The sixth volume in the Montana Mainstreet series, A Guide to Historic Missoula points readers to the buildings, historic sites, and parks that act as monuments to Missoula's--and Montana's--history.
Bozeman has been home to many pasts. Founded in the 1860s, the town has grown from a frontier farming settlement to a bustling city and center of academic excellence. This guide tells the stories of the places and people that built Bozeman and the efforts to preserve the town's colorful history.
Much of Missoula's history lies beneath the surface. As in many Old West cities, cavernous underground tunnel systems purportedly hid countless nefarious activities, from clandestine prostitution and Chinese opium dens to booze running during Prohibition. These sordid tales captivate today's residents and beg questions about the city's furtive past. Did local elite gentlemen mask their carnal habits there? Did John Wayne really use the passageways to run personal errands unnoticed? Author and urban archaeologist Nikki Manning ventures below to reconcile oral history with archaeological data in a fascinating exploration of Missoula's subterranean labyrinths.
Three voices. Three acts of defiance. One mass injustice. The story of camp as you’ve never seen it before. Japanese Americans complied when evicted from their homes in World War II -- but many refused to submit to imprisonment in American concentration camps without a fight. In this groundbreaking graphic novel, meet JIM AKUTSU, the inspiration for John Okada’s No-No Boy, who refuses to be drafted from the camp at Minidoka when classified as a non-citizen, an enemy alien; HIROSHI KASHIWAGI, who resists government pressure to sign a loyalty oath at Tule Lake, but yields to family pressure to renounce his U.S. citizenship; and MITSUYE ENDO, a reluctant recruit to a lawsuit contesting her imprisonment, who refuses a chance to leave the camp at Topaz so that her case could reach the U.S. Supreme Court. Based upon painstaking research, We Hereby Refuse presents an original vision of America’s past with disturbing links to the American present.
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.
This is the story of the Rankins, a family that embodied the risk and ambition that transformed America. John Rankin arrived in the West chasing the adventure of gold mining but soon turned to ranching and building in the new town of Missoula. There he met Olive Pickering, who had left New Hampshire in 1878 to become a teacher and seek a husband on the American frontier. John and Olive's children continued to demonstrate their parent's ambition and nerve. Their son became one of the biggest landowners in the country, one of the first personal injury lawyers, and a crusader against railroads and mining. Jeannette became the first woman in a national legislature, voted against two world wars and led marches protesting the Vietnam War. As a dean, Harriet helped develop the modern co-educational university. Edna traveled the world advocating for birth control. The Rankins faced both national adulation and condemnation for the choices they made. Their family story concerns independence and education, activism, the boundaries created by gender, religious choices, and the changing meaning of the West.
'A modern society has grown out of what it was yesterday. So understanding history is essential to understanding ourselves. Helena: An Illustrated History is a priceless historical collection of faces and stories about our special state's capital and the lives and events that have shaped it-and us.' --Mark Racicot, Governor, State of Montana
Explore the hayloft, stalls, and hardware of a Montana barn and you will learn much about the state’s farm and ranch traditions. Crib barns, with walls of timber stacked like Lincoln logs, show the influence of French-Canadian and Scandinavian immigrants. Gambrel-roofed barns, which shed heavy snowfall and provide roomy haylofts, tell of the long Montana winters that necessitated ample hay storage. Tack rooms, once filled with harnesses and gear, tell of workhorses given shelter in heavy-duty stalls nearby. Beyond their utilitarian functions, barns are simply beautiful. Some stand proudly, their freshly painted red lines contrasting sharply with the golden wheat in surrounding fields. But some, less fortunate, are falling into disrepair. Marked by rotting timbers and broken windowpanes, these crumbling buildings still have much to teach us. Historic Barns of Montana presents the best, most unique, most significant, and most beautiful of these barns. Photographer Tom Ferris explored barns inside and out across Montana, snapping the hundreds of photographs in the book. Authors and architectural historians Chere Jiusto and Christine Brown help readers understand the significance of what they are looking at and tell the stories of individual barns. Historic Barns of Montana recognizes these buildings as both useful and beautiful, encourages their preservation, and honors the ranch and farm families that built them.
Glacial Lake Missoula and Its Humongous Floods tells the gripping tale of a huge Ice Age lake that drained suddenly--not just once but repeatedly--and reshaped the landscape of the Northwest. The narrative follows the path of the floodwaters as they raged from western Montana across the Idaho Panhandle, then scoured through eastern Washington and down the Columbia Gorge to the Pacific Ocean.
When Montana became the 41st state in 1889, an old pinoeer lamented, “Now she's gone to hell,” but most Montanans embraced statehood as the inevitable culmination of one of the most rapid and dramatic transformations in United States history. Only twenty-five years after becoming a territory, Montana was profoundly different: the buffalo slaughtered and gone, the Indian wars fought and ended, the tribal nations confined to reservations, cattle and sheep raised by the tens of thousands, Butte exploded into a rich, wide-open town, and railroads built to link the once remote land with the world. Montana 1889 tells the many stories of this overwhelming transformation by entering into the lives, emotions, and decisions of diverse peoples cooperating and competing on this contested ground. As in Ken Egan’s highly acclaimed Montana 1864, these stories are told month by month, deftly showing the flow and friction of events and the unfolding destinies of individuals and nations.