Someone threw a pitcher at Bob Weir and the Grateful Dead never came back to Missoula. Masked men forced a sheepherder to make them coffee before spending eight hours clubbing his flock to death. A 19-year-old named Cromwell Dixon became the first person to fly over the Continental Divide — and was dead a month later. An entrepreneur carted a 365-pound "petrified man" from Montana to New York City and failed spectacularly. Long George Francis, outlaw and poet, crashed his car on Christmas Eve with a broken leg and crawled through a blizzard toward an increasingly uncertain safety.
These are true stories, drawn from the literary journalism of Distinctly Montana magazine and adapted into produced audio by editor-in-chief Joe Shelton. The show takes Montana's mythology seriously enough to look at it honestly — and what it finds is both darker and more wonderful than the postcard version. Each episode pairs careful narration with sound design and music in service of the story.
Episodes run between twelve and twenty-two minutes and release monthly. Subscribe to Distinctly Montana magazine at www.distinctlymontana.com/subscribe.
Charley Pride: From the Helena Smelter to Country Western Superstar
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.
22 Sept 2026
Some Notes Towards a Metaphysics of the Ninepipes Reservoir Turtles
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.
4 Sept 2026
One Handshake at a Time: JFK's Courtship of Montana
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.
25 Aug 2026
Fur Traders and Flying Saucers: James Lumley and the Cadotte Pass UFO
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."
17 Aug 2026
The Bison Hunters
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.
3 Jul 2026
How Bobby Became a Legend
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.
9 Jun 2026
The Life and Afterlife of Comanche
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.
26 May 2026
The Devil's Brigade in Helena
In 1942, a secret joint American-Canadian commando unit trained in the hills outside Helena, Montana, learning to ski, parachute, and kill silently with a custom-designed knife built for one purpose. By night, the same men crowded into Last Chance Gulch bars and danced at the USO. Before they shipped out, more than two hundred had married Helena girls. They went on to fight some of the most brutal engagements of the European war. After, some of them came back to Helena, to the wives they'd married in a rush, and tried to be ordinary men again.
1 May 2026
I Didn't Die in Montana: Hank Williams Jr. on Ajax MT
On August 8, 1975, Hank Williams Jr. set out to hunt mountain goats on Ajax Peak, on the Montana-Idaho border near Wisdom. He was 26, the son of a country music legend, and the heaviest of the three hikers crossing a late-summer snowfield near the summit. He stepped into his guide's footprint. Something under his right foot moved. What followed was a fall so catastrophic that the men who reached his body couldn't believe he was still alive.
30 Mar 2026
Conquering the Divide
In the early days of aviation, Montana's Continental Divide was the prize every flyboy wanted — and the mountain range that kept breaking their planes. A barnstormer crashed in a gulch. A racing legend couldn't catch a break in Butte. Then a nineteen-year-old kid who'd built his first flying machine at fourteen arrived in Helena with something to prove. He had one month left to live.
Distinctly Montana Stories brings literary journalism from the pages of Distinctly Montana magazine to life in audio.
Sound effects and music sourced from Epidemic Sound.
11 Mar 2026
Frank Lloyd Wright's Montana Dreams
In 1909, Frank Lloyd Wright was exhausted, trapped in a failing marriage, and desperate to run away with another man's wife. That same year, Chicago financiers hired him to design a utopian orchard town in the Bitterroot Valley—an ambitious vision that would never be built. What Wright left behind in Montana, and what was taken from it a century later, is a story of ambition, loss, and the strange persistence of dreams.
Written by Joseph Shelton. Music licensed through Epidemic Sound. Subscribe to the magazine at www.distinctlymontana.com/subscribe
2 Mar 2026
Who the Hell Was Montana Frank?
In this episode of Distinctly Montana Stories, join me, Joseph Shelton, as I delve into the enigmatic life of Montana Frank McCray, a figure who straddled the line between myth and reality in the American West. Known as the last of Buffalo Bill's scouts, Montana Frank claimed a storied past filled with adventure, including performances in Wild West shows and connections with iconic figures. However, as we explore archived articles and personal accounts, a more complex picture emerges. Was he a legendary frontiersman or a vaudeville performer spinning tales to captivate his audience? Tune in to uncover the truth behind Montana Frank and the allure of Western folklore.
19 Feb 2026
The Last Ride of Long George Francis
Long George Francis was many things: rodeo champion, poet, outlaw, and the self-proclaimed Robin Hood of the Hi-Line. He'd survived hotel fires, rodeo injuries, and sixteen months as a fugitive. He'd never killed anyone. And on Christmas Eve, 1920, a judge trusted him enough to grant him a few days of freedom before he reported to prison—just long enough to deliver candy and toys to the woman he loved.
He never made it.
The Last Ride of Long George Francis was written by Nick Mitchell for Distinctly Montana magazine. Narrated and produced by Joe Shelton. Music licensed from Epidemic Sound.
Distinctly Montana Stories brings literary journalism from the pages of Distinctly Montana magazine to life in audio. Subscribe to Distinctly Montana Magazines at www.distinctlymontana.com/subscribe
19 Feb 2026
The Petrified Man of Livingston Goes East
In 1899, a 365-pound mummified figure with a bullet hole in his forehead was pulled from the Missouri River and put on display across Montana for two bits a head. Doctors couldn't explain him. A drunken miner swore he was the ghost of a beloved territorial governor. Montana legend Liver Eatin' Johnson insisted he was an old friend named Antelope Charley.
The Petrified Man was going on tour.
Credits: Written by Nick Mitchell. Produced by Joe Shelton. Music from Epidemic Sound.
Distinctly Montana Stories brings literary journalism from the pages of Distinctly Montana magazine to life in audio. Subscribe to Distinctly Montana Magazines at www.distinctlymontana.com/subscribe
18 Feb 2026
Blood on the Wool
In this gripping episode of Distinctly Montana Stories titled "Blood on the Wool," I delve into the harrowing world of early twentieth-century Montana sheepherders. Life on the range was often monotonous, but that all changed one fateful night when a sheepherder encountered a violent gang intent on wreaking havoc among his flock. This episode explores the dark chapter known as the Sheep Wars, where economic tensions between cattlemen and sheepherders erupted into brutal confrontations. Join me as I recount the chilling details of these attacks, the sheer brutality involved, and the lasting impact on the lives of those who endured it. Tune in to uncover a lesser-known but significant part of Montana's history.
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