Montana’s Lones Wigger was, unquestionably, among the finest competitive shooters in American history. While his fame exists mostly in the marksmanship niche, Wigger’s name belongs alongside the legends of the Old West when it comes to rifle skills. Wigger — who died in 2017 at age...
The antique mall below Last Chance Gulch in Helena, Montana is full of temptations. Myriad treasures fill the rooms, many beyond price. An enormous glass bowl full of colorful matchbooks draws my eye. Atop them lies a tattered brown book. About the size of a...
In 1914, as the silent-movie wave swept the nation, Hollywood’s biggest character was Jim Stokes, the Two-Gun Man. In the film The Bargain, Jim wore a six-shooter on each thigh, rolled his cigarettes one-handed, and rode a brown-and-white pinto named Fritz. He was the good...
At 2 a.m. on June 7, 1896, a Great Northern train pulled into the station at Blackfoot, Montana, bringing three Yale graduates to some of the last great stretches of the fabled American West. The privileged leader of the group was Gifford Pinchot, age 31....
Paul Harris (1925-2018) exemplifies the back and forth between art and artist, between place and culture, and between male and female dynamics. Although his art defies categorization, Harris worked within the context of other artists and art movements. Post-war American artists bore witness to dramatic changes...
The Mountain West in the 2020s has been characterized by increasing crowds. In 2021, Montana’s Flathead County grew by 3.5 percent and Billings was briefly ranked as the top emerging market in the entire nation. By February 2022, the median value of a single-family home...
More than 50 years ago, southeastern Montana’s landscape changed forever when a 525-foot-high dam was erected on Crow Tribal land to control flooding, generate power, and provide irrigation to farms and ranchlands. The added benefit was the creation of the striking Bighorn Canyon National Recreation...
In 1832, at the age of 23, Swiss painter Karl Bodmer was commissioned by naturalist, ethnographer, and explorer Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied to create a pictorial record of what would later be known as one of the most important ethnographic expeditions in North America during...
Tucked away in the Glacier National Park photo archives, under the careful stewardship of the National Park Service, are hundreds of photo negatives and prints by Tomer J. Hileman, one of the park’s most prolific photographers from nearly a century ago. And just as the...
Rudy Autio helped start the residency program at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in Helena, Montana, in the 1950s. In doing so, he helped to launch one of the most well-respected ceramics institutions in the U.S., while also establishing his legacy in...