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By Jim Harmon/Missoula Current The First Interstate Bank building currently occupies the southeast corner of Higgins and Main in downtown Missoula – but it wasn’t always so. At the turn of the 20th century, two other notable businesses were located there: the Star Theater and the California Wine House, operated by Messieurs Thibedeau and Lee. Part of...

Meet the late Dick Venable. A few years back, when asked to write his autobiography, he produced what can only be described as a work similar in size to Tolstoy’s “War and Peace." And that was just Part One.

It was located right in my backyard – where I grew up – yet, I'd neither heard of it nor the story associated with it. Following the devastating forest fires of 1910 (the "Big Burn"), mountaintop lookouts were established as an early warning system. One of them, in the Kootenai National Forest (my backyard, as I grew up in Libby), acquired a rather infamous name in the 1960s: Sex Peak Lookout.

The start of another Griz football season has columnist Jim Harmon harkening back to the 1898 roster, where inaugural UM coach Fred Smith also suited up as a halfback.

Jim Harmon writes, "Ah, if only I had known about Diocletian Lewis. I might today be a man with a full head of hair, rather than a shallow remnant of a male with hardly a single follicle in working order."

Jim Harmon writes, "The Caras family in Missoula dates back to the late 1800s – specifically, to two brothers named Sam and Jim."

Montana’s reliance on volunteer firefighters has a fascinating history. In 1878, the Virginia City newspaper, the Madisonian, praised the work of the town’s volunteers: “The fire brigade did heroic work in extinguishing the flames and preventing the spread” of a fire in a wood shed at William Thompson’s place."

Hundreds of trout, dozens of grouse, hail the size of eggs, watermelons stolen from an old man, naughty boys disrupting the singing school, a sure way to improve school boys’ spelling, a screeching brass band and a bit of Irish humor. Those were the August headlines in Missoula newspapers in 1874.

Only a few decades ago, before plastic bottles were a thing, there were public water fountains.

Zurich American Insurance, part of Swiss-based insurance heavyweight Zurich Insurance Group that was listed by Forbes as the 112th largest public company in the world, has stalled insurance payouts to mine workers and their families for the profit of their own investors, according to a new lawsuit.