From the earliest days of non-Native settlement of Montana, when
Chinese immigrants made up more than 10 percent of the territory's
population, Chinese pioneers played a key role in the region's
...development. But this population, so crucial to Montana's history,
remains underrepresented in historical accounts, and popular
attention to the Chinese in Montana tends to focus on sensational
elements-exoticizing Chinese Montanans and distancing their lived
experiences from our modern understanding. The Middle Kingdom
under the Big Sky seeks to recover the stories of Montana's
Chinese population in their own words and deepen understanding of
Chinese experiences in Montana by using a global lens. Mark T.
Johnson has mined several large collections of primary documents
left by Chinese pioneers, translated into English here for the
first time. These collections, spanning the 1880s through the
1950s, provide insight into the pressures the Chinese community
faced-from family members back in China and from non-Chinese
Montanans-as economic and cultural disturbances complicated
acceptance of Chinese residents in the state. Through their own
voices Johnson reveals the agency of Chinese Montanans in the
history of the American West and China.
Black Montana Wood, Anthony W
2021, 2021-07-01
eBook
Black Montana argues that the state of Montana, in its capacity as a settler colony, worked to exclude the Black community that began to form inside its borders after Reconstruction.  
Historians and novelists alike have described the vigilantism that took root in the gold-mining communities of Montana in the mid-1860s, but Mark C. Dillon is the first to examine the subject through ...the prism of American legal history, considering the state of criminal justice and law enforcement in the western territories and also trial procedures, gubernatorial politics, legislative enactments, and constitutional rights.
Using newspaper articles, diaries, letters, biographies, invoices, and books that speak to the compelling history of Montana's vigilantism in the 1860s, Dillon examines the conduct of the vigilantes in the context of the due process norms of the time. He implicates the influence of lawyers and judges who, like their non-lawyer counterparts, shaped history during the rush to earn fortunes in gold.Dillon's perspective as a state Supreme Court justice and legal historian uniquely illuminates the intersection of territorial politics, constitutional issues, corrupt law enforcement, and the basic need of citizenry for social order. This readable and well-directed analysis of the social and legal context that contributed to the rise of Montana vigilante groups will be of interest to scholars and general readers interested in Western history, law, and criminal justice for years to come.
Providing new insights into women's struggle for equality, this historical study shows the true story of the women of old Montana. With few career options available in the 19th century, many of the ...most independent and enterprising women turned to the world's oldest profession for a lucrative source of income. Author Lael Morgan brings to life the lively and eccentric characters who tamed the West's wildest region from the time of the gold rush to the election of the first woman to U.S. Congress: Chicago Joe, with her addiction to handsome men and high finance; Yow Kum, an enslaved Chinese prostitute; the enterprising, successful black prostitute named Lizzie Hall; and Carmen, a "full blossomed Spanish rose who would just as soon stick a stiletto into your gizzard as stand at the bar and have a drink with you." An unbiased exploration of an open society and an unforgettable time in American history, this work showcases how some of these remarkable characters suffered the fate of disease, violence, and alcohol and drug addiction, while a surprising number prospered.
Southwest Montana is beautiful country, evoking mythologies of freedom and escape long associated with the West. Partly because of its burgeoning presence in popular culture, film, and literature, ...including William Kittredge's anthology The Last Best Place, the scarcely populated region has witnessed an influx of wealthy, white migrants over the last few decades. But another, largely invisible and unstudied type of migration is also present. Though Mexican migrants have worked on Montana's ranches and farms since the 1920s, increasing numbers of migrant families—both documented and undocumented—are moving to the area to support its growing construction and service sectors. The Last Best Place? asks us to consider the multiple racial and class-related barriers that Mexican migrants must negotiate in the unique context of Montana's rural gentrification. These daily life struggles and inter-group power dynamics are deftly examined through extensive interviews and ethnography, as are the ways gender structures inequalities within migrant families and communities. But Leah Schmalzbauer's research extends even farther to highlight the power of place and demonstrate how Montana's geography and rurality intersect with race, class, gender, family, illegality, and transnationalism to affect migrants' well-being and aspirations. Though the New West is just one among many new destinations, it forces us to recognize that the geographic subjectivities and intricacies of these destinations must be taken into account to understand the full complexity of migrant life.
As Big as the West Milner II, Clyde A
2008, 2010-05-27, 2008-10-24
eBook
Granville Stuart (1834-1918) is a quintessential Western figure, a man whose adventures rival those of Wyatt Earp, Buffalo Bill, or Sitting Bull, and who embodied many of the contradictions of ...America's westward expansion. Stuart collected guns, herded cattle, mined for gold, and killed men he thought outlaws. But he also taught himself Shoshone, French, and Spanish, denounced formal religion, married a Shoshone woman, and eventually became a United States diplomat. In this fascinating biography, Clyde Milner and Carol O'Connor trace Stuart's remarkable trajectory from his youth in an Iowa agricultural settlement to a mining camp in Gold Rush California to his rough-and-tumble life in Montana and his rise to prominence as a public figure.
In On the Road Again, William Wyckoff explores Montana s changing physical and cultural landscape by pairing photographs taken by state highway engineers in the 1920s and 1930s with photographs taken ...at the same sites today. The older photographs, preserved in the archives of the Montana Historical Society, were intended to document the expenditure of federal highway funds. Because it is nearly impossible to photograph a road without also photographing the landscape through which that road passes, these images contain a wealth of information about the state s environment during the early decades of the twentieth century. To highlight landscape changes -- and continuities -- over more than eighty years, Wyckoff chose fifty-eight documented locations and traveled to each to photograph the exact same view. The pairs of old and new photos and accompanying interpretive essays presented here tell a vivid story of physical, cultural, and economic change.
Wyckoff has grouped his selections to cover a fairly even mix of views from the eastern and western parts of the state, including a wide assortment of land use settings and rural and urban landscapes. The photo pairs are organized in thirteen visual themes, such as forested areas, open spaces, and sacred spaces, which parallel landscape change across the entire American West.
A close, thoughtful look at these photographs reveals how crops, fences, trees, and houses shape the everyday landscape, both in the first quarter of the twentieth century and in the present. The photographs offer an intimate view into Montana, into how Montana has changed in the past eighty years and how it may continue to change in the twenty-first century.
This is a book that will captivate readers who have, or hope to have, a tie to the Montana countryside, whether as resident or visitor. Regional and agricultural historians, geographers and geologists, and rural and urban planners will all find it fascinating.
InThe Coming Man from CantonChristopher W. Merritt mines the historical and archaeological record of the Chinese immigrant experience in Montana to explore new questions and perspectives. During the ...1860s Chinese immigrants arrived by the thousands, moving into the Rocky Mountain West and tenaciously searching for prosperity in the face of resistance, restriction, racism, and armed hostility from virtually every ethnic group in American society. As second-class citizens, Chinese immigrants remained largely insular and formed their own internal governments as well as labor and trade networks, typically establishing communities apart from the main towns. Chinese miners, launderers, restaurant keepers, gardeners, railroad laborers, and other workers became a separate but integral part of the American experience in the Intermountain West.Although Chinese immigrants constituted more than 10 percent of the Montana Territory's total population by 1870, the historical records provide a biased and narrow perspective, as they were generally written by European American community members. Merritt uses the statewide Montana context to show the diversity of Chinese settlements that has often been neglected by archival studies. His research highlights how the legacy of the Chinese in Montana is, or is not, reflected in modern Montana identity and how scholars, educators, professionals, and the public can alter the existing perception of this population as the "other" and perceive it instead an integral part of Montana's past.
Born of encounters between Indigenous women and Euro-American men in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Plains Metis people occupied contentious geographic and cultural spaces. Living ...in a disputed area of the northern Plains inhabited by various Indigenous nations and claimed by both the United States and Great Britain, the Metis emerged as a people with distinctive styles of speech, dress, and religious practice, and occupational identities forged in the intense rivalries of the fur and provisions trade. Michel Hogue explores how, as fur trade societies waned and as state officials looked to establish clear lines separating the United States from Canada and Indians from non-Indians, these communities of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry were profoundly affected by the efforts of nation-states to divide and absorb the North American West.Grounded in extensive research in U.S. and Canadian archives, Hogue's account recenters historical discussions that have typically been confined within national boundaries and illuminates how Plains Indigenous peoples like the Metis were at the center of both the unexpected accommodations and the hidden history of violence that made the "world's longest undefended border."
