Montana Books

Having been raised near the Continental Divide and spending summer vacations on Red Rock Pass and the CD, the photos in this book bring a flood of memories. Leland stood where I rode horses and hiked as a child and where summer vacations are spent as an adult. Having stood on the same hillside Leland took the magnificient sunset photograph of Montana's Centennial Valley for the book's cover page, I have truely seen in life the magnificient colors and majestic scenery presented by Leland Howard's photography. The written text by Lynna Howard is as well done with thorough detail of all the areas they hiked and all her special humor especially telling about hiking and camping in a "Grizzly Bear Recovery Area" and the humorous tales sprinkled through several pages about two Llamas Popeye and Pogo. Hiking on to the Lemhi Range and viewing Borah Peak the highest peak in Idaho in the Lost River Range was a view more than fifty miles. Lemhi Pass brings lots of Lewis and Clark history and the Sacajawea Memorial Camp. Through Chief Joseph Pass there are tales of snow in July, a vanashing CD trail, and Lynna's tough job of modeling at Little Lake. By early October there is snowfall and ice on Twin Lakes. Lynna gives a short history lesson about Big Hole National Battlefield and the Nez Perce Chief Joseph, how he fought to save his people from the U.S. Army, after he, Chief Joseph had so helped guide Lewis and Clark. The glacier carved peaks are truely rugged, nearly inaccessable areas in the Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness Area. The reader learns about "Trodes" and proposed routes for the CDT, and the discomforts and dangers of Hypothermia. And then there are the dangers of Lynna hiking off by herself and finding lots of bear scat and a wolf mistaken for Leland's pet dog Tempest. Rogers Pass to Marias Pass brings humor of grizzly stories, camping in Bear Creek Corridor, and the depth of description of scenery and surroundings near Bighorn Lake. The Bob Marshall Wilderness is an area of grizzlies, deep sucking bogs, Ruffed Grouse, deer, mountain goats, coyotes, and extreme geological formations with thorough explainations by Lynna of what has happened the last 175 million years. The hikers are assisted by mule trains, cowboys, and there is a lost soul found. On to the Canadian Border--what can I say--simply God's Country, glaciers, water falls, more grizzlies. By late September it can be snowy and bitter cold in Glacier with the park service trail crews removing seasonial bridges from waterways. Always most welcome along the CDT was the support crew and "Mom's Mobile Wilderness Cafe". "Along Montana and Idaho Continental Divide Trail" is a magnificient publication of Photographic Art for the dedicated hikers like Leland and Lynna as well as arm chair hikers who simply want to dream.

This wonderful book by Lynna and Leland Howard is a far cry from the usual coffee table photography book. The humorous, personable writing style of the author had me laughing all the way through the trail hiking story, which is woven amongst the incredible photographs. As magestic and awe-inspiring as the Divide Trail is, Lynna and Leland bring it within reach and touch upon the realism of the hike. The mountainside conifers under snow and the miles of wildflowers that stretch along the ranges will make you sigh with wonder, while the stories of Pogo the llama, and the list of clever bear tips will split your seams. You will savor every photograph and read every word. Highly recommended!

Patrick Morris has written an exceptional book detailing Anaconda's unique history. He captures the flavor of a city whose birth was sculpted by the great dreams of pioneer capitalists (those famous warring copper kings) and very hard-working pioneering men and women. To read this history of a town built upon a copper smelting industry, as documented through the prism of Anaconda perspectives--and not just as another sideline adjunct to Butte's storied copper mining--is a long overdue pleasure. This is a very readable book that speaks to Anaconda's importance to the copper mining and smelting industry in Montana.

Seems very factual and concise about the early history of the town, Marcus Daly the man and the Anaconda company. Very interesting and I am sure that everyone will enjoy reading it. Very good insight into the area history.

Reincarnation is one of the bedrock concepts of Metaphysical Studies. The idea of birth, death, and rebirth is the foundational belief systems of millions of people around the world. Although born in Melbourne, Australia, C. D. Montana feels that she has a lifelong connection to the Lakota Indians which led her to explore her own past lives and her relationship with the spirit world. The result of her inquiries and studies is "Another Place, Another Time: The Reincarnation Of Crazy Horse". Now in an expanded and updated second edition, this extraordinary account of the spiritual world includes Montana's close relationship with her spirit guide Maryanne. It was through the aid of her spirit guide (and many other spirits) that enabled Montana to uncover amazing proofs of her past life as the Native American warrior leader Crazy Horse. "Another Place, Another Time" is a fascinating and well-written memoir that will prove of special interest to students of Metaphysical Studies in general, and direct spirit world guidance in particular.

ANOTHER PLACE, ANOTHER TIME is C.D. Montana's autobiographical account of a challenging yet inspirational period in her life as she became aware of her deep connection with Crazy Horse of the Oglala Sioux tribe. Montana's story begins in Australia, where she was born and raised, and finds its way across an ocean and all the way to South Dakota and Wyoming, as her conversations with her spirit guide led her to more fully explore memories of past lifetimes, particularly a past life as an Oglala Sioux.

My favorite part of this book is the 'final words' chapter which provides answers to many long-standing questions about Crazy Horse. What makes Montana's story especially powerful is how candidly she describes some of the heartbreaking personal hardships she underwent at the same time as she was experiencing remarkable miraculous insights and signs from her past life. While some readers may be concerned about an Australian woman being the reincarnation of Crazy Horse, I find Montana's down-to-Earth presentation both honest and refreshing, with immense value to anyone interested in the Sioux, Crazy Horse, and the subject of reincarnation.

I have use this drug/herb for years. It is will known is foreign countries like France and Panama. Excellent for bruises and blows. Speeds recovery period after surgery. Minimized swelling after surgery and trauma. I have had this book for years. I own the last printing in 1992. A must have medical remedy book.

I think this book is long time coming and very informative. Arnica is awesome and needs to be talked about more!

Awesome job! About time!

This is a great book of images and poetry, ostensibly detailing the life of the midwestern farmer-- but, so much more than that, the son/father chronicle that works its way into every page. If you can read the introduction to this book without shedding a tear, please give your father a call and try to rediscover what's missing.

Volkmer has an uncanny instinct to capture more than just "the thing" (which, I think, all too oftens characterizes contemporary poetry, writers reticent to comment), but rather the psychological and emotional context for things-- not just things in time, but moments in time. And what makes this book particularly tragic is the obvious honesty that these moments cannot be, can never be, replayed.

The pictures work much the same way, but the words pull this work up from tired (but important) Time-Life photos of dust bowl hardships to the heart of soul of the relationships among man, son, machine and survival.

Bravo!

Two artists work from their hearts -- a photographer with an obvious love for the meanings and visual power of grain elevators, the other a poet whose graceful, plainspoken words brings to life the smells, the sweat, and the sentiments of the plains spirit.

Okay, that's too hokey by half, but this is a grand book. The poetry is great -- even the poet's foreword is a pleasure to read -- and the photographs show the beauty and variability, even personalities, of the tallest things on the prairies. Easily worth the price, for anyone who has a soft spot in their heart for these grand structures.

This is an incredible book that tells pioneer stories in their own words. The interviews capture the sense of community from the pioneer era as well as a wide range of other emotions. I felt like I had gone back in time. I highly recommend this book to any lover of history anywhere!

Longhorn Cattle to Homesteads. The interviews in this book capture the era in an extraordinary and colorful way. It makes you laugh and cry and wonder at the spirit of those early pioneers. This is truly an amazing book!

This book is great for the young and the old. I have learned a lot from it and my daughter will too. This makes a great baby gift that can last a lifetime! My only complaint is that U of M is featured, not MSU (go CATS!).

Fantastic!!! WOW! What a great treasure for fans of the "Treasure State'
I was hoping that the letter "M" would have more to do with the various "M's" on Montana college campuses, but Myrna Loy is also one of my favorite classic Hollywood stars.
Can't wait to read it to my daughter!

By VICTORIA TILNEY McDONOUGH for the Missoulian

Reading Philip Burgess' poems is like looking at old black-and-white photographs, the sharp grays and whites sun-faded with time, and yet the clarity of the faces and images so revealing that at times you have to look away.

"Badlands Child," Burgess' collection of poems, is full of ache. Though the poems take us from rural Montana to Vietnam, across the United States, over oceans and deserts and mountains to Spain, Morocco and Normandy, and then finally back to Montana, there is a common denominator of heartbroken lives, of silent observation and numbness, of hollow loneliness. And yet, there are moments of love and appreciation so ripe that all of that pain seems justifiable, redeemed somehow, the human condition as it is meant to be.

In "Weather Report From Home," the pull between away and home is like bare skin against cold metal - it is familiar, familiar yet wholly uninvited. Sewn together with big, loopy stitches, there is guilt and sadness, regret, relief:

Curious, that when you hear the old man
loud and hollow over the party line
tell of three days rain after a long dry spell,
even though you've been thirty years gone
from that lean, dusty place
you still feel the extravagant wetness
of those first few raindrops on a sun-tender forearm.

Far from Montana, "Saigon Whore" is told from the point of view of the title character, not of the soldier. She wonders and speaks, her questions perhaps not too far from those of the soldier:

I cannot see my life before me, I cannot see love.
I come into the bar where Mick Jagger sings
of dissatisfaction and I search each soldier's heart
for stars with which to create a necklace,
a constellation of a man and woman planting rice
beneath a sky of silent blue.

Burgess' collection is enriched with a small spattering of old photographs, the majority of which are from the Burgess family archives dating back to the Civil War. Each is beautiful and stark, reinforcing the images we have read of a dance below a "guillotine moon," fence posts guarding "the border of what's left of a man's spring dreams," an old Chevrolet truck resting "in the powdery cleavage of the hills," a stag with "three legs frozen in failed leap," and the sister, in the lounge of a mental hospital, who "sways like a metronome, arms trembling across her emaciated chest." These photographs, dropped seemingly effortlessly within the text, are like poems themselves - you squint, searching for signs, for truths, for a reason why when you know there are none.

The poem "L.A. Coyote" leaves us hearing the haunting cry of this desert creature, and perhaps seeing ourselves in the reflection of his unblinking eyes:

The L.A. coyote learns to find grace in alienation,
to bless betrayal through slightly bared teeth,
and to relish the chilly decay that rides on winds
blown through the nooks and crannies of worn cadavers.

The coyote learns that all passions are temporary,
that water can be tasted only as you die of thirst,
and that true warmth is never without cold.

Burgess was raised on an isolated ranch in eastern Montana. Currently, he lives and works in Missoula.

First a disclaimer.

I know nothing about poetry. In fact, as a general rule, I'd rather read an environmental impact statement or a brief in a federal tax case than try to decipher the higher meaning hidden behind the words and phrases of the most gifted poets.

That's why I was amazed by a book of poetry mailed to me recently from Touch of Light Publishing, a Missoula company specializing in works peculiar to Montana.

Without much interest - more out of a sense of obligation to at least take a look - I opened Philip J. Burgess' Badlands Child, a collection of 80 biographical poems.

From the opening offering, "The Caretaker," I was hooked. It may have been that the imagery was so familiar - the long expanses of near-desert that stretch north and south along Highway 2 on Montana's northern tier, groves of Russian olives planted as windbreaks generations ago and the railroad when it was still the Great Northern.

According to biographical material sent with the book, Burgess grew up on an isolated Eastern Montana ranch along the Missouri, and, as with anyone who takes landscape seriously, it left its mark in all that came after.

Even the powerful impressions left by his tour in Vietnam and on his subsequent wanderings around the world are tainted by the dust of a Montana childhood. (...)

(...)

The poet lives in Missoula now, where he spent 13 years advocating for and counseling veterans. The poetry collection represents 20 years of work, a lifetime of watching the chips fall where they may.

Mark H. Brown and W. R. Felton wrote two well-researched accounts of the photographs of Laton Alton Huffman (1854-1931): "The Frontier Years" in 1955 and "Before Barbed Wire" in 1956. Both books are delightful reading, providing rare insights into the stories behind Huffman's superb photos and the daily life of old west pioneers before the arrival of railroads and wire fences.

The books contain rare and fascinating visual documentation of the American west. The earlier book, "The Frontier Years," focuses on the soldiers, Indians, buffalo hunters and early inhabitants of eastern Montana. The second book, "Before Barbed Wire," is probably the single best collection of photos capturing life of life of early ranchers on the open range. With the "eye of an artist and the perspective of a historian," Huffman accurately preserved the American west of an earlier time.

Huffman came to Montana Territory in December, 1878, as post-photographer at Fort Keogh, near the current Miles City. This military fort was established two years earlier in 1876, after the stunning Indian annihilation of all of Custer's troops at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. From this primitive headquarters, General Nelson Miles lead the final campaigns against the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne Indians.

Huffman started photographing the soldiers, the buffalo hunters, and soon the gamblers, the drinkers, the bounty hunters and others in and near Milestown. Huffman became friends with area Indians, and his clear and well composed Indian portraits rank among the very best in American history. Huffman's interest expanded to include area ranchers and their homes and environment.

His early photographs were taken with a bulky, home-built camera that used fragile glass plate negatives. Huffman's preservation of the early years of frontier life reflected his love for the rugged inhabitants and their land.

Authors Felton and Brown visited Miles City, Montana, in the winter of 1950-51 and had photographer Jack Coffrin print pictures from Huffman's negatives. These photographs later became the illustrations for "The Frontier Years" and "Before Barbed Wire." Each book contains stories of a bygone era documented by 125 superb photographs. Note: The quality of the photographs is a wee bit sharper in the original volumes published by Henry Holt than in the reprint editions from Bramhall House.

Mark H. Brown and W. R. Felton wrote two well-researched accounts of the photographs of Laton Alton Huffman (1854-1931): "The Frontier Years" in 1955 and "Before Barbed Wire" in 1956. Both books are delightful reading, providing rare insights into the stories behind Huffman's superb photos and the daily life of old west pioneers before the arrival of railroads and wire fences.

The books contain rare and fascinating visual documentation of the American west. The earlier book, "The Frontier Years," focuses on the soldiers, Indians, buffalo hunters and early inhabitants of eastern Montana. The second book, "Before Barbed Wire," is probably the single best collection of photos capturing life of life of early ranchers on the open range. With the "eye of an artist and the perspective of a historian," Huffman accurately preserved the American west of an earlier time.

Huffman came to Montana Territory in December, 1878, as post-photographer at Fort Keogh, near the current Miles City. This military fort was established two years earlier in 1876, after the stunning Indian annihilation of all of Custer's troops at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. From this primitive headquarters, General Nelson Miles lead the final campaigns against the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne Indians.

Huffman started photographing the soldiers, the buffalo hunters, and soon the gamblers, the drinkers, the bounty hunters and others in and near Milestown. Huffman became friends with area Indians, and his clear and well composed Indian portraits rank among the very best in American history. Huffman's interest expanded to include area ranchers and their homes and environment.

His early photographs were taken with a bulky, home-built camera that used fragile glass plate negatives. Huffman's preservation of the early years of frontier life reflected his love for the rugged inhabitants and their land.

Authors Felton and Brown visited Miles City, Montana, in the winter of 1950-51 and had photographer Jack Coffrin print pictures from Huffman's negatives. These photographs later became the illustrations for "The Frontier Years" and "Before Barbed Wire." Each book contains stories of a bygone era documented by 125 superb photographs. Note: The quality of the photographs is a wee bit sharper in the original volumes published by Henry Holt than in the reprint editions from Bramhall House.

At last! An historical novel that's interesting, amusing, and *entertaining* and so *real* you feel you need to clean your boots every time you read a piece of it. Yeah, the pictures are faded. They're *old*, dammit, *real*. These are *everybody's* folks, the way they grew up and loved and lost their limbs just so we could be here. John Sayles, *do* read these books. You'll have another "Matewan" in your hands.

'Labor of love' seems inadequate in describing BEHIND THESE MOUNTAINS, authored by resident-historian, Mona Leeson Vanek. This engaging book narrates virtually every known event of significance in the region, through the use of oral tape recordings, letters, and written documentation. Beginning before the arrival of David Thompson, it contains determined homesteaders, exciting log drives down river, pioneering merchants, establishment of schools and churches, and the horrors of the 1910 forest fire. Countless stories of individuals, ranging from mildly amusing to hilarious enliven this history. Where else in a book of this sort can one find characters who vow to escape from a local jail "disguised as a bunch of radishes?" or a shingle-mill owner who closed down his mill after having to ante up compensation for too many workers' sawed-off fingers - at $1,000 per finger. BEHIND THESE MOUNTAINS stands as the definitive history of its region, the lower Clark's Fork of the Columbia River and the Bull River valley in Sanders County, Montana. The chapter on the Forest Service's arrival in the valley clearly describes the bitter struggles between pioneer ranger Augustus Ferdinand Silcox and local businessmen, led by Clifford R. Weare, who wanted to continue their unfettered exploitation of the public domain. The more than 200 photographs are positioned in the book to match and enhance the text, but reporoduction of many of them obviously is more faded and washed out than the author would have liked. The thorough index is a boon for genealogists. A complete set of end notes contain material that enhance the stories, and if readers ignore the footnotes, they'll miss some stirring accounts of vigilante activity during the 1880s. Excellent accounts of the building of the Northern Pacific Railroad, which opened the northwest area of Montana to settlement, provide vivid accounts of problems along this 'most difficult and expensive division' of the entire NPRR line. Vanek has done her community and Montana a great service