As military officers established frontier outposts in the American West, they brought with them favorite sporting traditions from back East. If an officer’s pursuit was hunting, he had to have dogs. Greyhounds accompanied General Eugene A. Carr during his 1869 Republican River Expedition in Colorado Territory....
In September 1892, artist Henry Herman “H.H.” Cross set up a studio at Marcus Daly’s Montana Hotel in Anaconda. There, Cross spent six months creating paintings of Daly’s racehorses, and on January 16, 1893, The Salt Lake Tribune reported that the hotel was “the Mecca...
With characters the likes of Rick O’Shay, Hipshot Percussion, and Deuces Wild, hailing from the imaginary town of Conniption, cartoonist Myron Stanford “Stan” Lynde’s Western-themed comic strips appealed to newspaper readers across the country. Published for 25 years beginning in the 1950s, these comics introduced...
It’s a bright summer day in the late 1910s. As Claire Boltwood drives up the steep hill from the north entrance of Yellowstone National Park to Mammoth Hot Springs, she has to pull over to cool the boiling radiator of her 70-horsepower Gomez-Deperdussin roadster. Her...
Few images evoke the despair of the Great Depression more poignantly than photographs of the enormous dust storms that defined the Dust Bowl era. Frequently described as “black blizzards,” these airborne tsunamis were primarily caused by successive droughts, the most significant of which occurred in...
Editor’s Note: This column is adapted from When Montana Outraced the East: The Reign of Western Thoroughbreds, 1886-1900 by Catharine Melin-Moser (University of Oklahoma Press, April 2025). Nineteenth-century Montana folklore tells of a beautiful chestnut-colored Thoroughbred mare named Oriole. On April 10, 1894, the heavily pregnant...
On a visit last spring to the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana, I was surprised by two insights. First, Russell’s visual storytelling is astounding. Second, some of those stories involved automobiles. The first insight shouldn’t have been a surprise. “Russell was a wonderful storyteller,”...
Country music legend Charley Pride traveled some of the most significant miles on his pioneering path to the top of his profession while in Montana. He came to Big Sky Country in 1960 as a minor league baseball player, pursuing his lifelong dream to play...
The giant entered Yellowstone National Park squeezed into the back seat of a white Ford Model 81A DeLuxe sedan, arms akimbo, knees spread wide. It was June 27, 1938. The man was 6 feet, 6 inches tall, with medium-length unruly black hair pulled back from...
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 —...