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 —...
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...