Arts & Events

Jim Harmon writes, "There always seems to be something amusing, even in some of the serious journalistic accounts. As one paper put it, “Even the grave business of life may be helped on by a joke.”

Can you remember the first valentine you ever sent? The Butte Semi-Weekly Miner, in February 1889, suspected each of us likely could. After all, “it was when you were an apple-faced school boy and walked a mile every morning to the red school house under the hill.”

The Miami-based trio Magic City Hippies made their return to Montana, playing two shows at the Elm in Bozeman and the Wilma in Missoula.

It is Black History Month. Montana’s African-Americans established a voice in state politics, business and society as early as the late 1800s, with the publication of the Colored Citizen newspaper in 1894.

The Montana Museum of Art and Culture has acquired a new collection that director and professor of art history and criticism Rafael Chacón said shaped people’s ideas of the West and offers viewers a chance to reconsider its mythologies.

Andrew Thompson and Hudson Greer opened a general merchandise store offering groceries, hardware, boots and shoes. Thomas Swanton offered the “finest brands of liquors, beer and cigars” at his Liverpool Saloon. There were carpenters and blacksmiths opening businesses as well in the mining camp south of Helena called Hartford.

Marit Olson and Jean Zosel write, "The Squirrel Project is an extension of Garden City Harvest’s Youth Harvest Project. The Youth Harvest Project hires teens to work in the spring, summer and fall farming seasons where they learn job and life skills on farms, at teen-run mobile market stands, and at the Missoula Food Bank."

When work stopped at noon on Saturday, the lumberjacks would bolt from the logging camp in the Blackfoot river area between Blanchard Flats and Kozy Korner near Clearwater Junction and head to Missoula. With money in their pockets, they just wanted to drink and party.

It’s been a while since we’ve perused the writings of one of our favorite Missoula society columnists, “Glitter,” whose scribblings graced the front pages of the Weekly Gazette in the late 1800s.

The stagecoach drivers knew no fear. “They drove like demons and many a timid passenger has wished that he had walked, as the line of stages tore down the hill.” That was the Anaconda Standard newspaper’s description of what it was like to take a stage from Ravalli to the southern shore of Flathead lake in the late 1800s. Specifically, it was story about Charlie Allard’s stagecoach line.