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A delightfully wicked look at the badly behaved characters who shaped the history of Montana through their deeds and misdeeds.
Although fast-disappearing, Montana's historic bridges are an integral and often overlooked part of Montana's landscape. This book tells the stories of those bridges and how they shaped the development of the Treasure State from the early horse-and-buggy days to the car culture of the post-World War II era.
Stillwater County's history is anything but still. In 1875, the trading post and stage stop of Stillwater at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Stillwater Rivers enticed trade with the Crow Indians based nearby at their second Crow Agency. The Northern Pacific Railroad built a station here in 1882, renaming it Columbus in 1894. Columbus soon became an important shipping center for early cattle and sheep ranchers, as well as a starting point for many homesteaders who staked claims in the fertile valleys. Agriculture was a key component in the formation and settling of the communities Park City, Reed Point, Absarokee, and Fishtail. The nearby Beartooth Mountains beckoned miners with ore and eventually supplied the nation with chromium during World War II. A major engineering accomplishment was completed in the mid-1920s with the construction of the power plant and dam at nearby Mystic Lake.
In On the Road Again, William Wyckoff explores Montana’s changing physical and cultural landscape by pairing photographs taken by state highway engineers in the 1920s and 1930s with photographs taken at the same sites today. The older photographs, preserved in the archives of the Montana Historical Society, were intended to document the expenditure of federal highway funds. Because it is nearly impossible to photograph a road without also photographing the landscape through which that road passes, these images contain a wealth of information about the state’s environment during the early decades of the twentieth century. To highlight landscape changes -- and continuities -- over more tha...
Memories of Montana's Bear Creek Valley flicker briefly to life each February on the anniversary of its darkest day. It is remembered as the site of Montana's worst coal mining accident, which claimed the lives of 75 miners, but the valley was so much more. For decades it was Montana's "coal basket," housing two towns, dozens of coal mines, and a population equaling that of neighboring Red Lodge. Businesses included a movie theater, dry goods store, grocery stores, hotels, hospitals, butchers, banks, bars, and union halls, all serving residents with pan-European origins. Its schools produced championship sports teams and community leaders. Gone, but not forgotten, Bear Creek Valley lives on in this book.
The deadliest campaign of vigilante justice in American history erupted in the Rocky Mountains during the Civil War when a private army hanged twenty-one troublemakers. Hailed as great heroes at the time, the Montana vigilantes are still revered as founding fathers. Combing through original sources, including eye-witness accounts never before published, Frederick Allen concludes that the vigilantes were justified in their early actions, as they fought violent crime in a remote corner beyond the reach of government. But Allen has uncovered evidence that the vigilantes refused to disband after territorial courts were in place. Remaining active for six years, they lynched more than fifty men without trials. Reliance on mob rule in Montana became so ingrained that in 1883, a Helena newspaper editor advocated a return to “decent, orderly lynching” as a legitimate tool of social control. Allen’s sharply drawn characters, illustrated by dozens of photographs, are woven into a masterfully written narrative that will change textbook accounts of Montana’s early days—and challenge our thinking on the essence of justice.