally" says Jerry Hanson, a former business planner for Naughty Pines who calls the government's 12,000 chickens a year licensing threshold "arbitrary."

These and other government-ordered alterations added at least $118,000 in unforeseeable costs to the little business. Already cash-starved, the girls by 1988 had to choose between feeding the bank or feeding the chickens. They chose the latter, hoping to keep the product and cash flowing, but by missing several payments they gave the bank -- already under threat from the chicken ladies of a bad-faith lawsuit -- a ready excuse to ask SBA to honor its guarantees, washing their hands of the nightmare and avoiding what promised to be a nasty foreclosure fight.

"We have something between success and a mess here" reads one internal SBA memo written during the time of troubles, reflecting the frustrations of those for whom turning the corner on the venture always seemed one or two more expensive steps away.

Internal SBA documents obtained by Insight through a Freedom of Information Act request portray an agency torn between its allegiance to its small-business borrowers and banking surrogates, which depending on their track record with the agency are given varying degrees of latitude for approving and administering its guaranteed loans.