1988 Yellowstone Fires
A look back at the devastating 1988 fires in Yellowstone National Park from 20 years on, written by the Chronicle's Scott McMillion. Read more
News
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Bozeman Daily Chronicle - Special Report
Serving Southwest Montana since 1911.
If you live in a fire-prone rural area, the government will pay
you wages to reduce the risk of losing your home to a forest
fire. Read more The fires of 1988 spawned an incredible amount of scientific investigation, with more than 250 research projects focused on fire. Scientists came from around the nation to study the effects of big fir Read moreSave money, and maybe your home
The aftermath and the lessons
Bozeman Daily Chronicle - Local
Serving Southwest Montana since 1911.
Airplanes line the runway at the Bozeman Yellowstone
International Airport recently. Read more Lights shine on the set inside the Ellen Theatre. The Taylor
Foundation has gifted the theatre with a high-end digital projector
and new screen. The first event using the new equipment will be a
touri Read moreBozeman Yellowstone International Airport
Excerpt: Ghastly Night
Ellen Thetre
NewWest.net - Bozeman, MT
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New West is a next-generation media company dedicated to the culture, economy, politics, environment and lifestyle of the Rocky Mountain West. Our core mission is to serve the Rockies with innovative, participatory journalism and to promote conversation that helps us understand and make the most of the dramatic changes sweeping our region.
Colorado State University English professor David Mogen recounts his peripatetic 1950's Montana childhood with good humor and insight in Honyocker Dreams: Montana Memories (University of Nebraska Press, 231 pages, $21.95). His father worked as a teacher and superintendent for school districts throughout Montana. Every few years, Mogen's parents would move with their six children to a new town for a different job--the towns the family lived in included Missoula, Ennis, Box Elder, Billings, Whitewater, and Froid, where Mogen graduated from high school. (When he went to college at Columbia in New York, one of his new classmates informed him that he pronounced the name of his hometown incorrectly.)
Although there were many differences between these places--such as the contrast between lively Missoula, where Mogen's dad completed his studies through the G.I. Bill, and the "time warp" they encountered in Whitewater, population 75, where electricity had only recently been introduced--Mogen sees all of these towns as places where the prior generations enacted their "honyocker dreams."
David Mogen will discuss his book at Matter Bookstore in Ft. Collins on August 25 at 7:30 p.m. Read more New West closes out National Poetry Month with two poems by Katie Phillips, whose Driving Montana, Alone won the 2010 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition. Phillips grew up in Maryland and Colorado and lived in Montana before moving to a suburb of Chicago. She has a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Iowa and feels fortunate that she can walk to work with her dog, Sasha. Her poems have been published in the Cider Press Review, the Raintown Review, the White Pelican Review, and elsewhere. Driving Montana, Alone is illustrated by several of Phillips' photographs of Montana, and the title poem was recently featured on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac.
Moab
I can see myself
growing lonely at the corner
of Uranium and Main. Read more Charles Wilkinson has written several notable books on a wide range of issues facing the modern West. His latest book, The People Are Dancing Again: The History of the Siletz Tribe of Western Oregon (University of Washington Press, 576 pages, $35) is a fascinating, at times heart-wrenching, historical account of the tribe he worked to help restore in the seventies. The book traces the long history of the Siletz, from the days preceding contact with Euro-American settlers, through war, relocation, and eventual termination as a federally recognized tribe. It continues into the modern era with the tribe's restoration and subsequent revival of traditional heritage, arts, and language. Widely regarded as one of the nation's pre-eminent experts in tribal and natural resources law in the West, Wilkinson is Distinguished Professor and Moses Lasky Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School, and is the author of many books, including The Eagle Bird: Mapping a New West and Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations.
New West: This book obviously grew from a deep personal regard for the Siletz people, and for their remarkable survival amidst immense adversity. How did this project first come about?
Charles Wilkinson: I was an attorney at the Native American Rights Fund here in Boulder in the seventies, and had represented the Menominee tribe of Wisconsin in being restored. Congress had terminated tribes in the fifties, broken the treaties, sold off the land, and ended all federal services, with the idea that they'd just blend into the larger society. The policy was a colossal failure. When the Menominee were the first tribe to be restored, people from Siletz came out and said they wanted to achieve restoration, and I was assigned to the case.
Very soon after that, by coincidence I went to teach at the University of Oregon Law School and I was now within two hours of the reservation. That meant that I got to see a lot of the Siletz people. It was the time of the fish wars in the Northwest, when tribes had been awarded fifty percent of the salmon runs, so Indian issues were very sensitive and there was strong opposition from the fishing community to the bill. There were a lot of public meetings, at which the tribal members and I would go to explain that the bill didn't affect fishing rights. There were a lot of late night meetings and I just got to know people really well. Read moreWhat's A 'Honyocker Dream'? David Mogen Explains in New Memoir
Two Poems from Katie Phillips' 'Driving Montana, Alone'
An Interview With Charles Wilkinson, Author of Siletz History 'The People Are Dancing Again'
