Distinctly Montana Stories

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 got robbed, Bobby let it be known he had merchandise to move cheap and fast—and half the town went home thrilled to be wearing stolen gems, until they looked closer. He would later sell 271 insurance policies to the staf...

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 Terry's column arrived, the bodies on the field had been so changed by sun and wind and the hands of the victors that Terry mistook them for buffalo carcasses. The burial party had eight shovels among them. They used bulle...

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 built for one purpose. By night, the same men crowded into Last Chance Gulch bars and danced at the USO. Before they shipped out, more than two hundred had married Helena girls. They went on to fight some of the most brutal...

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 heaviest of the three hikers crossing a late-summer snowfield near the summit. He stepped into his guide's footprint. Something under his right foot moved. What followed was a fall so catastrophic that the men who reached h...

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 gulch. A racing legend couldn't catch a break in Butte. Then a nineteen-year-old kid who'd built his first flying machine at fourteen arrived in Helena with something to prove. He had one month left to live. Distinctly Mo...

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 a utopian orchard town in the Bitterroot Valley—an ambitious vision that would never be built. What Wright left behind in Montana, and what was taken from it a century later, is a story of ambition, loss, and the strange...

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 reality in the American West. Known as the last of Buffalo Bill's scouts, Montana Frank claimed a storied past filled with adventure, including performances in Wild West shows and connections with iconic figures. Howeve...

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 as a fugitive. He'd never killed anyone. And on Christmas Eve, 1920, a judge trusted him enough to grant him a few days of freedom before he reported to prison—just long enough to deliver candy and toys to the woman he l...

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 explain him. A drunken miner swore he was the ghost of a beloved territorial governor. Montana legend Liver Eatin' Johnson insisted he was an old friend named Antelope Charley. The Petrified Man was going on tour. Credit...

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 range was often monotonous, but that all changed one fateful night when a sheepherder encountered a violent gang intent on wreaking havoc among his flock. This episode explores the dark chapter known as the Sheep Wars, wher...