2026

Dave Stamey has made it his life’s work to celebrate the rural American west. In the past two decades he has recorded fourteen albums of original music, travelled literally hundreds of thousands [...]

By Gayle M. Irwin into the inaugural class of the Montana Musicians Hall of Fame. Rob’s musical introduction started at an early age. His mother played piano to “work through things,” he said. [...]

By Billie J Olson In 1912, the legendary “Cowboy Artist” Charles M. Russell walked into the newly opened Elks Lodge in Great Falls, Montana, with a rolled- up canvas under his arm. He tossed it [...]

By Billie J Olson In the dust of the 1993 Calgary Stampede, a museum director named Lynn walked into a booth to inspect the Calgary Stampede Trophy. There stood Jay Contway, a man whose hands [...]

Story & Photos By Billie J Olson In the quiet corners of Havre, Montana, sits a man who has spent nearly ninety years proving that mastery is not found in a crowded toolbox, but in a single, [...]

For thirty-four years, Dr. Richard “Dick” Lauritzen was a fixture of the Great Falls Clinic, navigating the high- stakes precision of general surgery. But when he retired in 1998, the man who [...]

By Suzanne Waring Portraiture addresses a person’s identity in an artistic form. It can be a painting, sculpture, photograph, or any other artistic media. Before photography was common, portraits [...]

By Suzanne Waring Portraiture has been part of Peter Reiss’s life since childhood. His grandfather was Winold Reiss, the famous artist who came to Browning, Montana, many summers from 1920-1948 [...]

Born in 1941, Betty Lorraine (Blair) Steele grew up training and riding horses. In her sophomore year of high school, and the two years following, Betty won the all-around at the district level [...]

William C. “Billy” Knorr was born on January 21, 1885, in Poplar. Billy’s father, Phillip Knorr, was a U.S. Army Union Soldier in the Civil War who moved west to Montana and met Billy’s mother, [...]