Halfway between the tiny, Central Montana agricultural towns of Hobson and Windham, along a lonely stretch of rural highway, sits the Oxen Yoke Inn, which isn’t an inn at all. More aptly, it’s a watering hole, an oasis in the prairie. It is, in fact,...
When the old Royce Applegate Ranch, southeast of the small community of Square Butte in Central Montana, changed hands in November 2013, the new owner had his ranch manager build some new barbed wire fence. At the entrance to the ranch, a laser-cut sheet metal...
In 1907 an Irish boy traveled alone from Europe to Canada by sea, then from Canada to Montana by train. Exactly why he made the journey is a mystery. But he wore a big brass immigration I.D. badge suspended from a chain around his neck...
Of all the ways we can imagine meeting our doom, few of them strike as much terror into the heart as the horror of being buried alive. That prospect haunted the hard rock miners of Butte, Montana, every time they climbed into the small cages,...
“Isn’t this just the best place in the world?” Peter Rosten waved a hand across the landscape around us, a rich green pasture in the Bitterroot Valley, thick with grass. Two hundred yards from where we walked along the gravel road, a huge log cabin...
The ambulance howls at the window, the third one today. I tell myself to keep writing, but my focus is like an oiled piglet. I contemplate lunch again. Umami brine pho? Confit turkey club sandwich? Lengua tacos with sharp, raw onions and flame-ass chiles? Meal...
It’s late September and I’m on the road, a hell of a place to be. I’m in my 20-year-old, 4-cylinder, Ford Ranger pickup, driving coast to coast for what I hope will be a string of uneventful days. Since I have nowhere I really need...
When photographer Dave M. Shumway moved to Billings, Montana, in 2005, he began hiking the mountain trails closest to his new city. For the most part, that meant the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness to the south. “I’d hike the trails, and I’d look up to these 12,000-foot...
Just about everyone in the town of Lewistown, Montana, population 5,800, knew about the 6,000-square-foot stucco home just off Main Street. If not for the structure’s rich history — it was built by one of the town’s founding fathers in 1917, converted into nine upscale...
I’m not one to tease about physical limitations, or take advantage of someone because of them, but last year I found the perfect moment to capitalize on a friend’s frustrations. We were fishing a river in Idaho, just over the Bitterroot Mountains from Missoula, Montana, and...