“Hope and Bacon” in the Montana Quarterly
I have a story out in the Summer 2013 edition of the Montana Quarterly magazine. It’s an expanded version of an essay that appears in Stories from Montana’s Enduring Frontier. Here’s how it begins:
“We live in an ant hill, and the world outside is very big and very far away.”
So wrote “Suzette,” the celebrity journalist from Philadelphia, during her weeklong sojourn in the Montana mining camp of Altyn in 1901. Also known as Swift Current, Altyn was two days’ ride from the nearest railroad stop. Thus, as Suzette put it, “The Boers might invade England and the news would not awaken a hundredth part of the interest that would the story that Old Man Harris has jumped French Pete’s claim.”
Located not far from what is now Many Glacier Hotel in Glacier National Park, Altyn was one of the last gasps of old-fashioned prospecting fever in most of the continental United States...
It's not available online, so to read the whole thing, you’ll have to subscribe. Subscribing to this magazine -- purchased last autumn by one of its editors -- is worthwhile for more than just my story. It effectively captures life in Montana through great writing and photography.
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