Distinctly Montana Stories adapts the literary journalism of Distinctly Montana magazine into produced audio episodes. Each story is drawn from the magazine's twenty-year archive of Montana history, culture, and the people who shaped the state. The show is narrated by Joe Shelton, editor-in-chief of Distinctly Montana.
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Episode 14: Some Notes Towards a Metaphysics of the Ninepipes Reservoir Turtles
Written by Joseph Shelton · 23 min
Every spring, on a bend of Highway 93 in the Mission Valley, painted turtles wake from the mud and set out for water, crossing a band of asphalt at a top speed of about seven miles an hour. They have no way of knowing what a car is. Roughly 350 of them are killed on that road every year. This is an essay about what a small life is worth, the turtle, the sparrow, the mouse turned up by the plow, and about who gets to set the price.
Episode 13: One Handshake at a Time
Written by Joseph Shelton · 28 min
In 1958, John F. Kennedy needed Montana. Montana wasn't sure about him. He was wealthy, Catholic, and from a powerful New England family, glamorous in a state that voted Republican and distrusted every bit of it. So he did the only thing he could. He went town to town, hand to hand, winning Montana one person at a time. A headdress he held but wouldn't wear. Wet socks drying in a hotel sink. A pilot who missed his own flight because he ran into cows at Wolf Creek Canyon. This is the story of how Kennedy courted a state he could never win, and what Montana made of him once he was gone.
Episode 12: Fur Traders and Flying Saucers
Written by Nick Mitchell · 11 min
In October of 1865, a fur trader named James Lumley turned up at the Everett House in St. Louis and told the story to whoever would listen, until it reached a newspaperman who wrote it down. The previous September, in the Cadotte Pass, Lumley had seen a light cross the sky and break apart, heard an explosion, smelled sulfur. The next day he found a long gouge torn through the woods and followed it to a rock lodged in the mountainside, covered in markings he was sure had been made by hand. This was more than eighty years before anyone said the words "flying saucer."
Episode 11: The Bison Hunters
Written by Joseph Shelton · 13 min
By the 1880s, killing bison had become a career. The government encouraged it, the market rewarded it, and a certain class of Western men applied themselves to the work with a creativity that is difficult to describe and harder to forget. They studied where to place a shot so the herd wouldn't spook. They learned which animals were worth the most. They found uses for the tongue, the hump, the hide. And when their rifles grew too hot to fire and no water was near, they discovered they could keep shooting anyway. Then, one spring, the hunters arrived on the prairie to begin another season, and found that something had changed.
Episode 10: How Bobby Became a Legend, or, The Ballad of Young Evel Knievel
Written by Sherman Cahill · 16 min
In 1950s Butte, a teenager named Bobby Knievel was scoping out new cars, lifting their hubcaps, then doubling back to sell the owner his own missing property. When Marsh's Jewelry got robbed, Bobby let it be known he had merchandise to move cheap and fast, and half the town went home thrilled to be wearing stolen gems, until they looked closer. He would later sell 271 insurance policies to the staff and the residents of Warm Springs State Hospital. But money and cons were only ever going to hold a kid like this so long. There was a motorcycle coming, and a broken leg, and a jail cell next to a man the cops had already nicknamed Awful.
Episode 9: The Life and Afterlife of Comanche
Written by Joseph Shelton · 19 min
After the Little Bighorn, the burial parties found the ridge stripped and still. Among the dead lay a horse shot seven times and somehow still breathing. He would outlive the battle by fifteen years, become an army's mascot, and end up stuffed behind glass in Kansas.
Episode 8: The Devil's Brigade in Helena
Written by Nick Mitchell · 17 min
In the summer of 1942, a strange collection of Americans and Canadians arrived at Fort Henry Harrison to train for a mission that would never happen. By the time they shipped out, the town of Helena was lining the street as if watching their own sons march away. The Germans would give them their name at Anzio.
Episode 7: I Didn't Die in Montana: Hank Williams Jr. on Ajax Mountain
Written by Nick Mitchell · 14 min
On August 8, 1975, a 26-year-old country singer set out to hunt mountain goats on the Montana-Idaho line. He stepped into his guide's footprint near the summit. Something under his right foot moved.
Episode 6: Conquering the Divide
Written by Joseph Shelton · 19 min
In 1911, Montana's mountains were still a frontier — but only from the ground. A handful of daredevil pilots set out to be the first to fly over the Continental Divide. Some of them died trying.
Episode 5: Frank Lloyd Wright's Montana Dreams
Written by Joseph Shelton · 21 min
In 1909, America's most celebrated architect arrived in the Bitter Root Valley to design a utopian town that would rival Missoula. He was also trying to escape his wife and six children. Neither plan worked out.
Episode 4: The Last Ride of Long George Francis
Written by Nick Mitchell · 12 min
On Christmas Eve, a blizzard closed the roads. Long George Francis made a choice that would end his life and begin his legend.
Episode 3: The Petrified Man of Livingston Goes East
Written by Nick Mitchell · 11 min
A Montana man turned to stone — or so they said. When the Petrified Man left Livingston for an Eastern tour, the spectacle met an audience that wasn't buying it.
Episode 2: Who the Hell Was Montana Frank?
Written by Joseph Shelton · 23 min
He claimed to be a Montana outlaw. The newspapers printed his story. The trail leads through court records, dead ends, and the gap between who we say we are and who we actually were.
Episode 1: Blood on the Wool
Written by Joseph Shelton · 15 min
In 1900, there were nearly three million sheep in Montana — and men who wanted them dead. Armed riders circled camps at night, forced a herder to make coffee before the slaughter began, and left thousands of animals dead on the open range.
New episodes are released monthly. Follow the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify so you don't miss one.