The Montana Heritage Project
The Meagher County Poor Farm sits on the western edge of White Sulphur Springs, Montana. You turn off beside the once-grand old Ringling house and follow a winding gravel road until you come to what,…
Category: Work
Friday Afternoons in the Chief Historian’s Office
He was the kindest man I’ve known: scholar, gentleman, Lutheran, dad, husband, boss, Chief Historian of the National Park Service (NPS). Although he had too little confidence in himself, his political instincts were spot on….
Off to an Inauspicious Start
Montana Preservation I’d spent that 1980 April morning interviewing. The Montana Historical Society’s Preservation Office Program Manager job was up for grabs. Notwithstanding the fact that I’d just snagged a great position in the National…
A Preservation Office Pastiche
Montana Preservation I’d write a more fulsome history of my 15 years as Montana’s State Historic Preservation Officer, if I could remember them. That alone is a puzzle. How is it that the defining position…
Wrangling With Teenagers
Montana Preservation They were looking for a fight – those mining company executives and disdainful forest supervisors. The subdivision developers, the highway engineers, the power company managers, and, of course, the university presidents. Many were…
The Late Baby – The Surprise Kid
Montana Preservation It was always going to be tricky—adopting the State Historic Preservation Office into the Montana Historical Society’s established family. But needed. For a decade the Parks Division of the Department of Fish and…
The Last Library
Don’t count them out. Or think them made redundant by Google. They are damn pure magic. Portals into time travel. Archetypes of standing stone circles, temples, pantheons of all the gods we’ve worshipped over time….
The Incomparable Old Red Barn
I’ve lived for 40 years in breathtaking landscapes. Where, from our deck at the Land, the Backbone of the World—40 miles of the Rocky Mountains—stretches into infinity. Where night after night, my home range—the Big…
Fish Out of Water
If I had any doubts, the jig was up the afternoon that our Regional Park Managers quarterly meeting morphed into a Missouri River float trip. We had assembled in moderately rustic facilities at the Beartooth…