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Distinctly Montana Stories
Someone threw a pitcher at Bob Weir and the Grateful Dead never came back to Missoula. Masked men forced a sheepherder to make them coffee before spending eight hours clubbing his flock to death. A 19-year-old named Cromwell Dixon became the first person to fly over the Continental Divide — and was dead a month later. An entrepreneur carted a 365-pound "petrified man" from Montana to New York City and failed spectacularly. Long George Francis, outlaw and poet, crashed his car on Christmas Eve with a broken leg and crawled through a blizzard toward an increasingly uncertain safety.
These are true...
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When Yellowstone Erupts: A Geologic Gothic
Some morning in the geologic future, the magma chamber under Yellowstone empties in an instant. The towns of southwest Montana are gone before the sound of the blast can reach them. The people killed in the first minutes, it turns out, are the fortunate ones..png)
Charley Pride: From the Helena Smelter to Country Western Superstar
Before he was a country-western legend, Charley Pride tended a furnace at the East Helena lead smelter and played ball for a team sponsored by the plant. He came to Montana to chase the major leagues. He drove 80 miles each way to sing in largely all-white bars for forty dollars a night, worked the molten slag by day, and still believed baseball was his future, right up until one backstage moment, an uninvited guitar, and a single sentence from an old country star changed everything..png)
Some Notes Towards a Metaphysics of the Ninepipes Reservoir Turtles
Every spring, on a bend of Highway 93 in the Mission Valley, painted turtles wake from the mud and set out for water, crossing a band of asphalt at a top speed of about seven miles an hour. They have no way of knowing what a car is. Roughly 350 of them are killed on that road every year. This is an essay about what a small life is worth, the turtle, the sparrow, the mouse turned up by the plow, and about who gets to set the price.
One Handshake at a Time: JFK's Courtship of Montana
In 1958, John F. Kennedy needed Montana. Montana wasn't sure about him. He was wealthy, Catholic, and from a powerful New England family, glamorous in a state that voted Republican and distrusted every bit of it. So he did the only thing he could. He went town to town, hand to hand, winning Montana one person at a time. A headdress he held but wouldn't wear. Wet socks drying in a hotel sink. A pilot who missed his own flight because he ran into cows at Wolf Creek Canyon. This is the story of how Kennedy courted a state he could never win, and what Montana made of him once he was gone.