Montana voted in Prohibition in 1916, in part due to the persuasiveness of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. They had whipped the voters up into a frenzy over the evils of alcohol. In late 1918, Prohibition under the 18th Amendment began in Montana—at least on paper.

As blood cooled in the darkening snow around him, maybe he could only make sense of what was happening to him through the lens of poetry: all poems end on a note of regret, melancholy, and, hopefully, some measure of beauty. And the best ones end with a bang.

There are, at the time of this writing, 329 separate entries in the Story of Butte database, with more coming all the time. In addition to discrete entries, there are also many tours that organize locations into a series of stops that tell a fuller story, such as the 11 locations featured in the Murder of Frank Little tour.

Enormous bear tracks wended their way along the shore and in between the heaps of ripening meat, but a disappointed Lewis wrote that "we have not as yet seen one of these anamals... the men as well as ourselves are anxious to meet with some of these bear."

In hard rock mining, the "nipper" is an entry-level position for someone, usually young and potentially a child, who assists the miners in getting them fresh equipment, exchanging out old bits, and fetching whatever the miners need. In the Butte of 1911, child labor laws were still far down the road, the job was often occupied by twelve to nineteen-year-old boys

The Dooley Church, was mostly forgotten by everyone except the residents of Sheridan County and a handful of photographers who travel across the country to photograph old, abandoned buildings.

From the journals, we learn only the bare facts. It was September 4, 1805. They had had a very difficult time climbing out of the North Fork of the Salmon. The steep terrain and deep snow left many of the horses lame from falling. A lack of forage and game left both humans and horses hungry and weak.

If Dempsey had it made, then Shelby, Montana was on the make. The little Hi-Line railroad town had been on the map since the late 19th century, but had fallen on hard times when homesteading in the region went bust. But in 1921, oil was discovered north of Shelby. Within months, the town filled with oil field workers, geologists, and drillers.

Multiple accounts place Sacagawea and Charbonneau at Fort Manuel Lisa, and it is historically very likely that Sacagawea died there as well, as a traveler’s journal had noted that the young woman died after having recently given birth to a baby girl.

The second, longer trip was a roundtrip to Yellowstone National Park. Supposedly they now had “puncture-proof” tires. In addition to the necessary provisions, each rider carried either a 10-pound rifle or a revolver and each had a 30-round cartridge belt and half of a tent.

The National Carousel Association publishes an online Index of North American Carousels. That index lists seven carousels in Montana, including merry-go-rounds in Boulder, Butte, Columbia Falls, Helena, Missoula, Shelby and Somers.

By the early 1820s, improved economic conditions spurred renewed interest to expand the American fur trade into the upper Missouri. Predictably, the onset of trapping operations in 1823 triggered another cycle of bloodshed.

Imagine that the year is 1910 and you have just moved with your family to Montana. The last spike of the Milwaukee Road was driven in last year just west of Garrison, and the small town where you live is now accessible by rail from both the West Coast and the distant metropolis of Chicago.

The holotype for T. rex, which is the name-bearing representative of that species, was discovered near Haxby, an old post office north of Jordan, Montana.

The next time he saw it, he was luckier. His shot hit the beast. According to Israel's son, the animal tried to attack the Hutchins family in its last moments, tearing through a half-inch rope in one champing bite. He said it bled to death trying to reach and attack the family.

It had been 73 years since the Nez Perce had greeted Lewis and Clark with friendship and pledged peace with the U.S. government, thinking they would get the same respect in return. They were now retracing the Voyage of Discovery's route back through the rugged Bitterroot Mountains on a flight for their lives.

Eventually, the escalating violence, particularly in Helena, became so overwhelming that newspaper editor Robert Fisk famously called for stemming the tide of recent vigilante terror by returning to "decent ordinary lynching."

t was believed that the Montana airspace, terrain, barometric pressure, and winter temperatures would replicate what air crews might expect over Germany. On base, though, the barracks and other assorted operational buildings, erected quickly, lacked adequate insulation.

Published accounts generally concur that aerial bombardment of the ice jam commenced at approximately 7:30 p.m. and was conducted at an altitude of 2,200 to 2,600 feet. An article published in The Billings Gazette on March 22nd specifically indicates that sixteen "250-pound bombs [were dropped] along a five-mile ice gorge." Destruction of a target that large by one bomber with conventional ordnance would, presumably, have required strategic use of the intervalometer.

This was the hellish reality facing Montana's 163rd Infantry Regimental Combat Team in the steaming jungles of Papua New Guinea. The men from Montana's small towns—farm boys and ranch hands, miners and shop clerks—were in jungle hell-holes, L-shaped to help them survive rolling grenades.