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Distinctly Montana Stories
Someone threw a pitcher at Bob Weir and the Grateful Dead never came back to Missoula. Masked men forced a sheepherder to make them coffee before spending eight hours clubbing his flock to death. A 19-year-old named Cromwell Dixon became the first person to fly over the Continental Divide — and was dead a month later. An entrepreneur carted a 365-pound "petrified man" from Montana to New York City and failed spectacularly. Long George Francis, outlaw and poet, crashed his car on Christmas Eve with a broken leg and crawled through a blizzard toward an increasingly uncertain safety.
These are true...
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Fur Traders and Flying Saucers: James Lumley and the Cadotte Pass UFO
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.".png)
The Bison Hunters
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.
How Bobby Became a Legend, or, The Ballad of Young Evel Knievel
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.
The Life and Afterlife of Comanche
On a hot Sunday afternoon in June of 1876, thousands of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors surrounded 210 cavalrymen and cut them down. Two days later, when General Terry's column arrived, the bodies on the field had been so changed by sun and wind and the hands of the victors that Terry mistook them for buffalo carcasses. The burial party had eight shovels among them. They used bullet casings to pin paper names to the makeshift grave markers. They shot the wounded horses where they stood, after letting them drink. One horse they did not shoot. His name was Comanche..png)