Montana
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By Steve Gardiner
The variety of terrain and vast expanse of the Big Sky state have fueled the imagination of many of Montana's excellent writers. From the grasslands and agricultural plains in the east to the rugged, snow-capped peaks of the northern Rocky Mountains in the west, Montana is synonymous with natural beauty. Glacier National Park, Beartooth Wilderness Area, and the northern section of Yellowstone National Park are some of the highlights.
It is a land packed with history. Explorers, fur trappers, miners, settlers, soldiers, Indians, railroaders, entrepreneurs all played their part in the development of the territory.
Lewis and Clark named dozens of prominent land features and wrote extensively about what they saw here. Signs along the Bozeman Trail mark the sites of numerous battles between Indians and soldiers, the most famous being the defeat of George Armstrong Custer and his troops at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The railroad followed the soldiers and settlers into the territory and many towns and cities developed along its path. These natural features and historical events all played an important part in the development of the literature of Montana.Stories of Indians
Today several Indian reservations exist throughout the state. Writers including
James Welch, George Bird Grinnell, Claude Schaeffer and others have worked to preserve the historic legends of the Kutenai, Cheyenne, Gros Ventre, Crow, Blackfeet, Assiniboine and other tribes of the area. Others like Dorothy Johnson in her books Buffalo Woman and A Man Called Horse and James Welch in Fool's Crow have portrayed Indian life through their fictional work.Stories of Exploration
Lewis and Clark weren't the only explorers who wrote about Montana. George Catlin, John James Audubon and others related their discoveries in the Big Sky country through their literary works.
Explorers are still the subjects of many writings like
Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage, a detailed account of the Lewis and Clark expedition.Stories of Settlers and Cowboys
A.B. Gutherie in The Big Sky and his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Way West,
Will James in the Newberry Medal winner Smokey the Cowhorse, Granville Stuart in Forty Years on the Frontier, and Charles M. Russell in several short writings, created a view of life during the Wild West days of Montana's early history.Contemporary Writing
Mary Clearman Blew recounts her life growing up in Montana in All But the Waltz and Wallace Stegner shares his life in Big Rock Candy Mountain. Norman Maclean relates a tale of family, religion and flyfishing in his highly regarded A River Runs Through It. University of Montana professor K. Ross Toole has written extensively about the history of Montana and Ben Mikaelson has delighted school children with his stories Sparrowhawk Red and Rescue Josh McGuire. David Quammen writes about interesting phenomena in science in Natural Acts and Tim Cahill has kept a generation of armchair adventure travelers thrilled with his tales in Jaguars Ripped My Flesh and Pass the Butterworms. Alan Kesselheim also takes readers along on his adventures in Threading the Currents and Water and Sky . William Kittredge writes about western issues in Owning It All and We Are Not In This Together. Ivan Doig captures what it means to grow up in Montana in This House of Sky and uses Montana settings in Dancing at the Rascal Fair, Ride with Me, Mariah Montana and English Creek. Richard Ford won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel Independence Day in 1996. A long list of poets including Richard Hugo, William Pitt Root, Barbara Taylor Smith, Patricia Goedicke, Bill Hoagland, Greg Keeler, Wallace McRae, Paul Zarzyski and others have called Montana home.Resources
Kittredge, William and
Smith, Annick (editors).The Last Best Place:A Montana Anthology. Helena, MT: Montana Historical Society, 1988.
Newby, Rick and Hunger, Suzanne (editors).
Writing Montana:Literature Under the Big Sky. Helena, MT: Falcon Press, 1996.
Steve Gardiner is an English teacher at Billings Senior High School.