If you're in Helena on a Thursday night, you might hear music and a roar of applause. The State Capital Band is in its 120th consecutive year of playing for the Helena area. The band plays in Memorial Park at 8 pm on Thursday nights - weather permitting.

For all that, they're still very much a Montana company which means that buying a piece of furniture from Black Timber Furniture is buying local. There are obvious benefits to buying local, like keeping money in the state and helping to support Montana's working families.

Distinctly Montana and the Montana Memory Project are proud to feature the winners of the second annual Montana Memory Project Short Story Contest!

I’m old enough to remember the golden age of TV Westerns, when shows like The Rifleman, Have Gun, Will Travel, and Gunsmoke filled the few channels we did get. Hell, I’m old enough to remember getting our first television, an enormous humming Philco...

Burke has lived in Missoula for decades now, and both Robicheaux and the Hollands have found themselves in the Treasure State. His most recent novel, Another Kind of Eden, tells a searing story of violence and mysticism among the changing times of the 1960s.

The thing I love most about Montana is: the warmth and friendliness of the people no matter if they live in a small town like where I live (Superior) or Missoula (where we lived for four years)

She went to retrieve a hat from a trunk, and as she rifled through its contents, she somehow accidentally discharged the pistol into her own head. Suspicion immediately fell on the magician, but after multiple people, including the girl’s mother, said that there was no way that the kindly magician could have killed her, he was found not guilty.

Montana's rich heritage is near and dear to my heart. My desire to learn about that history through the early inhabitants of the land leads to the opportunity to help tell the story of the growth of our society in the West. Reflecting upon the difficulties early peoples faced as they developed a civilization helps tell the story of 19th and 20th century America.

On the last full day of Paul Maclean's life, Sunday, May 1, 1938, he had about $50 in his wallet, having cashed a two-week paycheck. He took his girlfriend, Lois Nash, twenty-nine, a redheaded Irish nurse, to an afternoon White Sox game at Comiskey Park at Thirty-Fifth and Shields.

Home Waters is many things—a son’s exegesis of his father’s work, a memoir of a childhood spent fishing in Montana, an investigation into the death of a family member who is also the subject of a beloved novel, and, above all, a companion piece to Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It.

Cast was first printed in an English document as long ago as 1230, borrowed from an Old Norse verb kasta, “to throw.” This original sense carries through in our modern phrases cast the first stone, cast a net, cast the dice.

But amidst the Olympian chaos and drama was a goddess who worked quietly on behalf of humanity: Hygiea, the Greek personification of good health. Hygiea learned the healing arts from her father, a powerful god of medicine.

"My favorite kind of book to read is one that skirts genre in interesting ways. I received my M.A. in poetry, and I began studying writing seriously as an undergrad by writing non-fiction; but I find that the books and the writing that I’m drawn to most are those that refuse categorization."

McKenna has this to say: "I have traveled the world widely, and I can say with absolute honesty that there is nowhere else in the world I'd rather live than Montana! Montana embodies my spirit, my breath, and my life. Most days I need look no further than out my window to be inspired."

Funnily enough, I started the "After Humans" series in the fall of 2019, before 2020 dropped the hammer on us. I had photos of Lake Hotel in Yellowstone and The Stanley Hotel outside Rocky Mountain National Park where I wanted to add wildlife, which made me think, what would the buildings look like after humans left, and the landscape and animals took them back? It's been a fun challenge to "deconstruct" the hotels' interiors and exteriors and imagine where the buffalo, birds, etc. would roam.

As Montana continues to see growth in its population, rural libraries will need to grow as well. Many libraries that are currently considered “rural” may well be urban. Conversely, if populations within Montana gravitate toward larger urban centers, some rural libraries may find themselves losing service populations. 

Montanans should pay attention to Shakespeare because he was a huge hit with the mountain men, miners, women’s reading groups, and so many others in Montana’s history, and he continues to delight people across our region with wonderful performances by Montana Shakespeare in the Parks.

Hike, it seems, has been very difficult to trace, with no apparent Latin, French, or Germanic ancestry. The Oxford English Dictionary tentatively suggests that hike may be related to another dialectal British word, hoick, meaning “to haul or turn out; to