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 —...
Some 12 years before Theodore Roosevelt’s rapid rise to the U.S. presidency, he experienced a bear hunt that was more troublesome than most of his earlier expeditions. As related in Roosevelt’s book The Wilderness Hunter, he engaged a guide named Griffin, an old man skilled...
Every year since 1993, Butte has held Montana’s “shortest, loudest, coldest” parade for the Lunar New Year to celebrate the city’s historic Chinese community. Butte was once home to one of the largest Chinatowns in the Rocky Mountain region. The parade passes sites that once...
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...