Montana - Old Versus New by Sarah Anderson

"That will be a $5 fine," said the highway patrol police officer apologetically, after stopping me for speeding, the needle of my speedometer having shot past eighty and off the end of the dial. This was Montana, 'Big Sky Country', where the car licence plate is a series of inverted 'v's followed by a long straight line: mountains in the west and then miles and miles of flat, flat land. The Rocky Mountains in the west of the State are brown and arid during the summer months with sprinklings of coniferous trees on their parched slopes; odd, in a region where rivers and creeks full of trout criss-cross the landscape.

This western part of Montana is experiencing a cultural clash. It is not a new phenomenon. The native people were appalled by the trappers, traders, buffalo hunters and prospectors. These mountain men in their turn were horrified by the missionaries, white settlers and ranchers; the ranchers saw the next influx of sheep herders and settled farmers as repulsive. But whereas the cultural clashes of the past came in waves from the east, this time the incomers are mostly from the west, from California; the frontier is inverting and turning back on itself and the new wave of newcomers is not popular. As a local Bozeman resident said, "If I find out someone's from somewhere far away I am rude to them. I get annoyed and angry. I feel you were in your place and it got ruined. Now you are coming to my place to ruin it." His views are far from unique, as the messages on the T-shirts imply: "Montana Sucks: Now go Home and Tell Your Friends" and "Beautify Montana: Put a Californian on a bus." A notice on the way into Livingston, a small town in the west, shows how the residents have even resorted to irony to express their feelings: "Have you Hugged a Tourist Today?"

The changes are both rapid and radical and the 'Cappuccino cowboys' and lycra-clad mountain bikers with their 'ranchettes' and trophy homes, are sneered at, but the old economy, which mostly depended on ranching, as well as the now finished extractive industries of logging and mining, could certainly no longer sustain the population. The new economy is based on real estate and recreation, and although the newcomers are turning the old 'Wild West' into the new 'Virtual West' [a term used by William Kittredge to describe the practice of turning simple land into safe, watered, walled, stuccoed interpretations of the West], a new West had to emerge, and these newcomers, many of whom are from Hollywood, do have money.

It would be easy to romanticize the past, but far better that it should be appreciated for what it was, with all its shortcomings, and not held up as something sacred. In our culture, which is both environmentally aware and travel crazy, urban dwellers tend to go to the wilderness to search for 'great places and sacred places' in order to get a quick high and to try and capture some of the wild and violent past. The reality is that, as the frontier turns back on itself, the violence has changed from being predominately rural to being predominately urban. It is the cities which are the new 'wild places.' The fragile landscape desperately needs help, but the environmental movement has not provided all the answers. There is a deep suspicion of those environmentalists who do not live in the west, dictating what they believe should happen there.

A barometer of the changes which have taken place in Montana, is the local Livingston bookseller, Sax and Fry, which was founded by the present proprietor’s grandfather in 1883. It moved to its present premises, an unusual square building, in 1914, and then, as now, it concentrated almost exclusively on books on the West, of which there is a huge selection. The present owner remembers going into the shop as a boy to help, and to read comics. Sadly his immediate family is not interested in the shop, but cousins are being primed to continue the business which tries to keep a balance of progress and tradition. The staff immediately suggest that one opens an account, and yet they are still able to hold their own in a small town which now has two other bookshops.

The harsh and Spartan life endured by the original pioneers created an individualistic, independent and tough breed of people whose descendants are now pivotal figures on the extreme right: neo-Nazism and the Ku Klux Klan have strong holds in Montana. Both movements appear to be growing because of the fear of loss of control of an individual's life; jobs and traditional uses of land are both threatened and it is imperative that the newcomers recognize that the local people need to earn a living. As the editor of High Country News, 'a paper for people who care about the west', said, "Logging, mining, grazing: those are part of the west. No one wants to see them go. God, who wants a place with nothing but a bunch of yuppies running around?"