At their peak, Montana lumber mills employed more than 13,000 workers in over three hundred sawmills. Today fifteen mills with 2,700 employees remain. Retired Montana Historical Society library manager Brian Shovers examines the reasons for the decline and the persistence of smaller family-owned mills. (9/28/2019)

Adept at both political and business manipulations, timber baron A. B. Hammond emerged as one of Montana’s wealthiest and most powerful individuals. Dale Burk, owner of Stevensville’s Stoneydale Press and a former journalist, explores the practice of clear-cutting on the Bitterroot National Forest during the 1950s and 1960s. Burk’s reporting in the Missoulian during the early 1970s ultimately led to a major reform of logging practices on U.S. Forest Service lands nationwide. (9/28/2019)

Native Americans were Montana and Wyoming’s original hard-rock miners, conducting extensive pit and trench excavation at important sources of stone, including several obsidian sources in Yellowstone National Park. In his talk, University of Montana professor of anthropology Dr. Doug MacDonald describes the traditional use of two important obsidian sources in Yellowstone—Obsidian Cliff and Cougar Creek—and proposes ideas on ways to better utilize these sites in interpreting the park’s Native American past.

Although home to indigenous nomadic peoples for more than ten thousand years, Montana remained one of the last regions to attract academically trained archaeologists. Montana State University instructor and PhD student Nancy Mahoney considers how, between 1880 and 1950, this lapse allowed a thriving community of amateurs and avocationalists to amass collections of Native artifacts, a practice that has ongoing consequences for the public stewardship of Montana’s prehistoric past.

Libby’s past was based in natural resource extraction, predominately logging and mining. Today, however, neither industry exists to underpin the economy and provide employment. Montana State University PhD candidate Jennifer Dunn examines what aspects of its history Libby chooses to highlight as it re-creates its image as a pristine outdoor destination.

Montana Standard editor and author David McCumber discusses the investigative work that he and his partner, Andrew Schneider, conducted into health issues surrounding the mining of asbestos in Libby. McCumber provides the backstory behind the pair’s journalistic efforts as well as the far-reaching impacts their award-winning articles had in uncovering a national scandal.

Crowning a prominent hillside in Bozeman, the Life of Montana Insurance Company (LOMIC) building is often perceived as a modernist temple, but research reveals that it was not built until 1979, years after its Neo-Formalist stylistic cousins were constructed. Bozeman preservation architect Lesley Gilmore unveils how this came to be and why LOMIC vacated the building as early as 1984.

Montana State University graduate student Kirke Elsass investigates why Montana’s built environment has as much concrete as it does. He also examines the way in which the concretization of Montana—between 1880 and 1910—illustrates the entanglement of peoples’ material experience and their modes of thinking, as well as the intersection of geologic and human histories. (9/28/2019)

Montana State University PhD student Micah Chang discusses Sleeping Buffalo Hot Springs near Saco, a cornerstone of continuity and community pride for the last century. The popular attraction defied decades of regional economic decline throughout the twentieth century; Chang provides suggestions for how the Hi-Line can continue forward in a time of depopulation. (9/28/2019)

Montana State University PhD student Casey Pallister examines the buffalo bone industry of the 1880s through a cultural lens. After briefly outlining the industry, Pallister considers such factors as who participated in bone hunting, how hunters and non-hunters envisioned their labors, and the ways in which gender roles, racial dynamics, and imaginings of the West impacted the practice and its place in memory. (9/28/2019)