Introduction
The first Montana guidebook appeared in 1865 and described only one route—the Mullan Military Wagon Road, completed three years earlier—yet it took in a great deal of territory all the same. Its author, Captain John Mullan, who built the road, began his single “tour” at Walla Walla and carried it across the mountains of Idaho and Montana to Fort Benton, allowing forty-seven days for the six-hundred-mile trip. He described the Indians and the road conditions a traveler might meet, gave detailed advice on equipment and the care of horses and wagons, and cheerfully declined responsibility for anyone who took an unauthorized short cut.
Mullan’s road, the Writers’ Project noted in its preface, has long since been obliterated from the landscape and from all but the oldest memories; a network of modern highways now spans the country he wrote about. After a hiatus of two or three generations, the Project offered the Montana of 1939 in its place—presenting a relatively short but fascinating past as the background against which the daily experiences and concerns of the people, and the patterns of contemporary economic, social, and cultural life, are set. Above all it tried to convey the beautiful and varied natural setting of the state’s recreational country, the high “shining mountains” that earlier travelers had struggled across.
The book was, as its preface acknowledged, deeply indebted to many hands. Faculty members of Montana State University and Montana State College served as consultants; the regional office of the U.S. Forest Service opened its informational resources; park naturalists advised on the Glacier National Park chapter; and writers such as James Willard Schultz and the late Frank B. Linderman contributed authentic material on several of the Indian tribes and reservations. Reference librarians in Missoula and at the state university, and the staff of the Montana State Historical Library, rounded out the research behind the volume.
Montana is arranged like its companions in the series. General-background essays move from contemporary Montana through the natural setting and conservation, the era before the white man, history, the ethnic groups, agriculture, labor, industry, transportation, education, the arts, the press, and recreation. Descriptions of Billings, Butte, Great Falls, Helena, and Missoula follow, and then eighteen highway tours cross the plains and ranges of the Treasure State. A substantial final section is devoted to Glacier National Park, with its motor routes along the Going-to-the-Sun Highway and a series of trail tours into the high country, before a glossary, chronology, and bibliography close the book.
Sponsored by the state Department of Agriculture, Labor and Industry and first issued by Hastings House in 1939—with later printings carried into the 1950s—the guide is reproduced here as the Writers’ Project left it. The preface and the complete table of contents appear exactly as printed.
Contents
Bibliographic Record