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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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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.
Fur Traders and Flying Saucers: James Lumley and the Cadotte Pass UFO
In October of 1865, a fur trader named James Lumley turned up at the Everett House in St. Louis and told the story to whoever would listen, until it reached a newspaperman who wrote it down. The previous September, in the Cadotte Pass, Lumley had seen a light cross the sky and break apart, heard an explosion, smelled sulfur. The next day he found a long gouge torn through the woods and followed it to a rock lodged in the mountainside, covered in markings he was sure had been made by hand. This was more than eighty years before anyone said the words "flying saucer.".png)
The Bison Hunters
By the 1880s, killing bison had become a career. The government encouraged it, the market rewarded it, and a certain class of Western men applied themselves to the work with a creativity that is difficult to describe and harder to forget. They studied where to place a shot so the herd wouldn't spook. They learned which animals were worth the most. They found uses for the tongue, the hump, the hide. And when their rifles grew too hot to fire and no water was near, they discovered they could keep shooting anyway. Then, one spring, the hunters arrived on the prairie to begin another season, and found that something had changed.