Episodi

  • When Yellowstone Erupts: A Geologic Gothic

    When Yellowstone Erupts: A Geologic Gothic
    Oct 27 2026
    Some morning in the geologic future, the magma chamber under Yellowstone empties in an instant. The towns of southwest Montana are gone before the sound of the blast can reach them. The people killed in the first minutes, it turns out, are the fortunate ones.
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    12 min
  • Charley Pride: From the Helena Smelter to Country Western Superstar

    Charley Pride: From the Helena Smelter to Country Western Superstar
    Oct 2 2026
    Before he was a country-western legend, Charley Pride tended a furnace at the East Helena lead smelter and played ball for a team sponsored by the plant. He came to Montana to chase the major leagues. He drove 80 miles each way to sing in largely all-white bars for forty dollars a night, worked the molten slag by day, and still believed baseball was his future, right up until one backstage moment, an uninvited guitar, and a single sentence from an old country star changed everything.
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    16 min
  • Some Notes Towards a Metaphysics of the Ninepipes Reservoir Turtles

    Some Notes Towards a Metaphysics of the Ninepipes Reservoir Turtles
    Sep 22 2026
    Every spring, on a bend of Highway 93 in the Mission Valley, painted turtles wake from the mud and set out for water, crossing a band of asphalt at a top speed of about seven miles an hour. They have no way of knowing what a car is. Roughly 350 of them are killed on that road every year. This is an essay about what a small life is worth, the turtle, the sparrow, the mouse turned up by the plow, and about who gets to set the price.
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    23 min
  • One Handshake at a Time: JFK's Courtship of Montana

    One Handshake at a Time: JFK's Courtship of Montana
    Sep 4 2026
    In 1958, John F. Kennedy needed Montana. Montana wasn't sure about him. He was wealthy, Catholic, and from a powerful New England family, glamorous in a state that voted Republican and distrusted every bit of it. So he did the only thing he could. He went town to town, hand to hand, winning Montana one person at a time. A headdress he held but wouldn't wear. Wet socks drying in a hotel sink. A pilot who missed his own flight because he ran into cows at Wolf Creek Canyon. This is the story of how Kennedy courted a state he could never win, and what Montana made of him once he was gone.
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    28 min
  • Fur Traders and Flying Saucers: James Lumley and the Cadotte Pass UFO

    Fur Traders and Flying Saucers: James Lumley and the Cadotte Pass UFO
    Aug 25 2026
    In October of 1865, a fur trader named James Lumley turned up at the Everett House in St. Louis and told the story to whoever would listen, until it reached a newspaperman who wrote it down. The previous September, in the Cadotte Pass, Lumley had seen a light cross the sky and break apart, heard an explosion, smelled sulfur. The next day he found a long gouge torn through the woods and followed it to a rock lodged in the mountainside, covered in markings he was sure had been made by hand. This was more than eighty years before anyone said the words "flying saucer."
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    11 min
  • The Bison Hunters

    The Bison Hunters
    Aug 17 2026
    By the 1880s, killing bison had become a career. The government encouraged it, the market rewarded it, and a certain class of Western men applied themselves to the work with a creativity that is difficult to describe and harder to forget. They studied where to place a shot so the herd wouldn't spook. They learned which animals were worth the most. They found uses for the tongue, the hump, the hide. And when their rifles grew too hot to fire and no water was near, they discovered they could keep shooting anyway. Then, one spring, the hunters arrived on the prairie to begin another season, and found that something had changed.
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    13 min
  • How Bobby Became a Legend, or, The Ballad of Young Evel Knievel

    How Bobby Became a Legend, or, The Ballad of Young Evel Knievel
    Jul 3 2026
    In 1950s Butte, a teenager named Bobby Knievel was scoping out new cars, lifting their hubcaps, then doubling back to sell the owner his own missing property. When Marsh's Jewelry got robbed, Bobby let it be known he had merchandise to move cheap and fast—and half the town went home thrilled to be wearing stolen gems, until they looked closer. He would later sell 271 insurance policies to the staff and the residents of Warm Springs State Hospital. But money and cons were only ever going to hold a kid like this so long. There was a motorcycle coming, and a broken leg, and a jail cell next to a man the cops had already nicknamed Awful.
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    16 min
  • The Life and Afterlife of Comanche

    The Life and Afterlife of Comanche
    Jun 9 2026
    On a hot Sunday afternoon in June of 1876, thousands of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors surrounded 210 cavalrymen and cut them down. Two days later, when General Terry's column arrived, the bodies on the field had been so changed by sun and wind and the hands of the victors that Terry mistook them for buffalo carcasses. The burial party had eight shovels among them. They used bullet casings to pin paper names to the makeshift grave markers. They shot the wounded horses where they stood, after letting them drink. One horse they did not shoot. His name was Comanche.
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    19 min