Thompson does Montana a service by finding stories about an underattended Native chief, the burial of a child in Missoula, and more. Each is fascinating, and most are stories you haven't heard before.

The Ballad of Little Jo arrived right at the moment when the Western re-emerged after a protracted period of stagnation back into popular appeal. Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves (1990) and Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) both won the Best Picture Academy Award for their respective years of release.

Norman Maclean was not born in Montana, nor did he die here. His published work is slim, especially when compared to A.B. Guthrie or Ivan Doig. But I wager that if you asked people what piece of writing best exemplifies Montana, many would respond A River Runs Through It. 

Distinctly Montana spoke with Florio about her favorite places in Montana, works-in-progress, what she’s reading, and eating camp stove ramen on book tours. It was a lively and funny conversation that underscored how much she has to offer readers who crave the fast-paced and gritty stories that she tells so well.

Even 25 years down the line, What Dreams May Come still stands as an impressive visual achievement, as well as an option for viewers in search of an earnest romance. And it’s not every day that Love Across the Supernatural Divide is aided by Glacier National Park. 

For centuries, the traditional meal of Cornish tin miners was the pasty. Made daily by wives and mothers, pasties were the perfect portable meal: a miscellany of vegetables and meat encased and baked in a D-shaped pastry shell. 

Since its inception, MAT has put on a whopping 231 shows totaling over 1,407 individual performances while annually casting over 100 community members and racking up what might well be 100,000 volunteer hours.

These true tales include terrifying grizzly encounters, the quietly elegiac story of finding a dead man propped against a tree in the Bitterroot, a frantic struggle to stop a spreading wildfire, days spent in the sun and nights spent camping under the stars.

Charley didn’t see the man’s death, but heard about it from other smelter workers. Told and retold, the man’s gruesome demise became a cautionary tale for the other workers, a bedtime fable for the unwary.

Like the Medical Clinic, all of the exhibits are intended to promote "real-life play." In the wonderfully imaginative displays children will explore a different side of Great Falls, here reimagined as the kid-sized community of "Little Falls."

"Found Photos of Yellowstone" offers a beautiful and unexpectedly intimate portrait of America's favorite National Park, a history of the place told exclusively through the antique photos of tourists and employees of the Park.  

Two or three weeks after the setting forth of two groups of gold seekers, with their belongings on pack horses, a smaller party, only three persons, rode off in the same general direction, toward the Yellowstone River, but for another purpose. They were going to mark the way that became known as the Bozeman Trail.

Beverly Snodgrass owned two of Butte’s leading houses of prostitution. In 1968, the talkative madam, her affections scorned by an official she called “Dimple Knees,” who stole her heart and then her money, decided to tell her story to a newspaper reporter.

When shopping for an engagement ring or wedding band, "Shop by putting rings on your finger, dont' look with your eyes," says Changell Cazell at Alara Jewelry. "You can quickly find out that you look best in a metal clor or diamond shape that is different than what attracted you while scrolling."

The fire was set by a 14-year-old elevator boy, the son of one of the Club's employees. The boy was named Harry Anderson. He was what modern parlance calls a pyromaniac: or rather, he liked to see all of the firemen and their horses come to the hotel.

The Big Director gets on his chair with the camera attached to the hydraulic crane and yells, “Back to one!”, meaning everyone is at their starting position.  For me, it’s sitting in front of my keno machine, ready to repeatedly push a button.  “Masks off!” the Big Director yells.

Major Eugene Baker of the Second Cavalry was sent to punish the Piegan (Blackfeet) village of Mountain Chief who was thought to be harboring the murders of Malcolm Clarke, prominent Montana rancher. Instead, the Calvary mistakenly attacked the village of Heavy Runner, known to be peaceful.

In 1886 the U.S. Cavalry was assigned the protection of the park, and they took the assignment very seriously, patrolling the park throughout the year.

To see all of the grain elevators in Blaine Hadfield's gorgeously photographed and researched coffee table book, you'd have to travel thousands of miles. And even if you did see them with your own eyes, it probably wouldn't be as pretty as the photos Hadfield has included here.

What was this world, where men's shirts could never keep their pecs in check, and women’s heaving bosoms were always in danger of exploding from their bodices like a stop-valve under too much pressure?