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Anaconda
Labor, Community, and Culture in Montana's Smelter City
Laurie Mercier
University of Illinois Press, 2001

Laurie Mercier's look at "community unionism" examines the distinctive culture of cooperation and activism fostered by residents in Anaconda, Montana, home to the world's largest copper smelter and the namesake of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. 

Mercier depicts the vibrant life of the smelter city at full steam, incorporating the candid commentary of the locals ("the company furnished three pair of leather gloves . . . and all the arsenic [dust] you could eat"). During five decades of devoted unionism, locals embraced an "alternative Americanism" that championed improved living standards for working people as the best defense against communism. Mercier also explores how gender limits on women's political, economic, and social roles shaped the nature and outcome of labor struggles, and traces how union rivalries, environmental concerns, and the 1980 closing of the Anaconda smelter transformed the town. 

A fascinating portrait of how community molds working class consciousness, Anaconda offers important insights about the changing nature of working class culture and collective action.

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Best Backpacking Trips in Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado
Mike White
University Press of Colorado, 2019

Best Backpacking Trips in Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado provides everything you need to know to organize and execute the best backpacking trips in the Mountain West. Mike White and Douglas Lorain, who have walked every mile of the trails described inside, take readers and hikers into some of the wildest and most scenic backcountry landscapes in the nation and help them design the ultimate trip.

Focusing on one-week excursions, the book offers details on all the aspects of trip planning—trail narratives, technical data, maps, gear, food, information on regulations and permits, and more. But it is more than a basic guidebook. Trip information is enriched by valuable and interesting sidebars on history and ecology that will increase appreciation for these natural areas and the people who were instrumental in their discovery or protection.

In Best Backpacking Trips in Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado, White and Lorain pass on their knowledge of quality hikes, planning and preparation, and the unique satisfaction of multi-day backpacking. This guide, put into practice, will result in the trip of a lifetime.

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The Butte Irish
Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875-1925
David M. Emmons
University of Illinois Press, 1989
In this pioneering study, David Emmons tells the story of Butte's large and assertive population of Irish immigrants. He traces their backgrounds in Ireland, the building  of an ethnic community in Butte, the nature and hazards of their work in the copper mines, and the complex interplay between Irish nationalism and worker consciousness.

From a treasure trove of "Irish stuff," the reports, minutes, and correspondence of the major Irish-American organizations in Butte, Emmons shows how the stalwart supporters of the RELA and the Ancient Order of Hiberians marched and drilled for Irish freedom---and how, as they ran the town, the miners' union, and the largest mining companies, they used this tradition of ethnic cooperation to ensure safe and steady work, Irish mines taking care of Irish miners. Butte was new, overwhelmingly Irish, and extraordinarily dangerous---the ideal place to test the seam between class and ethnicity.
 

[more]

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The City That Ate Itself
Butte, Montana and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit
Brian James Leech
University of Nevada Press, 2018
Winner of the Mining History Association Clark Spence Award for the Best Book in Mining History, 2017-2018

Brian James Leech provides a social and environmental history of Butte, Montana’s Berkeley Pit, an open-pit mine which operated from 1955 to 1982. Using oral history interviews and archival finds, The City That Ate Itself explores the lived experience of open-pit copper mining at Butte’s infamous Berkeley Pit. Because an open-pit mine has to expand outward in order for workers to extract ore, its effects dramatically changed the lives of workers and residents. Although the Berkeley Pit gave consumers easier access to copper, its impact on workers and community members was more mixed, if not detrimental.
 
The pit’s creeping boundaries became even more of a problem. As open-pit mining nibbled away at ethnic communities, neighbors faced new industrial hazards, widespread relocation, and disrupted social ties. Residents variously responded to the pit with celebration, protest, negotiation, and resignation. Even after its closure, the pit still looms over Butte. Now a large toxic lake at the center of a federal environmental cleanup, the Berkeley Pit continues to affect Butte’s search for a postindustrial future.
[more]

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A Few Months to Live
Different Paths to Life’s End
Jana Staton, Roger W. Shuy, and Ira Byock
Georgetown University Press, 2001

A Few Months to Live describes what dying is like from the perspectives of nine terminally ill individuals and their caregivers. Documenting a unique study of end-of-life experiences that included detailed conversations in home care settings, the book focuses on how participants lived their daily lives, understood their illnesses, coped with symptoms-especially pain-and searched for meaning or spiritual growth in their final months of life. The accounts are presented largely in the participants' own words, illuminating both the medical and non-medical challenges that arose from the time each learned the "bad news" through their final days of life and memorial services.

Describing the nationwide crisis that surrounds end-of-life care, the authors contend that informal caregiving by relatives and close friends is an enormous and too-often invisible resource that deserves close and public attention. By incorporating not only the ill person's but also the family's perspective, they portray the nine participants in the contexts of their daily lives and relationships rather than simply as patients. Addressing such issues as palliative care, quality of life, financial hardship, grief and loss, and communications with medical personnel, the authors identify how families, professionals, and communities can respond to the challenges of terminal illness and the need to confront life's end.

[more]

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The Glacier Park Reader
David Stanley
University of Utah Press, 2017
The first and only anthology of key writings about Glacier National Park, this comprehensive collection ranges from Native American myths to early exploration narratives to contemporary journeys, from investigations of the park’s geology and biology to hair-raising encounters with wild animals, fires, and mountain peaks.
 
Soon after the park was established in 1910, visitors began to arrive, often with pen in hand. They included such well-known authors as mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart, historian Agnes C. Laut, fiction writer Dorothy Johnson, humorist Irvin S. Cobb, poet Vachel Lindsay, and artist Maynard Dixon—all featured in the book. Readers will encounter colorful characters who lived in and around the park in its early days, including railroad magnate and conservationist Louis Hill, renegade ranger and poacher Joe Cosley, bootlegger Josephine Doody, and old-time cowboy guide Jim Whilt. Blackfeet and Kalispel myths, politically charged descriptions by early explorers such as John Muir and George Bird Grinnell, and full-color reproductions of the illustrated letters of cowboy artist and Glacier resident Charles M. Russell are also included. 

Copublished with the Glacier National Park Conservancy.
The Glacier National Park Conservancy preserves the Park for generations to come. Learn more about our work at www.glacier.org

Part of the National Park Reader series, edited by Lance Newman and David Stanley
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Halcyon Journey
In Search of the Belted Kingfisher
Marina Richie
Oregon State University Press, 2022
Winner of the John Burroughs Medal Award for Natural History Writing

More than one hundred species of kingfishers brighten every continent but Antarctica. Not all are fishing birds. They range in size from the African dwarf kingfisher to the laughing kookaburra of Australia. This first book to feature North America’s belted kingfisher is a lyrical story of observation, revelation, and curiosity in the presence of flowing waters.

The kingfisher—also known as the halcyon bird—is linked to the mythic origin of halcyon days, a state of happiness that Marina Richie hopes to find outside her back door in Missoula, Montana. Epiphanies and a citizen science discovery punctuate days tracking a bird that outwits at every turn. The female is more colorful than the male (unusual and puzzling) and the birds’ earthen nest holes are difficult to locate.

While the heart of the drama takes place on Rattlesnake Creek in Missoula, the author’s adventures in search of kingfisher kin on the lower Rio Grande, in South Africa, and in London illuminate her relationships with the birds of Montana. In the quiet of winter, she explores tribal stories of the kingfisher as messenger and helper, pivotal qualities for her quest. For all who love birds or simply seek solace in nature, Halcyon Journey is an inviting introduction to the mythic and mysterious belted kingfisher.
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front cover of Hope And Dread In Montana Literature
Hope And Dread In Montana Literature
Ken Egan
University of Nevada Press, 2003

This literary survey from a third-generation Montanan includes a thoughtful discussion on the now infamous events of the mid- to late-nineties. The rich literary tradition of Montana, contends author Ken Egan Jr., reflects a catastrophic vision of the West that shows the "horrors of domination" and "the foolish and destructive habits of the imperial heart." Since the 1860s, Montana’s writers have depicted struggles for survival in the state’s dramatic landscape, and for decency in a region characterized by the headlong exploitation of both natural and human resources.

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Inventing the Savage
The Social Construction of Native American Criminality
By Luana Ross
University of Texas Press, 1998

Luana Ross writes, "Native Americans disappear into Euro-American institutions of confinement at alarming rates. People from my reservation appeared to simply vanish and magically return. [As a child] I did not realize what a 'real' prison was and did not give it any thought. I imagined this as normal; that all families had relatives who went away and then returned."

In this pathfinding study, Ross draws upon the life histories of imprisoned Native American women to demonstrate how race/ethnicity, gender, and class contribute to the criminalizing of various behaviors and subsequent incarceration rates. Drawing on the Native women's own words, she reveals the violence in their lives prior to incarceration, their respective responses to it, and how those responses affect their eventual criminalization and imprisonment. Comparisons with the experiences of white women in the same prison underline the significant role of race in determining women's experiences within the criminal justice system.

[more]

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A Lakota War Book from the Little Bighorn
The Pictographic "Autobiography of Half Moon"
Castle McLaughlin
Harvard University Press, 2013

Houghton Library and Harvard’s Peabody Museum Press collaborated on the publication of this fourth volume in the Houghton Library Studies series, an innovative cultural analysis of the extraordinary composite document known as “The Pictographic Autobiography of Half Moon, an Unkpapa Sioux Chief.” At its core is a nineteenth-century ledger book of drawings by Lakota Sioux warriors found in 1876 in a funerary tipi on the Little Bighorn battlefield after Custer’s defeat. Journalist Phocion Howard later added an illustrated introduction and had it bound into the beautiful manuscript that is reproduced in complete color facsimile here.

Howard attributed all seventy-seven Native drawings to a “chief” named Half Moon, but anthropologist Castle McLaughlin demonstrates that these dramatic scenes, mostly of war exploits, were drawn by at least six different warrior-artists. Their vivid first-person depictions make up a rare Native American record of historic events that likely occurred between 1866 and 1868 during Red Cloud’s War along the Bozeman Trail.

McLaughlin probes the complex life history of this unique artifact of cross-cultural engagement, uncovering its origins, ownership, and cultural and historic significance, and compares it with other early ledger books. Examining how allied Lakota and Cheyenne warriors valued these graphic records of warfare as both objects and images, she introduces the concept of “war books”—documents that were captured and altered by Native warrior-artists to appropriate the strategic power of Euroamerican literacy.

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The Legacy of American Copper Smelting
Industrial Heritage versus Environmental Policy
Bode J. Morin
University of Tennessee Press, 2013
     Throughout world history, copper has been a significant metal for a vast number of cultures, from the oldest civilizations on record to the Bronze Age and Greek and Roman antiquity. Though replaced by iron as the primary metal for tools and weapons in ancient civilizations, copper found new resurgence in the nineteenth century when it was discovered to have particularly high thermal and electrical conductivity. Copper mining quickly escalated into a large-scale industry, and because of its vast reserves and innovative mining techniques, the United States seized the reins of global production with the opening of significant copper mines in Tennessee and Michigan in the 1840s and Montana in the 1870s.
     Copper-mining prosperity and America’s dominance of the industry came with a heavy environmental price, however. As rich copper deposits declined with increased mining efforts, large deposits of leaner ores—oftentimes less than one percent pure—had to be mined to keep pace with America’s technological thirst for copper. Processing such ore left an inordinate amount of industrial waste, such as tailings and slag deposits from the refining process and toxic materials from the ores themselves, and copper mining regions around the United States began to see firsthand the landscape degradation wrought by the industry.
     In The Legacy of American Copper Smelting, Bode J. Morin examines America’s three premier copper sites: Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula, Tennessee’s Copper Basin, and Butte- Anaconda, Montana. Morin focuses on what the copper industry meant to the townspeople working in and around these three major sites while also exploring the smelters’ environmental effects. Each site dealt with pollution management differently, and each site had to balance an EPA-mandated cleanup effort alongside the preservation of a once-proud industry.
     Morin’s work sheds new light on the EPA’s efforts to utilize Superfund dollars and/or protocols to erase the environmental consequences of copper-smelting while locals and preservationists tried to keep memories of the copper industry alive in what were dying or declining post-industrial towns. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the American history of copper or heritage preservation studies, as well as historians of modern America, industrial technology, and the environment.

[more]

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Mapping Indigenous Presence
North Scandinavian and North American Perspectives
Edited by Kathryn W. Shanley and Bjørg Evjen; Foreword by S. James Anaya
University of Arizona Press, 2015
Despite centuries of colonization, many Indigenous peoples’ cultures remain distinct in their ancestral territories, even in today’s globalized world.  Yet they exist often within countries that hardly recognize their existence. Struggles for political recognition and cultural respect have occurred historically and continue to challenge Native American nations in Montana and Sámi people of northern Scandinavia in their efforts to remain and thrive as who they are as Indigenous peoples. In some ways the Indigenous struggles on the two continents have been different, but in many other ways, they are similar.
 
Mapping Indigenous Presence presents a set of comparative Indigenous studies essays with contemporary perspectives, attesting to the importance of the roles Indigenous people have played as overseers of their own lands and resources, as creators of their own cultural richness, and as political entities capable of governing themselves. This interdisciplinary collection explores the Indigenous experience of Sámi peoples of Norway and Native Americans of Montana in their respective contexts—yet they are in many ways distinctly different within the body politic of their respective countries. Although they share similarities as Indigenous peoples within nation-states and inhabit somewhat similar geographies, their cultures and histories differ significantly.
 
Sámi people speak several languages, while Indigenous Montana is made up of twelve different tribes with at least ten distinctly different languages; both peoples struggle to keep their Indigenous languages vital. The political relationship between Sámi people and the mainstream Norwegian government and culture has historically been less contentious that that of the Indigenous peoples of Montana with the United States and with the state of Montana, yet the Sámi and the Natives of Montana have struggled against both the ideology and the subsequent assimilation policy of the savagery-versus-civilization model. The authors attempt to increase understanding of how these two sets of Indigenous peoples share important ontological roots and postcolonial legacies, and how research may be used for their own self-determination and future directions.
[more]

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The Mechanics of Optimism
Mining Companies, Technology, and the Hot Spring Gold Rush, Montana Territory, 1864-1868
Jeffrey J. Safford
University Press of Colorado, 2004
For every successful mining district celebrated in history, there were failed dozens whose stories have been largely forgotten. The Mechanics of Optimism documents, in rare detail, the boom-bust cycle of Hot Spring District, a mid-1860s Montana gold camp that did not pay, despite early predictions of a sure thing.

Historian Jeffrey J. Safford examines how gold mining ventures were developed and financed during and after the Civil War, and how men, primarily Easterners with scant knowledge of mining, were willing to invest large sums in gold mines that promised quick and lucrative returns.

Safford explains how these mining companies were organized and underwritten, and why a little-known district in southwestern Montana was chosen as a center of operations. Relying on extensive primary sources, Safford addresses the mind-set of the businessmen, the expectations and realities of new mining technology, the financial strategies, and the universality of the Hot Spring experience.

[more]

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Meet Joe Copper
Masculinity and Race on Montana's World War II Home Front
Matthew L. Basso
University of Chicago Press, 2013
“I realize that I am a soldier of production whose duties are as important in this war as those of the man behind the gun.” So began the pledge that many home front men took at the outset of World War II when they went to work in the factories, fields, and mines while their compatriots fought in the battlefields of Europe and on the bloody beaches of the Pacific. The male experience of working and living in wartime America is rarely examined, but the story of men like these provides a crucial counter-narrative to the national story of Rosie the Riveter and GI Joe that dominates scholarly and popular discussions of World War II.


In Meet Joe Copper, Matthew L. Basso describes the formation of a powerful, white, working-class masculine ideology in the decades prior to the war, and shows how it thrived—on the job, in the community, and through union politics. Basso recalls for us the practices and beliefs of the first- and second-generation immigrant copper workers of Montana while advancing the historical conversation on gender, class, and the formation of a white ethnic racial identity. Meet Joe Copper provides a context for our ideas of postwar masculinity and whiteness and finally returns the men of the home front to our reckoning of the Greatest Generation and the New Deal era.

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Mining Cultures
Men, Women, and Leisure in Butte, 1914-41
Mary Murphy
University of Illinois Press, 1997

Butte, Montana, long deserved its reputation as a wide-open town. Mining Cultures shows how the fabled Montana city evolved from a male-dominated mining enclave to a community in which men and women participated on a more equal basis as leisure patterns changed and consumer culture grew. Mary Murphy looks at how women worked and spent their leisure time in a city dominated by the quintessential example of "men's work": mining. Bringing Butte to life, she adds in-depth research on church weeklies, high school yearbooks, holiday rituals, movie plots, and news of local fashion to archival material and interviews. 

A richly illustrated jaunt through western history, Mining Cultures is the never-told chronicle of how women transformed the richest hill on earth.

[more]

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Montana Ghost Dance
Essays on Land and Life
By John B. Wright
University of Texas Press, 1998

Montana has been the "last best place" for so many people. A century ago, Native Americans gathered here to perform the Ghost Dance—a last, doomed attempt to make white settlers vanish and bring back the old ways of life. Today, people are still pouring into Montana, looking for the pristine wilderness they saw in A River Runs through It.

The reality of Montana—indeed, of all the West—has never matched the myths, but this book eloquently explores how the search for a perfect place is driving growth, development, and resource exploitation in Big Sky country. In ten personal essays, John Wright looks at such things as Montana myths; old-timers; immigrants; elk; ways of seeing the landscape; land conservation and land trusts; the fate of the Blackfoot, Bitterroot, and Paradise valleys; and some means of preserving the last, best places.

These reflections offer a way of understanding Montana that goes far beyond the headlines about militia groups and celebrities' ranches. Montana never was or will be a pristine wilderness, but Wright believes that much can be saved if natives and newcomers alike see what stands to be lost. His book is a wake-up call, not a ghost dance.

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The Montana Vigilantes 1863–1870
Gold,Guns and Gallows
Mark C. Dillon
Utah State University Press, 2016
 Historians and novelists alike have described the vigilantism that took root in the gold-mining communities of Montana in the mid-1860s, but Mark C. Dillon is the first to examine the subject through the prism of American legal history, considering the state of criminal justice and law enforcement in the western territories and also trial procedures, gubernatorial politics, legislative enactments, and constitutional rights.

Using newspaper articles, diaries, letters, biographies, invoices, and books that speak to the compelling history of Montana’s vigilantism in the 1860s, Dillon examines the conduct of the vigilantes in the context of the due process norms of the time. He implicates the influence of lawyers and judges who, like their non-lawyer counterparts, shaped history during the rush to earn fortunes in gold.

Dillon’s perspective as a state Supreme Court justice and legal historian uniquely illuminates the intersection of territorial politics, constitutional issues, corrupt law enforcement, and the basic need of citizenry for social order. This readable and well-directed analysis of the social and legal context that contributed to the rise of Montana vigilante groups will be of interest to scholars and general readers interested in Western history, law, and criminal justice for years to come.
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North To Montana
Brigham Madsen
Utah State University Press, 1999

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The Northern Rockies
A Fire Survey
Stephen J. Pyne
University of Arizona Press, 2016
It’s a place of big skies and big fires, big burns like those of 1910 and 1988 that riveted national attention. Conflagrations like those of 1934 and 2007 that reformed national policy. Blowups like that in Mann Gulch that shaped the literature of American fire. Big fires mostly hidden in the backcountry like the Fitz Creek and Howler fires that inspired the practice of managed wildfires. Until the fire revolution of the 1960s, no region so shaped the American way of fire.

The Northern Rockies remain one of three major hearths for America’s fire culture. They hold a major fire laboratory, an equipment development center, an aerial fire depot, and a social engagement with fire—even a literature. Missoula is to fire in the big backcountry what Tallahassee is to prescribed burning and what Southern California is to urban-wildland hybrids. On its margins, Boise hosts the National Interagency Fire Center. In this structured collection of essays on the region, Stephen J. Pyne explores what makes the Northern Rockies distinctive and what sets it apart from other regions of the country. Surprisingly, perhaps, the story is equally one of big bureaucracies and of generations that encounter the region’s majestic landscapes through flame.

The Northern Rockies is part of a multivolume series describing the nation’s fire scene region by region. The volumes in To the Last Smoke also cover Florida, the Northern Rockies, the Great Plains, the Southwest, and several other critical fire regions. The series serves as an important punctuation point to Pyne’s 50-year career with wildland fire—both as a firefighter and a fire scholar. These unique surveys of regional pyrogeography are Pyne’s way of “keeping with it to the end,” encompassing the directive from his rookie season to stay with every fire “to the last smoke.”
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Rancher Archaeologist
A Career in Two Different Worlds
George Frison
University of Utah Press, 2014
Sometimes childhood events can shape a person’s destiny. Such was the case for George Frison. His father’s accidental death meant that Frison was raised by his grandparents, thus experiencing life on a ranch instead of the small town childhood he otherwise would have had. The wealth of prehistoric artifacts on the ranch caught his attention. Eventually, this interest prompted him to change his life’s course at age thirty-seven. 
     In this memoir, Frison shares his life’s work and his atypical journey from rancher to professor and archaeologist. Herding cattle, chopping watering holes in sub-zero weather, and guiding hunters in the fall were very different than teaching classes, performing laboratory work, and attending faculty and committee meetings in air-conditioned buildings. But his practical and observational experience around both domestic and wild animals proved a valuable asset to his research. His knowledge of specific animal behaviors gave insight to his studies of the Paleoindians of the northern plains as he sought to understand how their stone tools were used most effectively for hunting and how bison jumps, mammoth kills, and sheep traps actually worked. Frison’s careful research and strong involvement in the scholarly and organizational aspects of archaeology made him influential not only as an authority on the prehistory of the northern plains but also as a leader in Wyoming archaeology and Northern American archaeology at large.
     This book will appeal to both the professional and the lay reader with interests in archaeology, anthropology, paleontology, plains history, animal science, hunting, or game management. Frison’s shift from ranching into the academic world of archaeology serves as a reminder that you are never too old to change your life. 
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A River Runs Through It, and Other Stories
Norman Maclean
University of Chicago Press, 1976
From its first magnificent sentence, "In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing", to the last, "I am haunted by waters", A River Runs Through It is an American classic.

Based on Norman Maclean's childhood experiences, the title novella has established itself as one of the most moving stories of our time; it captivates readers with vivid descriptions of life along Montana's Big Blackfoot River and its near magical blend of fly fishing with the troubling affections of the heart.

The paperback edition is now available with an evocative new cover by acclaimed Montana painter Russell Chatham.

"A masterpiece. . . . This is more than stunning fiction: It is a lyric record of a time and a life, shining with Maclean's special gift for calling the reader's attention to arts of all kinds—the arts that work in nature, in personality, in social intercourse, in fly-fishing."—Kenneth M. Pierce, Village Voice

Norman Maclean (1902-90), woodsman, scholar, teacher, and storyteller, grew up in the Western Rocky Mountains of Montana and worked for many years in logging camps and for the United States Forestry Service before beginning his academic career. He retired from the University of Chicago in 1973.
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front cover of A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition
A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition
Norman Maclean
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Just as Norman Maclean writes at the end of "A River Runs through It" that he is "haunted by waters," so have readers been haunted by his novella. A retired English professor who began writing fiction at the age of 70, Maclean produced what is now recognized as one of the classic American stories of the twentieth century. Originally published in 1976, A River Runs through It and Other Stories now celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary, marked by this new edition that includes a foreword by Annie Proulx.

Maclean grew up in the western Rocky Mountains in the first decades of the twentieth century. As a young man he worked many summers in logging camps and for the United States Forest Service. The two novellas and short story in this collection are based on his own experiences—the experiences of a young man who found that life was only a step from art in its structures and beauty. The beauty he found was in reality, and so he leaves a careful record of what it was like to work in the woods when it was still a world of horse and hand and foot, without power saws, "cats," or four-wheel drives. Populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, and set in the small towns and surrounding trout streams and mountains of western Montana, the stories concern themselves with the complexities of fly fishing, logging, fighting forest fires, playing cribbage, and being a husband, a son, and a father.

By turns raunchy, poignant, caustic, and elegiac, these are superb tales which express, in Maclean's own words, "a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by." A first offering from a 70-year-old writer, the basis of a top-grossing movie, and the first original fiction published by the University of Chicago Press, A River Runs through It and Other Stories has sold more than a million copies. As Proulx writes in her foreword to this new edition, "In 1990 Norman Maclean died in body, but for hundreds of thousands of readers he will live as long as fish swim and books are made."
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Rocky Mountain Heartland
Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming in the Twentieth Century
Duane A. Smith
University of Arizona Press, 2008
This is a lively history of three Rocky Mountain states in the twentieth century. With the sure hand of an experienced writer and the engaging voice of a veteran storyteller, the well-known historian Duane A. Smith recounts the major social, political, and economic events of the period with verve and zest. Smith is thoroughly familiar with his subject and has a genuine enthusiasm for the history of the region. Written with the general reader in mind, Rocky Mountain Heartland will appeal to students, teachers, and “armchair historians” of all ages.
 
This is the colorful saga of how the Old West became the New West. Beginning at the end of the nineteenth century and concluding after the turn of the twenty-first, Rocky Mountain Heartland explains how Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming evolved over the course of the century. Smith is mindful of all the factors that propelled the region: mining, agriculture, water, immigration, tourism, technology, and two world wars. And he points out how the three states responded in varying ways to each of these forces.
 
Although this is a regional story, Smith never loses sight of the national events that influenced events in the region. As Smith skillfully shows, the vast natural resources of the three states attracted optimistic, hopeful Americans intent on getting rich, enjoying the outdoors, or creating new lives for themselves and their families. How they resolved these often-conflicting goals is the modern story of the Rocky Mountain region.
[more]

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Savage West
The Life and Fiction of Thomas Savage
O. Alan Weltzien
University of Nevada Press, 2022
Thomas Savage (1915—2003) was one of the intermountain West's best novelists. His thirteen novels received high critical praise, yet he remained largely unknown by readers. Although Savage spent much of his later life in the Northeast, his formative years were spent in southwestern Montana, where the mountain West and his ranching family formed the setting for much of his work.

O. Alan Weltzien's insightful and detailed literary biography chronicles the life and work of this neglected but deeply talented novelist. Savage, a closeted gay family man, was both an outsider and an insider, navigating an intense conflict between his sexual identity and the claustrophobic social restraints of the rural West. Unlike many other Western writers, Savage avoided the formula westerns— so popular in his time— and offered instead a realistic, often subversive version of the region. His novels tell a hard, harsh story about dysfunctional families, loneliness, and stifling provincialism in the small towns and ranches of the northern Rockies, and his minority interpretation of the West provides a unique vision and caustic counternarrative contrary to the triumphant settler-colonialism themes that have shaped most Western literature. Savage West seeks to claim Thomas Savage's well-deserved position in American literature and to reintroduce twenty-first-century readers to a major Montana writer.
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Senator Thomas J. Walsh of Montana
Law and Public Affairs, from TR to FDR
J. Leonard Bates
University of Illinois Press, 1999
This is the first comprehensive biography of Thomas J. Walsh, the Democratic senator from Montana from 1913 to 1933 who was best known for his role in uncovering the Teapot Dome scandal. J. Leonard Bates places Walsh in his colorful and tumultuous times, illuminating Montana history and politics as well as national movements including Progressivism, internationalism, Prohibition, war, and so-called normalcy.
 
Walsh fought throughout his long career against corruption and monopoly power. During his early years as a lawyer-politician in Helena, he was often in conflict with the "Copper Kings" and other powerful figures. As a senator, he became an internationalist, working throughout the 1920s for naval disarmament, the World Court, the St. Lawrence Seaway, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact for the "outlawry" of war.
 
In his most celebrated coup, breaking open the Teapot Dome scandal of 1923-24, Walsh revealed that the secretary of the interior had accepted "loans" from oil men in return for leases of U.S. naval oil reserves. Working through the Public Lands Committee of the Senate, Walsh enjoyed support for his investigation from members of both parties, and the Supreme Court endorsed his interpretation of the scandal in 1927. Shortly before his death, he presided over the Democratic National Convention that nominated Franklin Roosevelt and served for a brief time as a key figure in the new leader's circle.
 
Drawing on archival sources of unprecedented depth, including personal letters between Walsh and his first wife, Elinor McClements Walsh, Bates's expansive study paints a richly detailed portrait of an influential and principled figure whose political career spanned world war, depression, and the administrations of six presidents.
 
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front cover of Shadows on the Klamath
Shadows on the Klamath
A Woman in the Woods
Louise Wagenknecht
Oregon State University Press, 2021
In 1973, Louise Wagenknecht was just another college graduate, but unlike many, she wanted to go home, back to the Klamath Mountains where she was raised. When a job offer from the Klamath National Forest gave her that chance, she jumped at it. She landed in the logging town of Happy Camp, where she’d spent part of her childhood, as chronicled in her previous memoirs, White Poplar, Black Locust and Light on the Devils.

With Shadows on the Klamath, Louise Wagenknecht completes her trilogy about life in remote northwestern California. In this new work, she recounts her years in the Forest Service, starting as a clerical worker on the Klamath National Forest before moving to a field position where she did everything from planting trees to fighting fires.  

Her story is about a Forest Service in transition, as forest management practices began to shift. Not least among these changes was the presence of women in the ranks—a change that many in the Forest Service resisted. Wagenknecht blends the personal and professional to describe land management in the West and the people who do it—their friendships, rivalries, and rural communities.

Anyone with an interest in the Klamath-Siskiyou region, or the history of women in natural resource agencies, or the many issues associated with industrial forestry, should read this book for its valuable firsthand perspective. General readers interested in the rural West and personal memoir will also be richly rewarded.

 
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Supplying Custer
The Powder River Supply Depot, 1876
Gerald R. Clark
University of Utah Press, 2014
The Battle of the Little Bighorn is one of the best-known events in the history of the American West. Questions surrounding Custer’s fate have been discussed and researched at length, but details about the transportation and logistics of military supplies have not been thoroughly investigated. Archaeologist Gerald Clark stumbled upon the remnants of a supply depot while surveying the area near the confluence of the Yellowstone and Powder Rivers. It turned out to have been established by General Terry during the Sioux War and utilized by Custer and part of the 7th Calvary.
     The book details the items recovered archaeologically, including ale and soda bottles, cartridges, packing crates, and a horseshoe and ceramic doll. It also addresses the army’s knowledge of this area and how the supply depot fit into the broader military campaign. This book connects archaeology and history to explore how the American military planned, maneuvered, and operated on the northern plains from the end of the Civil War through 1876.
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front cover of This Is Our Land
This Is Our Land
Grassroots Environmentalism in the Late Twentieth Century
Ferguson, Cody
Rutgers University Press, 2015
In the last three decades of the twentieth century, the environmental movement experienced a quiet revolution. In This is Our Land, Cody Ferguson documents this little-noted change as he describes the efforts of three representative grassroots groups—in Montana, Arizona, and Tennessee—revealing how quite ordinary citizens fought to solve environmental problems. 
 
Here are stories of common people who, confronting environmental threats to the health and safety of their families and communities, bonded together to protect their interests. These stories include successes and failures as citizens learned how to participate in their democracy and redefined what participation meant. Equally important, Ferguson describes how several laws passed in the seventies—such as the National Environmental Policy Act—gave citizens the opportunity and the tools to fight for the environment. These laws gave people a say in the decisions that affected the world around them, including the air they breathed, the water they drank, the land on which they made their living, and the communities they called home. Moreover, Ferguson shows that through their experiences over the course of the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, these citizen activists broadened their understanding of “this is our land” to mean “this is our community, this is our country, this is our democracy, and this is our planet.” As they did, they redefined political participation and expanded the ability of citizens to shape their world. 
 
Challenging us to see activism in a new way, This is Our Land recovers the stories of often-unseen citizens who have been vitally important to the environmental movement. It will inspire readers to confront environmental threats and make our world a safer, more just, and more sustainable place to live.    
 
 
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front cover of Tribal Government Today, Revised Edition
Tribal Government Today, Revised Edition
James J. Lopach
University Press of Colorado, 1998
An account of Fourth World peoples within a First World nation, Tribal Government Today, Revised Edition, is a critical analysis of the contemporary progress of Indian tribes toward self-government and economic sufficiency. Focusing on seven reservations in Montana representing the diverse opportunities and problems facing Indian tribes in the West, this book approaches tribal government from the twin perspectives of reservation politics and the legal context within which reservation conflicts must be solved.
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front cover of White Man's Water
White Man's Water
The Politics of Sobriety in a Native American Community
Erica Prussing
University of Arizona Press, 2011
In recent years, efforts to recognize and accommodate cultural diversity have gained some traction in the politics of US health care. But to date, anthropological perspectives have figured unevenly in efforts to define and address mental health problems. Particularly challenging are examinations of Native peoples’ experiences with alcohol.

Erica Prussing provides the first in-depth assessment of the politics of Native sobriety by focusing on the Northern Cheyenne community in southeastern Montana, where for many decades the federally funded health care system has relied on the Twelve Step program of Alcoholics Anonymous. White Man’s Water provides a thoughtful and careful analysis of Cheyenne views of sobriety and the politics that surround the selective appeal of Twelve Step approaches despite wide-ranging local critiques. Narratives from participants in these programs debunk long-standing stereotypes about ”Indian drinking” and offer insight into the diversity of experiences with alcohol that actually occur among Native North Americans.

This critical ethnography employs vivid accounts of the Northern Cheyenne people to depict how problems with alcohol are culturally constructed, showing how differences in age, gender, and other social features can affect involvement with both drinking and sobriety. These testimonies reveal the key role that gender plays in how Twelve Step program participants engage in a selective and creative process of appropriation at Northern Cheyenne, adapting the program to accommodate local cultural priorities and spiritual resources. The testimonies also illuminate community reactions to these adaptations, inspiring deeper inquiry into how federally funded health services are provided on the reservation.

This book will appeal to readers with an interest in Native studies, ethnography, women’s studies, and medical anthropology. With its critical consideration of how cultural context shapes drinking and sobriety, White Man’s Water offers a multivocal perspective on alcohol’s impact on health and the cultural complexities of sobriety.
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front cover of The WPA Guide to 1930s Montana
The WPA Guide to 1930s Montana
Work Projects Work Projects Administration
University of Arizona Press, 1994
First published in 1939, this nostalgic guide includes chapters on Montana's natural setting, history, economy, and cultural life as of half a century ago, plus separate entries for Billings, Butte, Great Falls, Helena, and Missoula--which at the time boasted four hotels and five-cent bus fares. There then follow, in the WPA Guide tradition, 18 tours that crisscross the state and point out not only natural splendors along the way but also such noteworthy historic sites as Custer Battlefield, the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, Boothill Cemetery in Virginia City, and the site of the "holing-up" shanty of Calamity Jane. Fourteen additional tours--four for roads, ten for trails--guide readers through Glacier National Park.
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Young Men and Fire
Norman Maclean
University of Chicago Press, 1992
On August 5, 1949, a crew of fifteen of the United States Forest Service's elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness. Two hours after their jump, all but three of these men were dead or mortally burned. Haunted by these deaths for forty years, Norman Maclean puts back together the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy.

Young Men and Fire won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992.

"A magnificent drama of writing, a tragedy that pays tribute to the dead and offers rescue to the living.... Maclean's search for the truth, which becomes an exploration of his own mortality, is more compelling even than his journey into the heart of the fire. His description of the conflagration terrifies, but it is his battle with words, his effort to turn the story of the 13 men into tragedy that makes this book a classic."—from New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, Best Books of 1992

"A treasure: part detective story, part western, part tragedy, part elegy and wholly eloquent ghost story in which the dead and the living join ranks cheerfully, if sometimes eerily, in a search for truth and the rest it brings."—Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune

"An astonishing book. In compelling language, both homely and elegant, Young Men and Fire miraculously combines a fascinating primer on fires and firefighting, a powerful, breathtakingly real reconstruction of a tragedy, and a meditation on writing, grief and human character.... Maclean's last book will stir your heart and haunt your memory."—Timothy Foote, USA Today

"Beautiful.... A dark American idyll of which the language can be proud."—Robert M. Adams, The New York Review of Books

"Young Men and Fire is redolent of Melville. Just as the reader of Moby Dick comes to comprehend the monstrous entirety of the great white whale, so the reader of Young Men and Fire goes into the heart of the great red fire and comes out thoroughly informed. Don't hesitate to take the plunge."—Dennis Drabelle, Washington Post Book World

"Young Men and Fire is a somber and poetic retelling of a tragic event. It is the pinnacle of smokejumping literature and a classic work of 20th-century nonfiction."—John Holkeboer, The Wall Street Journal

"Maclean is always with the brave young dead. . . . They could not have found a storyteller with a better claim to represent their honor. . . . A great book."—James R. Kincaid, New York Times Book Review
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front cover of Young Men and Fire
Young Men and Fire
Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition
Norman Maclean
University of Chicago Press, 2017
A devastating and lyrical work of nonfiction, Young Men and Fire describes the events of August 5, 1949, when a crew of fifteen of the US Forest Service’s elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness. Two hours after their jump, all but three of the men were dead or mortally burned. Haunted by these deaths for forty years, Norman Maclean puts together the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy in Young Men and Fire, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Alongside Maclean’s now-canonical A River Runs through It and Other Stories, Young Men and Fire is recognized today as a classic of the American West. This twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Maclean’s later triumph—the last book he would writeincludes a powerful new foreword by Timothy Egan, author of The Big Burn and The Worst Hard Time. As moving and profound as when it was first published, Young Men and Fire honors the literary legacy of a man who gave voice to an essential corner of the American soul.
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