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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 st...
Latest episodes
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12 min
When Yellowstone Erupts: A Geologic Gothic
Some morning in the geologic future, the magma chamber under Yellowstone empties in an instant. The towns of southwest Montana are gone before the sound of the blast can reach them…
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16 min
Charley Pride: From the Helena Smelter to Country Western Superstar
Before he was a country-western legend, Charley Pride tended a furnace at the East Helena lead smelter and played ball for a team sponsored by the plant. He came to Montana to chas…
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23 min
Some Notes Towards a Metaphysics of the Ninepipes Reservoir Turtles
Every spring, on a bend of Highway 93 in the Mission Valley, painted turtles wake from the mud and set out for water, crossing a band of asphalt at a top speed of about seven miles…
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28 min
One Handshake at a Time: JFK's Courtship of Montana
In 1958, John F. Kennedy needed Montana. Montana wasn't sure about him. He was wealthy, Catholic, and from a powerful New England family, glamorous in a state that voted Republican…
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11 min
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 wrot…
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13 min
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 crea…
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16 min
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…
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19 min
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 Te…
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17 min
The Devil's Brigade in Helena
In 1942, a secret joint American-Canadian commando unit trained in the hills outside Helena, Montana, learning to ski, parachute, and kill silently with a custom-designed knife bui…
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13 min
I Didn't Die in Montana: Hank Williams Jr. on Ajax MT
On August 8, 1975, Hank Williams Jr. set out to hunt mountain goats on Ajax Peak, on the Montana-Idaho border near Wisdom. He was 26, the son of a country music legend, and the hea…
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19 min
Conquering the Divide
In the early days of aviation, Montana's Continental Divide was the prize every flyboy wanted — and the mountain range that kept breaking their planes. A barnstormer crashed in a g…
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21 min
Frank Lloyd Wright's Montana Dreams
In 1909, Frank Lloyd Wright was exhausted, trapped in a failing marriage, and desperate to run away with another man's wife. That same year, Chicago financiers hired him to design…
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24 min
Who the Hell Was Montana Frank?
In this episode of Distinctly Montana Stories, join me, Joseph Shelton, as I delve into the enigmatic life of Montana Frank McCray, a figure who straddled the line between myth and…
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12 min
The Last Ride of Long George Francis
Long George Francis was many things: rodeo champion, poet, outlaw, and the self-proclaimed Robin Hood of the Hi-Line. He'd survived hotel fires, rodeo injuries, and sixteen months…
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12 min
The Petrified Man of Livingston Goes East
In 1899, a 365-pound mummified figure with a bullet hole in his forehead was pulled from the Missouri River and put on display across Montana for two bits a head. Doctors couldn't…
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15 min
Blood on the Wool
In this gripping episode of Distinctly Montana Stories titled "Blood on the Wool," I delve into the harrowing world of early twentieth-century Montana sheepherders. Life on the ran…