The Bobcat Nation

I am in a huge San Francisco history reading kick right now, and it is some really fascinating stuff. So much incredible stuff happened within a few blocks of my apartment, which makes it all the more personal and interesting.

Similarly, I have always had a fondness for Montana history. The immediacy of the subject matter transforms it from something mundane into something personal and alive.

My book collection is pretty small (especially as compared to my Grandma's, which is quite impressive), but I wanted to throw out two of my favorite titles, and I hope to hear any recommendations you guys have as to books I should look into in the future.

Montana Century by Mike Malone

This is an amazing book, which lots of great historical photos (I never outgrew looking forward to the pictures in any book) and a wide breadth of subject matter giving an idea of how our state came to be what it is today. I believe this was also the last book that Malone worked on prior to his untimely death, so it has additional power on a personal level as a result.

The Vigilantes of Montana by Thomas J. Dimsdale

This book is very, very interesting, especially as I read it to be a first-person piece of propoganda used by the Virginia City vigilantes to try to swing support in favor of what was actually a calculated set of political and personal assassinations as opposed to a cleaning up of criminals. After reading this book, with its very thin and suspect "evidence," and then comparing it to other texts on the subject, one begins to see a "hidden" part of history that we don't always hear about (which is the way most history works).

If you guys have any recommendations on some other titles, I would love to hear them. I know for a fact that some of our UM friends should have some great additions to the list -- maybe even some of their own work.

The Princess of the Prarie, by Ronald Iverson

A very thorough history of Belgrade. It was a self published work and copies are very rare, but the are a couple in the Belgrade Library, and anybody at all interested in this small part of the Gallatin Valley ought to check it out.

My dad has a great book-I think it's called the Butte Memory Book. It's a huge collection of photos of Butte from the turn of the century all the way to the maybe the 70's. The photos were taken or collected by a guy named Owen Smithers I believe. Butte's history is so fascinating and colorful and this book really brings it to life.

There is a book called Blind Your Ponies with a deeper underlying story, but on the surface it is about Willow Creek Montana and how basketball is the one thing that brings the town together. Because I am still in school I haven't had a chance to read for than a few pages but my sister read it and said it was a great book.

"mile high, mile deep", which is about guess where... can't remember the name of the irish guy who wrote it, but it was kind of interesting. what i'd really like to find is a history of the chinese in montana/the old west.

i think it was richard o'malley, come to think of it.