Montana History

  • Get to Know a County: Lewis and Clark

    By Bryan Spellman
    Gold attracted people to the region, and Helena’s “main street” is a memorial to the early prospectors. Much of Last Chance Gulch is a pedestrian mall, and the turn-of-the-century architecture lining the sidewalks attracts the eye, just as the various window displays attract shoppers.
  • The White Swan Robe: A Tribute to Anonymous Nineteenth-Century Plains Indian Artists of Montana

    By Douglas Schmittou
    The most prolific Crow warrior-artist of his generation, White Swan was one of six Crow scouts detached to Lt. Col. George A. Custer's regiment on June 21, 1876. White Swan saw extensive combat in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where he was severely wounded. He recovered sufficiently from that conflict to chronicle his military career in artworks. This robe, however, was devoted primarily, if not exclusively, to honors achieved in intertribal warfare.
  • Montana's Mutilation Mystery

    By Sherman Cahill
    Along with Washington D.C.’s famous summer of the saucer sightings in 1952 and Point Pleasant, West Virginia’s hallucinatory year spent in the shadow of Mothman in 1966-1967, whatever really happened in Montana during its sustained ”flap“ constitutes one of the strangest episodes in the history of America’s long, intimate dance with the just-plain weird.
  • The Odyssey of Hugh Glass: A Bicentennial Tribute

    By Doug Schmittou, with illustrations by Rob Rath
    Cooke’s graphic description indicates that the bear’s claws literally scraped flesh from the bones of the shoulder and thigh. George C. Yount’s narrative strongly suggests that another wound perforated the windpipe, which spurted a “red bubble every time Hugh breathed.”
  • Trapper's Tales: Early Stories From Yellowstone

    By Doug Stevens
    Like Colter before him, the more seasoned trappers did not believe him. For the “greenhorns,” new to the wonders of the American West, he laid it on thick. Believed or not, he surely would have had a captive audience around the fire. 
  • East to Gold Mountain: Chinese Miners in Montana

    By Sherman Cahill
    And when Montana experienced its own gold rush, many Chinese came to Bannack and Virginia City to seek their fortunes; the first mention of Chinese arriving in the area was in an 1865 issue of the Virginia City newspaper The Montana Post, which groused at the arrival of a small group of gold-seeking Chinese workers. 
  • The Last Melody: Remembering PFC. Richard LaRock

    By John Dekhane
    Day after day, Richard witnessed the horrors of war—the loss of comrades, relentless shelling, and devastation everywhere. But on October 8, just north of Aachen in Übach, a military photographer captured a rare image of Richard at the piano—playing not for an audience, but for a moment of peace and humanity in the midst of war.
  • Race for the Capital

    By Lindsay Tran
    Daly spent about $2.5 million on the Anaconda campaign, while Clark spent $500,000 on his own campaign for Helena. Helena won the second referendum, helped out by 40% of the Butte vote and overwhelming support from eastern Montana.
  • Travelers' Rest: A Study in Precision on the Lewis and Clark Trail

    By Lindsay Tran
    The team also found several artifacts that could be attributed to the Corps, including a blue bead, melted lead, and a tombac (metal) button. Most interestingly, the latrines they uncovered contained a not insignificant amount of mercury, a dead giveaway that the poop in the pit belonged to non-Native individuals.
  • Living in Her Own Shadow: Calamity Jane's Time in Montana

    By Doug Stevens
    What better way to tap into the nineteenth-century fascination of the perceived free, nonconformist Western lifestyle than a woman who dressed in men's clothes and did stereotypical men things, like army scouting, drinking whiskey and smoking cigars? 
  • The Petrified Man of Livingston Goes East

    By Nick Mitchell
    So, amid the larger profusion of oddities like two-headed animals, conjoined piglets, Fiji mermaids, ancient Viking runestones found buried in midwestern fields, bearded ladies, pickled punks, "savages", and other bizarre traveling attractions, there emerged a very specific and surprisingly popular variety: the petrified man. 
  • Kid Curry and the Great Northern Train Robbery

    By Joseph Shelton
    Harvey Logan, better known as Kid Curry to his friends and enemies, was no stranger to Mon - tana. As a matter of fact, his criminal career had started here. It was where, some years earlier, he had committed his first murder. 
  • Leo J. Cremer: the Rodeo King of Montana's Historic Cremer Ranch

    By Todd Klassy
    The Cremer Ranch served as headquarters for his traveling rodeo, which he called "Leo J. Cremer's World Championship Rodeo Company." Though it was a working ranch that raised livestock, the Cremer Ranch also raised the best string of bucking horses in the entire state of Montana. Perhaps the world. 
  • How Montana Fought World War I

    By Amy Grisak
    As the Great War shook the world, Montana felt more impact than most states. WWI was at the nexus of political and immigration issues, labor strife, and a deadly pandemic, as well as the beginning of a prolonged drought that shaped one of the most tumultuous times in our history.
  • Chief Mountain: Iconic Landmark and Sacred Site

    By Doug Schmittou
    In September 1892, however, Stimson was a member of the first non-Indian party to climb Ninaistákis. At its summit, they discovered evidence of the mountain's long history of ceremonial use. On terrain far too rugged for bison to traverse, three bison skulls were found, two of which were so old "that the black sheaths of their horns had been worn away by winds and storms, and the sheaths of the other horns had turned from black to yellowish white." 
  • Butte, Montana: J. Edgar Hoover's FBI Siberia

    By Sherman Cahill
    In the end, Shaw had his gun and badge taken away. But the worst insult was yet to come: Hoover transferred Shaw to Butte, Montana—as close to Siberia as he could muster. 
  • Driving in the Steps of the Corps of Discovery

    By Holly Matkin
    We invite you to hop in your car to set off on a trip back in time, crossing paths with the Corps of Discovery’s route through central and southwest Montana as you embark on an expedition of your own.
  • The Band Boys of Butte: Montana's Best Brass Band and the Tycoon Who Never Bought a Man Who Wasn't for Sale

    By Ross Peterson, with photos courtesy of the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives
    By the late 1800s, over 200 saloons, like the Graveyard, Cesspool, and Bucket of Blood, served a population of around 10,500. Plentiful establishments furnished gambling. And red lights burned, according to the Butte classic Copper Camp, on East Galena Street, where French Erma, Austrian Annie, Jew Jess, Mexican Maria, and Mickey the Greek worked.