How I got into the pit isn't worth mentioning, and I don't remember much about it, anyway. The important thing is that I came here in 1986, to protect Butte, the Pit, and everything around it...

Not only did the highway contribute to the growth of businesses along its route, it also fostered economic opportunities for towns and cities that were previously isolated. And, perhaps more importantly, the route became a symbol of America's commitment to connecting its diverse landscapes and fostering cooperation between states.

Names were given to ways of life that would have seemed fantastic at the dawn of the previous century: hobos, tramps, yeggs or yaggmen, bums, bindlestiffs, gentlemen of the road, knights of the tie and rail. 

A few imaginative paleontologists have suggested that what people are seeing could be a plesiosaurus, an aquatic reptile from the Early Jurassic period. Some eyewitness reports are uncanny in their description of this carnivorous dinosaur, from its 40-foot length to its large flippers and snake-like neck, tiny head and long tail.

He whipped the camera into place, sighted the craft through the viewfinder, and began shooting. He managed to follow them as they passed behind a water tower, losing sight of them after they went behind the tower and into the blue sky to the southeast. He produced about 16 seconds of footage.

The pass remained officially undiscovered until 1889, when the Canadian James Hill was pushing his St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railway west across North Dakota and Montana. He had reached Great Falls, with a spur to Butte. But Hill had more ambitious plans—a competitor to the Northern Pacific that would extend to Seattle.

The rest of Il Conte Biancamano's several hundred crewmen arrived at Fort Missoula a few days later. So did many other Italians thereafter. The majority came from other captured ships. Some, though, came from New York's World Fair. Authorities interned waiters, like Cipolato, and other workers from the exhibition's Italian Pavilion.

The geyser basins had already been visited by the Washburn Expedition, but it was the Hayden group who got to see the eruptions of some of the park’s largest geysers. They gave them names such as Giant, Giantess, Grand and Castle.

Could it be that an aging fur trader really found something from another world planted in a mountain located,"in the neighborhood of the Cadotte Pass?" And if so, could it possibly still be there, undiscovered?

When a witness came forward to testify that he was given a $30,000 payoff, evidence of bribery was dismissed as “inconclusive” by a Helena-based grand jury of Clark supporters. Indeed, Twain rightly said, “No one has helped to send him to the Senate who did not know that his proper place was the penitentiary.”

But by his year of exhaustion, freedom had begun to take another shape for Wright. "I could see no way out," he wrote. "Because I did not know what I wanted I wanted to go away... A true home is the ideal of man, and yet-well, to gain freedom I asked for a divorce."

If Manifest Destiny had a smell, it would surely stink of rotting garbage, excrement, and a heady whiff of BO. Literature and film have cultivated in the American imagination a highly romanticized take on the Old West, but they’ve necessarily left out some of the crustier details of day-to-day hygiene.

The sky turns slate as thick, billowing clouds gather darkly in the east, blowing in from the Panthalassic Sea. The insects hush, suddenly, moments before sheets of warm rain begin to fall, dappling the leaves and disturbing the surface of the waters.

The knives were stiletto-thin, able to slide between an enemy combatant’s ribs with appalling ease. But unlike traditional stilettos, sharpened only at the point, the V-42, as it was eventually named, was edged on all sides, so that it would pull through a Nazi’s throat as easily as it could pierce his steel helmet.

Stretching from Oregon to North Dakota, and from Alberta to central Wyoming, the map identifies 14 major tributaries of the Missouri River, from the Milk River in the north to the Bighorn River in the south, and includes the location of prominent island mountain ranges interspersed between the rivers.

Lynching at the hands of a group of self-appointed vigilantes was employed in many mining towns across the Western U.S. in the mid-nineteenth century, including Montana. With the legal structure of courts, lawyers and judges lagging well behind the growth and the ensuing lawlessness of each gold strike, expedience was sometimes the preferred instrument to establish “law and order.”

The Good Roads advocates wanted better, smoother roads for the popular new craze sweeping the nation: the bicycle. At the forefront of this effort was the League of American Wheelmen (LAW), which had been lobbying for better roads since 1880.

He was still handsome in a way that even time and illness couldn’t diminish. His looks, which had inspired a poem by an anonymous English woman who, apparently speaking for much of the female population of Victoria’s kingdom, had called him “[n]ature’s perfected touch in form and grace.”

Studio photographs of Spotted Tail’s wife and Running Antelope, a Hunkpapa headman, were taken by Gardner in Washington, D.C., during 1872. Running Antelope was splendidly dressed in a magnificent quilled shirt, peace medal, dentalia-shell ear pendants, otter-fur hair wraps, and three eagle feathers, one of which bears specific war-exploit markings.

Two 100-foot-high towers carry concrete counterweights that are so precisely balanced the bridge required only a three-horsepower engine—smaller than the motor of an average lawnmower—to lift the 571-ton steel span. It took about 30 minutes to raise it 43 feet.