MontanaHistoricalSociety

Chief Earl Old Person, Life-Time Chief of the Blackfeet Tribe, sat for an interview in 2002 to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of North American Indian Days in Browning on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Norma Ashby interviewed Chief Old Person for KRTV of Great Falls as he commented on the meaning and celebrations of Indian Days, one of the largest powwows in Montana. Filmed by photographers Lindsay McNay and Tim Luinstra, the video special was sponsored by Dr. and Mrs. Dan Fiehrer.

Author and historian Bob Bigart explains how cattle exports from the Flathead Indian Reservation in the early twentieth century supported tribal members and made it possible for the tribes to avoid dependence on general rations from the federal government.

University of Colorado PhD student Kerri Clement examines horse herd restoration efforts on the part of Crow Agency superintendent Robert Yellowtail. While Yellowtail concentrated on particular breeds and worked to obtain high-bred horses, this short-lived project reflects the longer and deeper history between Crow people and equines. Between 1875 and 1910, cattle raising on the Flathead Reservation grew from supplementing a tribal economy based on hunting and gathering to the foundation of a new economy.

Retired MHS museum technician Vic Reiman begins with a short sketch of the development of black powder and firearms—going all the way back to China—and then concentrates on the first four models of lever-action rifles made by Oliver Winchester and their use by American Indians, settlers, and bad men on the western frontier.

As an integral and formative part of the Rocky Mountain West, mining helped shape public attitudes toward the land, labor unions, cultural and social mores, and community development. The ways in which mining history is preserved and presented does the same. Dr. Dayle Hardy-Short, professor of communication studies at Northern Arizona University, provides a preliminary overview of topics, organizational structures, and historical approaches used in mining museums in Montana and elsewhere across the West.

Montana State University adjunct humanities faculty Dr. Dan Hanson examines how Bannack State Park utilizes haunting as a commercial attraction and historical teaching tool in its annual “Ghost Walk.” Understanding haunting's functionality within this heritage site is important as Bannack continues to reflect and shape the real and imagined West.

Shortly before 10:00 P.M. on the night of January 15, 1895, a watchman noticed smoke coming from the Kenyon-Connell Commercial Company warehouse and summoned the fire department. Unbeknownst to firefighters, other rescue workers, and curious onlookers, the burning building contained not only stoves, sheets of corrugated iron, pipes, coils of wire, and iron wheelbarrows, but also a large supply of dynamite. Within minutes, a series of devastating explosions rocked the Mining City's warehouse district. Butte Historical Memorials board members Lindsay Mulcahy, Judy Chadwick, and Karen Henningsen tell the story of this largely forgotten tragedy that resulted in the deaths of fifty-eight people.

Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, thousands dreamed of leaving Bohemia(then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) for the country of endless hope. They were driven by a vision of better living conditions and quick riches, as well as a desire to escape political, religious, and national oppression. In History of the Czechs in Montana and Elsewhere in the Northwest, Dr. Martin Nekola, coordinator of the Czechoslova Talks Project, focuses on the Czechs—more than 350,000 of whom lived in the United States at the outbreak of World War I—who settled in this region.

Mark Johnson, a fellow with the University of Notre Dame's Institute for Educational Initiatives, examines connections between Butte's Chinese community and their relatives in southern China, a region beset by natural disasters and political upheavals that caused many to seek opportunities abroad. With these pressures from home combined with restrictions in Montana from certain professions, life was not easy for these Chinese Montanans.

Greg LeDonne—winner of Montana The Magazine of Western History's 2021 emerging scholar contest—reviews how the Owyhee Cattlemen's Association, a group of Idaho ranchers, employed neoliberal rhetoric in advocating for their use of public lands around and during the Rangeland Reform '94 debate. LeDonne focuses on the way in which a national discourse filtered down to the community level and became adapted to reflect local needs and economic interests.

Diana Di Stefano, MHS editor and publications manager, looks at how five generations of ranchers in Wyoming have adapted to changing economic and environmental circumstances. She uses oral histories to explore themes of belonging, thoughts on tourism, real estate development, and the cattle industry.

Scott Rosenthal, mining department head, and Shannon Panisko, Montana Tech Foundation director of annual giving, share stories of Clara Clark of Butte and Isabel Little of Baltimore, Maryland. In 1904, Clark and Little were among the first class of students to receive degrees from Tech's new mining engineering department. Today, 25 percent of the department's students are women.

The Miss Indian America Pageant was held from 1953 to 1984 as part of Sheridan, Wyoming's annual All-American Indian Days. In More Than “Indian Princesses,” recent Montana State University graduate Dr. Andi Powers explores the ways in which contestants served as important cultural ambassadors, participating in presidential inaugurations, appearing on popular television and radio broadcasts, and working on important projects on both local and national levels, such as the United Nations Declaration of Rights of Indian People.

Jeff Malcomson takes the audience on a guided introduction to the MHS Photograph Archives by reviewing the repository's development over the years and surveying several of its major collections. He shares dozens of photographs from these collections and also reveals current and future projects for the Photo Archives.

Beginning in 1870, supplies, trade goods, immigrants, adventurers—and whiskey—traveled the now-legendary Whoop-Up Trail from Fort Benton to the eponymous Alberta trading post. In Tales of Whoop-Up Country, Great Falls historian and author Ken Robison relates how the absence of law and order forced the Canadian government to create the North-West Mounted Police to close down the whiskey trade and force traders back across the border into Montana.

Montana State University professor Dr. Mary Murphy details the story of Montana artist Elizabeth Davey Lochrie. From her home on Butte's West Side, Lochrie crafted a life as artist, mother, clubwoman, and ally to Montana's native peoples. A Western painter in the tradition of Charlie Russell, Lochrie is best known for her portraits of Native Americans, but she was a prolific artist who also painted landscapes of urban Butte and rural Montana.

MHS senior curator Jennifer Bottomly-O'looney shares images and stories of artist Voldemar Podder. Podder—a physician who was displaced from his native Estonia during World War II—spent twelve years in various European refugee camps where he learned to paint. Always continuing his artwork, he immigrated to the United States in 1956, landing first in Warm Springs, Montana, then, in 1963, relocating to Butte. Podder was a prolific artist whose unique and enigmatic style reflects the life he lived and the people he knew.

University of Montana environmental studies professor Dr. Rosalyn LaPier shares photographs by Ella Mad Plume Yellow Wolf. Yellow Wolf—who was LaPier's great-aunt and whose images are now in MHS's collection—documented life on the Blackfeet Reservation in the early 1940s, providing an intimate look at children and community, employment and work life, military involvement, and religious practice, both Christian and Native.

Northern Arizona University communication professor Dr. Brant Short looks at Keir Hardie's commentaries in his newspaper, Labour Leader, as well as reports about Hardie in various Butte newspapers from that time.

MHS community preservation officer Kate Hampton explores the history of state and national legislation that particularly affected the African American community, focusing her attention on discrimination and accommodation laws.

Anthony Wood, doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan, considers some of the inherent contradictions and complexities as Butte's Black residents commemorated Emancipation Day in 1902.

In his Battle for Butte, the now-classic history of Montana's war of the Copper Kings, Mike Malone identified 1883–1884 as the beginning of big money's domination of Butte's mining and politics. In The Battle for Butte Journalism: From Mining and News to Mining, News, Politics, and Power, retired University of Oklahoma Press editor-in-chief Dr. Charles E. Rankin argues that, while such domination of Montana journalism did originate in Butte, the roots of that influence came years earlier, amid a raucous, more chaotic time for Mining City newspapers. English coal miner and labor leader Keir Hardie came to America in 1895 to learn about the U.S. labor movement and political protest. His observations on Montana, as well as the reaction he received among local miners, offer an insightful view on mining, politics, and class.

When Governor Elmer Holt accused the state highway commissioners of malfeasance in 1936, it sparked an ugly process that eventually involved the Montana Supreme Court and a Helena newspaper reporter named Paul Maclean, who was later made famous in A River Runs through It. Montana Department of Transportation historian Jon Axline reveals the details in his presentation.

Each year Montana Historical Society historians write 50 to 100 National Register of Historic Places signs, but invariably have to leave out many juicy historical details in order to meet a 190-word limit. MHS interpretive historian Christine Brown highlights intriguing, sometimes macabre, and often sad stories from Butte and Anaconda that never made it onto the National Register signs. These stories left on the cutting room floor range from war heroes, abusive husbands, and powerful widows to suicide, robbery, and runaway horses.

Recent University of Montana graduate John Stefanek discusses the implementation of Model Cities in Butte. While Model Cities—an urban renewal program that selected over 150 communities across the country for physical and social improvement—was defined by the issue of race in large eastern cities, Butte's program was defined by its smaller size and economic and environmental woes.

Montana State University PhD student Jacey Anderson examines the impacts of mining on Montana's economy and the environment. Beginning with the 1872 Mining Act and ending with 1998's ban on cyanide leaching, shes look at the ways in which communities have organized to both promote and restrict mining practices depending on public beliefs about the perceived benefits and dangers therein.

In a readers' theater presentation drawn from primary sources documenting Butte's rich food history, four noted Montana historians—all of whom are “foodies” as well—share delectable nuggets from the Mining City's culinary past. Professor Jan Zauha, Montana State University humanities and outreach librarian; Dr. Mary Murphy, Montana State University history professor; Molly Kruckenberg, MHS director; and Zoe Ann Stoltz, MHS reference historian tantalize your taste buds with these tales from the kitchens of yesteryear.

Dr. Leila Monaghan, professor of anthropology at Northern Arizona University, provides insight into the important, but little known, material, military, and spiritual assistance that women provided before, during, and after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Using the testimony of Cheyenne and Lakota women—Antelope, Pretty White Buffalo, Moving Robe, Julia Face, and others—Monaghan describes the battle as women experienced it: ensuring their family’s safety, rallying their warriors with “strongheart songs,” capturing runaway horses, nursing the wounded, landing death blows to injured enemy soldiers, engaging in direct combat, and performing rites for the dead. (9/28/2019)

At their peak, Montana lumber mills employed more than 13,000 workers in over three hundred sawmills. Today fifteen mills with 2,700 employees remain. Retired Montana Historical Society library manager Brian Shovers examines the reasons for the decline and the persistence of smaller family-owned mills. (9/28/2019)

Adept at both political and business manipulations, timber baron A. B. Hammond emerged as one of Montana’s wealthiest and most powerful individuals. Dale Burk, owner of Stevensville’s Stoneydale Press and a former journalist, explores the practice of clear-cutting on the Bitterroot National Forest during the 1950s and 1960s. Burk’s reporting in the Missoulian during the early 1970s ultimately led to a major reform of logging practices on U.S. Forest Service lands nationwide. (9/28/2019)

Native Americans were Montana and Wyoming’s original hard-rock miners, conducting extensive pit and trench excavation at important sources of stone, including several obsidian sources in Yellowstone National Park. In his talk, University of Montana professor of anthropology Dr. Doug MacDonald describes the traditional use of two important obsidian sources in Yellowstone—Obsidian Cliff and Cougar Creek—and proposes ideas on ways to better utilize these sites in interpreting the park’s Native American past.

Although home to indigenous nomadic peoples for more than ten thousand years, Montana remained one of the last regions to attract academically trained archaeologists. Montana State University instructor and PhD student Nancy Mahoney considers how, between 1880 and 1950, this lapse allowed a thriving community of amateurs and avocationalists to amass collections of Native artifacts, a practice that has ongoing consequences for the public stewardship of Montana’s prehistoric past.

Libby’s past was based in natural resource extraction, predominately logging and mining. Today, however, neither industry exists to underpin the economy and provide employment. Montana State University PhD candidate Jennifer Dunn examines what aspects of its history Libby chooses to highlight as it re-creates its image as a pristine outdoor destination.

Montana Standard editor and author David McCumber discusses the investigative work that he and his partner, Andrew Schneider, conducted into health issues surrounding the mining of asbestos in Libby. McCumber provides the backstory behind the pair’s journalistic efforts as well as the far-reaching impacts their award-winning articles had in uncovering a national scandal.

Crowning a prominent hillside in Bozeman, the Life of Montana Insurance Company (LOMIC) building is often perceived as a modernist temple, but research reveals that it was not built until 1979, years after its Neo-Formalist stylistic cousins were constructed. Bozeman preservation architect Lesley Gilmore unveils how this came to be and why LOMIC vacated the building as early as 1984.

Montana State University graduate student Kirke Elsass investigates why Montana’s built environment has as much concrete as it does. He also examines the way in which the concretization of Montana—between 1880 and 1910—illustrates the entanglement of peoples’ material experience and their modes of thinking, as well as the intersection of geologic and human histories. (9/28/2019)

Montana State University PhD student Micah Chang discusses Sleeping Buffalo Hot Springs near Saco, a cornerstone of continuity and community pride for the last century. The popular attraction defied decades of regional economic decline throughout the twentieth century; Chang provides suggestions for how the Hi-Line can continue forward in a time of depopulation. (9/28/2019)

Montana State University PhD student Casey Pallister examines the buffalo bone industry of the 1880s through a cultural lens. After briefly outlining the industry, Pallister considers such factors as who participated in bone hunting, how hunters and non-hunters envisioned their labors, and the ways in which gender roles, racial dynamics, and imaginings of the West impacted the practice and its place in memory. (9/28/2019)

Bozeman historian and author John C. Russell recounts the remarkable tale of a colorful and contradictory figure whose influence on Montana’s development was profound. After striking it rich in the goldfields of Alder Gulch, Story drove the first herd of cattle from Texas to Montana, then built a commercial empire of diverse interests, crafted with determination and ingenuity as well as a penchant for fraud and deceit. His book on Nelson Story—Treasure State Tycoon—was published by the Montana Historical Society Press in 2019. (9/27/2019)

Forgotten dead have surfaced at one time or another in most Montana communities. Random burials and early cemeteries lie scattered across the state’s vast landscape, under roads, fields, housing developments, shopping centers, and other areas. Such unexpected discoveries make grisly surprises for those unaware of the history that lies beneath. From her forthcoming book on Montana’s cemetery history, retired Montana Historical Society interpretive historian Dr. Ellen Baumler examines the afterlife in the state, sharing some of these discoveries, the problems they created, and the stories they tell. (9/27/2019)

Mark Johnson—a University of Notre Dame Fellow with the Institute for Educational Initiatives—explores Chinese religious traditions and burial practices, focusing specifically on China Row Cemetery in Helena and Mount Moriah Cemetery in Butte. Johnson examines the religious traditions maintained in Montana’s Chinese communities and their cultural practices surrounding death, including burial rituals, exhumation, and return of remains for reburial in China.

Between 1906 and 1926, Charlie and Nancy Russell spent every summer in Glacier National Park at their beloved Bullhead Lodge. Living-history interpreter Mary Jane Bradbury shares stories of the Russells entertaining friends and prominent artists, exploring the park, and reveling in the rugged beauty of the mountains. (9/27/2019)

One in his twenty-part Education Through Entertainment series—Polson performing artist and Governor’s Arts Award winner Neal Lewing salutes the U.S. Forest Service, national parks, and the timber industry. Lewing incorporates music, lies, legends, and a few laughs into a lively and entertaining history lesson. (9/27/2019)

Montana Historical Society reference historian Zoe Ann Stoltz discusses the events leading up to homesteading’s bust and the attempts to alleviate the looming disaster by Montana’s extraordinary 1919 special session.

At the close of World War I, post-war dynamics, drought, and more combined to create one of the worst crises in Montana history. Montana Historical Society senior archivist Rich Aarstad examines the battle waged by Helena Independent editor Will Campbell against the twin threats to American democracy—the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), who advocated revolutionary industrial unionism; and the Non-Partisan League, which called for the takeover of farm-related industries from corporate control. (9/27/2019)

Since 1882, when the Treasure State’s first transcontinental railroad line was completed, Montana has enjoyed connections with the rest of the United States by way of the finest passenger train service on the Great Northern, Northern Pacific, Milwaukee Road, and Amtrak railways. Railroad historian Dale Paterka presents a brief history of passenger trains in Montana. (9/27/2019)

Early railroad companies quickly realized that the beautiful scenery along their routes would be an attraction to Americans enthralled by the romance of the West. Montana Historical Society outreach and interpretation program manager Kirby Lambert illustrates how advertising campaigns featuring beautiful promotional art lured adventure-seekers—and paying customers—to experience firsthand the spectacular scenery of national parks and other scenic wonders of the West. (9/27/2019)

Founded by Father Pierre De Smet in 1841 and set against the backdrop of the majestic Bitterroot Mountains, St. Mary’s Mission played a significant role in the early story of the Treasure State. Mission staff member Susan Doverspike explores St. Mary’s history from its origins as “the place where Montana began” to its role as a historic site and museum today. Doverspike presents an overview of the mission’s history from its founding to its closure in 1954. In the companion track "St. Mary's Mission: Now," Lyn Graves presents the trials and tribulations of preserving historic buildings—which date back to 1861—plus the challenges of creating new exhibits to tantalize return visitors.

Founded by Father Pierre De Smet in 1841 and set against the backdrop of the majestic Bitterroot Mountains, St. Mary’s Mission played a significant role in the early story of the Treasure State. Mission staff member Lyn Graves explore St. Mary’s history from its origins as “the place where Montana began” to its role as a historic site and museum today. Graves presents the trials and tribulations of preserving historic buildings—which date back to 1861—plus the challenges of creating new exhibits to tantalize return visitors. In the companion track "St. Mary's Mission: Then," Susan Doverspike presents an overview of the mission’s history from its founding to its closure in 1954.

Before 1889, Montana exerted little oversight of those who claimed to be healers. Starting that year, however, the state required all medical practitioners to register with the newly formed State Board of Medical Examiners. Dr. Todd L. Savitt, historian of medicine at East Carolina University’s Brody School of Medicine, reveals a group demographic picture of the doctors who did (and did not) register and tells stories of some particularly interesting physicians in that group.

Polio crippled children for centuries before the cause was clearly identified and an extraordinary prevention strategy was developed. Todd Harwell, administrator for the State of Montana’s Public Health and Safety Division, reviews the history of polio and efforts to treat it before a vaccine was available, and follows Montana’s use of the vaccine to eradicate the disease during the 1950s and 1960s.