See If You Qualify BY PAT HILL Last month while planning a road trip with a friend I commented that the weather forecast looked good for the voyage. She looked at me and scoffed. “I don’t believe a word the weatherman says around here,” said my friend, who moved to Big Sky Country about a […]
Shooting Wolves
The Inevitable Result of Reintroduction BY JOHN BADEN The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently delisted the grey wolf from the Endangered Species Act. This generated outcries from many directions and it’s no wonder; few western issues are as emotionally charged as wolf reintroduction, recovery, or regression (to the 1800s). One’s choice of words speaks […]
Born to Run
It’s What Sled Dogs Do Best By David S. Lewis What makes sled dogs run—tearing off from a dead start with so much vigor and enthusiasm that the g-force can knock a musher back on his heels? And what makes them keep running, up to one hundred and fifty miles a day, and for 10 […]
Buffalo Bill Cody’s Cinnabar Cowboys
Cinnabar’s Hugo J. Hoppe Recruited for Cody’s Wild West Show By Bob Moore My wife Darnell’s family has been in Montana since 1863 when her great great-grand-father, Hugo Hoppe, a German immi-grant, had just been discharged from the Second California Cavalry. He had journeyed to the gold fields in 1851 where he learned it was […]
The Healthcare Scam
It Thrives Because the Masses Abdicate Personal Responsibility By David S. Lewis Healthcare has been advanced lately as a human right, something to which all are entitled— like freedom of speech and freedom of assembly—both by Hillary Clinton and the Montana Human Rights Network. Sorry, and don’t get all holier than thou, but healthcare is […]
My Cousin Evel Knievel
In Remembrance of an Old Friend BY PAT WILLIAMS It was a late night in the mid-1960s. I walked into my cousin Nick’s bar out at the nine-mile on Butte’s Harrison Avenue. The joint had a larger crowd than usual and I quickly knew why. Bobby Knievel was there. By then he was becoming Evel […]
How Do You Say Absaroka?
Pronunciations Vary By David S.Lewis Absaroka is absolutely the most confusing of all regional words. How is it pronounced? That depends on who you are and where you live. People new to the area and from elsewhere pronounce the word Ab-suh-ROKE-uh (the last two syllables rhyme with polka), but a dictionary’s pronunciation key does not […]
Mountain Men Still Live in Montana
The Tradition of John Colter and Jim Bridger Survives By Molly Brown Ever wonder what black powder smells like, what life would have been for men like Jim Bridger, John Colter, or Liver Eating Johnson? Plenty of people have and make it their life’s passion to reenact and re-create the time period of what is […]
Shooting a Dog
What Does the Law Say? By David S. Lewis A dog shot dead early this year in Park County caused controversy that raged through April. In newspaper articles, on radio, in letters to the editor, and even on billboards positioned on Interstate 90 by the dog’s owners, people weighed in, often with heated emotion. In […]
Return of the Yellowstone Grizzly
Officially Back from the Brink—Critics Not Satisfied By Pat Hill Grizzly bears in the Yellowstone area have now officially joined the American alligator, grey whale, and peregrine falcon as a “recovered species” according to the par-ameters of the Endangered Species Act (legislation meant to ensure viability of the nation’s wild plants and animals). “The grizzly’s […]