In the spring of 2024, I contacted the Gallatin History Museum in my hometown of Bozeman, Montana, looking for historical photographs of two country schools in the area, Malmborg and Springhill. I wanted to compare the old images with photographs I’d captured. Co-director Charlotte Mills...
Imagine a history professor who, instead of writing monographs, got some canvas, took up a paintbrush, and tried to tell the story of the West through a series of vignettes in oils. That might be the best way to describe Don Oelze: he paints history....
At 4 a.m., the first alarm sounds — not your typical electronic buzz or ringtone, but the vigorous shaking of collars belonging to two pointing dogs. Within seconds, there’s a cold muzzle nudging me to leave my warm bed to get dressed. This is really...
Former Montana resident Roland W. Reed Jr. [1864 – 1934] finally received recognition for his life’s work in a gallery bearing his name almost 100 years after he slipped on a banana peel, leading to his untimely death. Little is known of the photographer —...
Current Montana poet laureate Chris La Tray blends personal memoir and Indigenous history in Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home (Milkweed Editions, $30). Raised with only hints of the Métis and Anishinaabe (Chippewa) heritage of his father’s side of the family, La Tray...
It’s Friday afternoon, the hottest day of the year so far, and there’s already a line outside the door at Shan in Bozeman, Montana’s northside Cannery District. We figure it will be a while. And we don’t mind. It’s not every day you get to...
Oh, how the waters curve and jump — fringed with willows, flickery with trout — between a big wilderness and a small town. That’s the creek, the place where I spend much of my free time. I suppose you could refer to it as a...
The West has intrigued me since I was a kid. I grew up in the Midwest, playing in the woods, observing wildlife, and discovering photography. Given my early affinity for the outdoors, it made sense that I would be drawn to the West, to the...
Silt, spit, soot, wheat, and the sound of railroad ties are some of the materials at play this year at Bozeman’s Tinworks Art under the new direction of Director Jenny Moore, who assumed her role at the gallery in 2023. With an extensive curatorial background...
In memory of Richard Roberts [1919 – 2007] The woods allow a road but only as wide as axled wheels will ride, and in the untrod center protest with tiny pines. The woods permit at noon equality of shade and light, one so black, one so white it cannot be told which is wrong which...