On Montana’s Indian reservations—where severe economic hardship began long before the 1930s—Native women often played key roles in helping their communities survive. MHS associate editor Laura Ferguson, M.A., tells how tribal members like Indian CCC employee Lucille Otter (Salish) and community organizer Julia Schulz (A’aniniin/Gros Ventre) worked to improve conditions on the reservation during the Great Depression.

Paul Shea, director for the Yellowstone Gateway Museum, discusses the rapid growth of Livingston and the reasons for creating a new county. Shea looks at how, beginning in 1883, the railroad’s plans for shops and a spur line to Yellowstone National Park shaped the growth of Livingston and continued to impact the town for the next 104 years.

Kevin Kooistra, executive director of the Western Heritage Center, explains how the railroad impacted the planning, designing, and promoting of the settlement of Billings. Kooistra demonstrates the ways in which the city of Billings is still affected by choices made by the Northern Pacific Railway in 1882.

Lesley Gilmore, director of Historic Preservation Services for CTA Architects Engineers, discusses how CTA has contributed to the growth of Billings since the company’s founding in August 1938. Gilmore details the philosophical and chronological history of CTA, the progression of styles as evidenced by the firm’s projects and client preferences, and the key personalities responsible as the company grew from two to nearly 450 employees.

Moss Mansion historian Jim Decker examines how Billings became a commercial hub as the result of the early efforts of entrepreneur P. B. Moss. Decker shares stories relating to businesses and institutions still very prominent in the Magic City today, including the Northern Hotel, the sugar beet factory, Rocky Mountain College, the Billings Gazette, and more.

Retired MHS interpretive historian Ellen Baumler discusses how much of what we know about the rituals and beliefs of Montana’s earliest people comes from happenstance encounters with burials and mortuary practices. From Park County’s 12,600-year-old Anzick site to Dawson County’s Hagen Site National Historic Landmark and the more recent “Face on the Rims” in urban Billings, burial sites teach us much about universal beliefs and cultural practices that survived for thousands of years.

MSU PhD candidate LaTrelle Scherffius looks at wildlife photography in eastern Montana in the years between 1880 and 1920, when many increasingly saw nature as something to protect, rather than conquer or control. In 1892, George Bird Grinnell called for hunters to put down the gun and take up the camera. The shift toward “camera hunting” is marked by a transition away from photographs celebrating a hunter’s kill and toward photographs that capture animals in “nature.”

Tim Lehman, professor of history at Rocky Mountain College, examines the wolves of Fergus County and their effects on local economies in Central Montana. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Montana passed bounty laws to create incentives for killing wolves and other predators in an attempt to transform the landscape from a Native American buffalo ecology to a Euro-American cattle economy. Historical records of bounty payments not only reveal patterns in the extirpation of predators but also demonstrate the importance of this infusion of money into the emerging cash economy.

MHS reference historian Zoe Ann Stoltz uncovers the stories behind livestock brands and how their histories are vital to Montana history. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the people and brands associated with eastern Montana, including Will James, Peter Yegen, the XIT, Two Dot Wilson, the Circle Qtr Circle, the Greenough family, and many more tales that involve legendary brands and the Montanans they represented.

Iker Saitua, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Riverside and University of the Basque Country, examines the life of Basque immigrant John Etchart. In 1912, Etchart traveled from Nevada to northeastern Montana looking for new grazing lands. He eventually built up one of the most prominent ranches in the state and ultimately played a major role in other Basque expansion from the Great Basin into Montana.