Distinctly Montana Stories Podcast Launches with Tales of Outlaws, Hippies, and a Pitcher Thrown at Bob Weir
The Grateful Dead got run out of Missoula by a thrown pitcher. A con man convinced New York City he'd dug up a petrified territorial governor. A rodeo champion froze to death in the snow on Christmas Eve. Distinctly Montana Stories, a new podcast available now wherever podcasts are heard, collects them all.
The show adapts the literary journalism that appears in this magazine into carefully produced audio episodes—stories researched and written to print standards, now adapted for audio. Each installment runs twelve to twenty-two minutes: long enough to develop a real narrative, short enough for a commute.
The first season ranges from tragedy to dark comedy: the forgotten range wars between cattlemen and sheepherders that turned violent in ways that still feel startling. (In the season opener, masked raiders force a terrified sheepherder to boil them a pot of coffee—fuel for the eight hours of clubbing that followed.) A Wild West show performer who fabricated an entire legend. Daredevil pilots racing to be first over the Continental Divide. Frank Lloyd Wright's forgotten Bitterroot commission and the investment bubble that swallowed it.
The emotional centerpiece follows Long George Francis—outlaw, rodeo champion, and poet—who crashed his car in a Christmas Eve blizzard and crawled through the snow toward a shack he never reached.
"The Hippies Are Coming" traces Missoula's transformation from industry town to counterculture haven, including the 1974 night when someone in a crowd of 7,000 hurled an Aber Day Kegger pitcher at Bob Weir's head during a Grateful Dead show at the Field House. "Thanks a lot," Weir said, and the band cut the third set short. They never came back to Montana.
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