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Jackie Brennan

The Violence of Frontier Fantasies

Historic examples in advertising of popular western tropes, the romanticization of cowboy culture, and the notion of the interior of the American West as an idyllic place of escape.

Historic examples in advertising of popular western tropes, the romanticization of cowboy culture, and the notion of the interior of the American West as an idyllic place of escape. Clockwise from top left: (1) 1909 Great Northern Railway pamphlet promoting the Flathead Valley's potential for cultivation (Image: Montana Memory Project, University of Montana Mansfield Library) (2) First page of 1948 Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad publication Dude Ranches in Wyoming and Montana and Colorado (Image: Newberry Library Chicago) (3) Great Northern Railway ad for Glacier National Park from a June 1946 issue of National Geographic (4) 1885 cover of Northern Pacific Railroad brochure, “Alice's Adventures in the New Wonderland,” an annual publication devoted to enticing people to Yellowstone by promoting it as a land of curiosities (Image: National Park Service, Yellowstone’s Photo Collection, Brochures & Guides) (5) 1920s brochure from the OTO Dude Ranch inviting prospective dudes to "live the romance of the West"


 

People have been coming to the American West for decades with self-serving fantasies about the escape or salvation it promises them. TFC's own Jackie Brennan explores the historic roots of these fantasies and invites readers to consider how some of our prevailing ideas of regional identity can lead to violence in our communities.


Out here in the geographical West we are challenged by drought, fire, environmental and cultural pressures from the wealthy, politicians bowing to extremism, growing inequities, and fracturing communities. Also, not least of all, the people deluded by Wild West fantasies, who put our communities, our lands, and our wildlife at risk. Some of these myths are crushing us.

—Betsy Gaines Quammen, True West


It was an inauspicious beginning for a Treasure State, for thus was established a social and economic pattern of spoliation which subsequently was impressed upon the laws, customs, and even minds of Montanans...

—Joseph Kinsey Howard, Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome


In the 12 years that I lived largely away from Montana, I noticed my homesickness manifesting in increasingly bizarre ways. As one example, I would sometimes scroll through several counties’ brand books for recognizable family names. Yes, you read that right: brand books. The Montana Department of Livestock publishes one for each of the state’s 56 counties and, as I learned—almost certainly by an accident of restless internet scavenging—you don’t need a physical copy because they’re all available online.


This discovery set the stage for more than a few marathon sessions of pulling up my device’s “Find” command, then tapping out familiar names most likely to have recorded brands. Not long into one casual screen bender through the PDF brand book for Park County (where I grew up), I noticed a pattern bearing out something I already knew about that part of upper Yellowstone River country—namely, the density of households with active brands is far greater in the north end of the county, which is dominated by agricultural land. Probably nine out of every 10 family names I associate with Clyde Park, Wilsall, and the Shields Valley hinterlands have at least one active brand.


By contrast, the south end of Park County where I hail from is surrounded by public land, with National Park Service boundaries extending all the way south to Wyoming’s Teton Range, and Custer-Gallatin National Forest land essentially covering all but a buffer zone of a few miles on either side of Highway 89 between Gardiner and Livingston. The saturation of recorded brands drops precipitously as you work your way further south on the Yellowstone River, and there are only a handful of families in the Gardiner Basin with any. For most of them, their livelihoods aren’t tied to cattle or crops, but in guiding and outfitting services—the modern remnant of a dude ranching industry that got its start in the state about 12 miles north of Gardiner and put Montana on the map for generations of well-heeled eastern tourists.


(1) 2019 photo of the main lodge at the historic OTO Homestead and Dude Ranch—Montana’s first dude ranch. (Image: Yellowstone National Park) (2) Fireplace in the main room of the OTO, 2019 (Image: Yellowstone National Park) (3) Historic photo of guests in lodge's main room. Owner Dick Randall is in white shirt and standing next to fireplace.


Now, this might seem like an absurd point of fixation for a column-style piece on my employer’s blog—presumably a place for The Friendship Center to share our news, educate our online audience, and showcase the dedicated partners we work alongside to address and prevent violence in our community. As the editorial gremlin behind what we publish here, I can say that we also delight in taking the occasional break from our usual fare to go a little deeper and challenge ourselves to look at our past, our present, and our own lived experiences with curiosity about the conditions that give rise to the violence that pervades our culture. I intend to do that, and for this special occasion, I’m also going to invite us all to consider how some of our casually accepted notions of regional identity continue to put our communities in harm’s way.


In what I might posit as Jackie’s Somewhat Unified Theory of Community Violence™, places where extractive enterprises take off and attract a revolving door of transplants with histories relatively unknown to their peers tend to be breeding grounds for both the interpersonal violence we often see with our TFC clients, as well as violence that looks more like latent abuse passed through generations until it unleashes its full self-destructive potential. Lots of places in the Mountain West (and certainly industrial boomtowns the world over) fit this description. And, as I hope we’re all aware by now, the commodities being harvested have changed many times in this landscape. The legacy of industrial-scale mineral and timber extraction lives on in deforested hills, disturbed soil, and contaminated water—none of which any of us based in or near Helena have to travel far from our front doors to find. A quick look at the EPA’s interactive map of Superfund sites will show you that we’re within about an hour’s drive of nine National Priorities List sites in a part of the U.S. that otherwise has very few active or proposed Superfund sites.


We have western Montana’s century-spanning relationship with hardrock mining and its concomitant smelting operations to thank for our proximity to multiple places with toxicity levels hazardous to humans. But before the industrial era, it was the hide and fur trade that ran roughshod on the North Plains, feeding a market that nearly eradicated more than one species vital to the health of North America’s wetlands and our once-vast native grasslands. As I was recently reminded by a friend whose Métis ancestors were heavily involved in the fur trade under the auspices of the Hudson’s Bay Company, trading posts were the original man camps—forerunners to today’s male-dominated trailer-towns that pop up around sites of surging oil and gas extraction. Just like they are now, those temporary settlements between the 17th and 19th centuries were notorious for high rates of sexual and domestic violence, as well as alarmingly frequent disappearances and murders of Indigenous women.


The Slow Burn of the Scenery Economy


Jumping ahead to now, yesterday’s mill and mining towns and even some of those old trading post sites are today’s mountain hideaways and hobby ranches for the wealthy. Few enjoy hearing it, but I often say that it should not be a point of pride that recreation, tourism, and real estate have become the modern stock and trade of Rocky Mountain states like Montana. For reasons I hope I can get across, industries that depend precariously on huge numbers of temporary visitors aren't necessarily better, more replenishable, or less violent than industries that depend on denuding the land of huge amounts of physical material. But before I get into that, I want to be clear that none of this latest rush to capitalize on the abundant resources found in western states is new—not by a long shot. This cycle of gentrification and displacement has been going on with varying degrees of speed and violence since the dawn of settler colonialism in North America, and Montana’s history has absolutely kept up the time-honored tradition.


Whether the commodity is land, precious metals, a lakeside second-home with a private boat dock and views of pristine mountains (at least, when it’s not smoky), another residential housing unit cannibalized by the booming vacation rental industry, or a perfectly staged Instagram selfie in front of a natural wonder to help a multi-billion dollar corporation continue to monetize people’s attention, there’s always a gold rush of some kind going on here. Some just play out faster than others, or with more immediate side effects.


What I think has been described best as the “scenery economy” has been a slower burn on landscapes and communities. The extractive process certainly isn’t as literal as millions of tons of ore or timber being pulled from the ground, but it hasn’t been without impact. What’s most mystifying to me about the moment we find ourselves in is not so much the dizzying pace with which people are visiting or gobbling up real estate in the Mountain West, but that they’re exotifying it as much as, if not more than they were 150 years ago. Like they were in the years after the American Civil War, people are obsessed with a self-serving fantasy of this region, and bringing to it their expectations that it can never live up to.


To elaborate a bit, I recently read Off With the Crack of a Whip, the first book in what’s supposed to be Lee Whittlesey’s two-volume deep dive into the history of stagecoach travel in Yellowstone National Park. For those of us born within the last 40 years, it’s hard to imagine Yellowstone visitation looking like anything other than private automobiles flooding the park’s five entrance stations by the hundreds of thousands every summer. But commercial group tours of the park—starting with stagecoaches around 1880, then motorized buses after 1917—were once the norm, and survived in large form until 1990.


“Yellowstone-Park,” c. 1910. Serigraph poster by Ludwig Hohlwein

“Yellowstone-Park,” c. 1910. Serigraph poster by Ludwig Hohlwein. Printed by G. Schuh and Cie, Munich, Bavaria. This original was gifted to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, by Bess and Clyde Erskine, daughter and son-in-law of OTO Ranch owners Dick and Dora Randall. Prior to opening the OTO, Dick Randall was a Yellowstone night herder and stagecoach driver for George Wakefield, one of the colorful stage operators chronicled in Lee Whittlesey’s Off With the Crack of a Whip. Astute Helena residents may recognize this image from Gulch Distillers, where you can spot a poster like this one behind the bar. (Image: Buffalo Bill Center of the West, 1.69.1836)


Though the stagecoach era was short-lived, it stoked significant national interest in the region. White European settlement west of the Mississippi by way of the Oregon Trail (or, in the case of my mother’s ancestors, the Mormon Trail) was well underway prior to the American Civil War. Immediately after, commercial stagecoach outfits are what opened the frontier up to a different kind of traffic: tourism. In decades previous, Americans who could afford to travel for pleasure ventured to Europe. That started to shift after the 1870s when the nation’s first national park became, if not the first, one of the earliest tourist draws to the interior of the American West.


In introducing George Rea, one of the first colorful characters to cash in on bringing tourists into Yellowstone by stage, Whittlesey makes a point worth repeating in full here:


As background, let us remember that the American West was continuously a land full of sometimes questionable characters who were often running away from something. Whether it was a Civil War they did not want to fight, wives and children whom they abandoned, relatives who gave them trouble, scrapes with the law, boredom, or precious minerals that sent them looking for adventure, these questionable characters could easily disappear in the vast, sparsely settled West, sinking easily into obscurity in whichever town they chanced upon.


And Montana Territory seemed especially boundless because it was huge and unsettled. Every person that one encountered in the vast territory was an anonymous stranger—a potential criminal running away from a shady past—and these encounters when coupled with alcohol could produce violence.


Whether Montana in its territorial days was as “unsettled” as these new arrivals to the region believed depends on your definition of human occupation in a landscape. That humans have had a continuous presence in places we now recognize as southwest Montana and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem since at least the last Ice Age (~12,000 years ago) is not in question. The oldest human burial site found to date in the Americas (~11,000 years old) is in the north end of present-day Park County near Wilsall. On the Yellowstone Plateau specifically, the Tukudika (aka Sheep Eater) band of Mountain Shoshone continued to inhabit the park for several years after it was established in 1872. I think that context is important to call out, but the semantics of settlement don’t matter so much for the larger point I want to make about the staying power of violence here. What matters, and what I think Whittlesey keys in on astutely, is what these “questionable” transplants believed about the place they were coming to, and what they wanted it to be for them.


The fantasy that this was a place to escape to or hide out is consequential. It’s the fantasy that overshadowed the fact that it was not a blank slate, that even back then, the land had already been inhabited and used for millennia. The fantasy projected onto it drove the way people interacted and harvested from it, and how they treated other people here. Odious and misinformed as the imagination of newcomers might’ve been, reality came to resemble it, and still does.


The Tinderbox We Tolerate


People arriving en masse with their fantasies of a vacant, lawless frontier is enough to set the stage for violence. The volatility levels up when you add in a booming extractive enterprise to lure in people who are down on their luck and desperate for work, or maybe just bored and looking for excitement. Now, make that extractive industry dependent on transient visitors coming—at first by the thousands, eventually by the millions—to what they see as an amusement park because it’s been marketed to them as a wonderland, albeit one rife with existential hazards to this day.[i] The region in and around Yellowstone has sat at the confluence of all these factors for the better part of 15 decades now.


To be sure, this can make for a dynamic place to live and work, and it's not lost on me what a privilege it was to spend the formative years of my life in a mix of personalities as novel as the landscape, but it’s a tinderbox situation. It was true in my childhood and I’m sure it was even more so in the wide-open stagecoaching days Whittlesey was writing about: Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho still in their chaotic adolescence as territories, and a new national park in the region with no real way to enforce protection except for a baffling 30 years when the U.S. Army was vaguely tasked with policing tourist vandalism and evicting poachers until Congress allocated funds to create the National Park Service.[ii] It’s only natural to be fascinated by the kinds of people who washed up in the region before hoteliers and railroad companies joined forces to consummate national park tourism as a big business.[iii]


Found nowadays through auction websites and antiquarian booksellers, guidebooks like this played up Yellowstone not as a place of sublime beauty like Yosemite, but a hotbed of curiosities.


What I’m becoming more and more sensitive to as I get older is how much the outdated fantasies have lived on—across our state, but especially where I grew up—when you’d like to believe we all know better. And maybe the “we” I’m talking about does. By and large, I think those of us who’ve had to live in these places do know better. Because these places aren’t disparate from the very human struggles and loss that any life is full of, we know we don’t live in some Brigadoon fantasyland sealed off from the rest of the world.


Don’t get me wrong: We’re lucky to live in a place of intense beauty, where a quotidian sunset can look like the stuff of a psychedelic trip. Our terrain is definitionally epic, we have a level of biodiversity that’s eluded most of the continent for human generations, and the rich cultural history of this place is legible everywhere from oral tradition to artwork found on the walls of caves and canyons. This is a special place, but it’s also no utopia. My upbringing puts that duality into sharper focus all the time, and I was reminded of it very early in my time with The Friendship Center.


For background, I’m not part of our direct services team, but there is some consistency in the onboarding process for every new hire here. Whether or not we’ll be working directly with clients, all TFC staff must comply with Advocate Privilege, a Montana law that obliges us to strictly protect the confidentiality of our clients. As a matter of course, all new staff also work through a considerable amount of training to help us understand our niche as an advocacy program as well as how our agency fits into the statewide victim services system. There’s an entire module of a basic advocacy training offered by the Montana Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence about intimate partner lethality, and one rabbithole I plunged down while I was there is all about our state’s fatality review process.


Montana’s Domestic Violence Fatality Review Commission is a group of multi-disciplinary partners appointed by the Attorney General that convenes twice a year to review closed domestic violence homicide cases. It’s reactive to be sure, but the goal of examining the circumstances around fatalities in hindsight is to identify gaps in the systems that are supposed to protect and support victims, and improve the coordination and response between agencies to hopefully prevent fatal outcomes in the future. To Montana’s credit, our fatality review process has become a model used not just nationally, but around the world.[iv] In 2014, Montana also became the first state in the nation to create a dedicated commission to review Native American domestic violence fatalities.


The commission’s findings and recommendations have been published in biennial reports since 2005 (with the exception of 2021), with the most recent edition being the 2023 report. Much like the brand books I sometimes comb through, searching these reports for familiar names among the intimate partner homicides tracked since 2000 is endlessly (if morbidly) fascinating to me. If you’re seeing the list of names for the first time, the exercise can be sobering. I had no connection to the victim services world before my current job, but I quickly found two personal acquaintances among the listed homicide victims—one I knew from my hometown, the other from high school sports. One victim was my parents’ age and killed in 2014. The other graduated high school the same year as my sister and was killed in 2013. Both were killed by former partners who then killed themselves. All died of gunshot wounds.


Access to firearms is recognized as life-threatening enough that there’s usually a specific question about it on voluntary risk assessment forms used with survivors. A widely cited study co-authored by pioneering intimate partner violence researcher Dr. Jacquelyn Campbell estimates that a female victim’s risk of being murdered by their partner is five times higher when their abuser has access to guns. Nationally, over half of all intimate partner homicides are committed with guns, and Montana’s trends track with that: The 2023 fatality review report identified a firearm as the primary weapon in 58% of intimate partner homicide cases across the state since 2000. Consider that statistic alongside the fact that Montana consistently has one of the highest proportions of adults living in a household with a firearm—almost two-thirds, or double the national average.


We don’t really know how many of those firearms in our communities are secured, whether they’re in the hands of violent offenders, or if they’re owned by people with basic gun safety knowledge until after a crisis happens or is narrowly avoided. And I want to be clear that though I have a definite opinion on the subject, I’m not here to moralize about whether it’s right or wrong that for every secondhand vacuum option I had while browsing pawn shops when I first moved back in 2023, there were about 15 long guns and five chainsaws to choose from. What I do feel confident saying is that we sure seem willing to tolerate the fatal risk of living in a state where access to firearms is the norm and not the exception. History also shows us that, at least here in Montana, the idea of an unobstructed right to bear arms without sensible guardrails is an imported idea, and a new one that mainly benefits those profiting from the multibillion-dollar arms industry.


In her excellent 2023 book True West, Betsy Gaines Quammen likens the geographical West of North America to a living myth museum, where the implanted beliefs of inexhaustibility and unimpeded freedom constantly belie the reality of the actual historical periods that fuel people’s romanticized delusions of this place. As one example, Gaines Quammen alludes to gun restrictions in 19th century frontier towns to explain that “the exaltation of the Second Amendment as a bulwark for democracy” is a modern development, not a historical one.


One of the first laws to pass Montana’s territorial legislature between 1864-1865 banned “the carrying of concealed deadly weapons” anywhere within the limits of any town in the territory. Generally, guns were checked on entry at inns or with law enforcement. Joseph Kinsey Howard  speaks to this topic as well in his seminal Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome, a book published first in 1949 that holds up as both a piece of historical scholarship and a love letter to Montana’s unfailing idiosyncrasy. In it, Howard writes that in the first report issued by a federal grand jury after Vigilantes relinquished control of Virginia City (by then, the territorial capital), four of the 16 indictments handed down were for assault with a deadly weapon, or merely “exhibiting deadly weapons.” Writing almost 75 years apart from each other, both Gaines Quammen and Howard recognize the irony that in frontier days, guns—far from revered and openly flaunted—were seen as instruments of barbarism and regulated accordingly.


Dodge City, Kansas, ca. 1880. Sign reads "The carrying of firearms strictly prohibited." Many frontier towns like Dodge City, Tombstone, and Deadwood that we associate with Wild West shootouts had, in reality, some of the most restrictive gun control laws in the country. (Image: Kansas State Historical Society)


If gun restrictions, once commonplace, were still on the books, how many of the 140+ homicides, some of which also involved familicide or suicides with multiple fatalities, wouldn’t even be lines in a fatality review commission report? Would Debi, 59 when she was killed, have turned 70 this summer? Would Erica, killed when she was just 22, be turning 34 this October? There’s no way to know, and I won’t pretend there is. But the question eats at me when I see their names in each of those biennial reports since 2015, and I believe it’s something we have to ask ourselves when we live with deadly weapons that are so readily available.


Beliefs Have a Body Count


During a visit to my hometown this past August, I asked my mom to identify people she recognized in a number of photos from the 70s and 80s. Dozens currently cover the wall of an establishment that sits on the site of two local watering holes that were lost in a July 2020 fire. Gardinerites who patronized and darkened the doors of one of those bars over the years have been contributing the photos at the invitation of the business owner who’s slowly resurrecting both bars in a new form. Before my mom named anybody, she said, “I see dead people.”


She wasn’t being hyperbolic. Among the more vintage-looking photos of smiling patrons—some in costumes, some playing pool, some sporting very retro-looking mustaches, some playing instruments while others laugh and dance, many with a drink in hand or on the bar or hightop in front of them—it felt like every other person my mother proceeded to name has since died. And these are all people who were her age.


As far as I know, very few of the folks in the photos died as a direct result of interpersonal violence. Debi, the older of the two homicide victims I mentioned before, is an exception in that respect (and I’m sure a photo memorial to her that was in the original bar burned with the building in 2020). Most of the deceased folks in the photos punched their tickets to an early grave on the strength of that other manifestation of violence I mentioned at the very top of this piece—where abuse and unacknowledged trauma gets passed down and takes on the sublimated form of depression and serious PTSD perpetually numbed by heavy substance use and relentless partying.[v] In my parents’ circle of friends and acquaintances, deaths as a result of suicide, overdose, drunk driving, or exposure on a cold night weren’t uncommon. Growing up in Gardiner, cancer, heart attacks, freak accidents, or failing health brought on by old age felt like comparatively benign ways to go out.


Without knowing the particulars of every story, I think this saturation of early, preventable deaths can be explained by the same exact phenomenon Lee Whittlesey was describing in Off With the Crack of a Whip. A lot of these people came out to Yellowstone as seasonal workers and—whether it was a thirst for adventure born of ennui, or more ominous life troubles—many were running away from something. Because Gardiner was a relatively inexpensive gateway community to live in and housing was easier to find pre-2010, people could put stakes down and not look back. The fact that people’s histories were largely unknown to friends, peers, neighbors, and even their partners in their adopted community was mostly harmless. But for those fleeing more serious circumstances, the underlying causes didn’t go away. More likely, they metastasized.


There’s a quote by well-known somatic therapist Resmaa Menakem that’s gotten more popular in recent years with the growing interest in the roots of inherited trauma. It starts with the statement, “Trauma decontextualized in a person looks like personality.” Menakem goes on to say how, without context, family traits and culture are similarly misunderstood. In my hometown, the overlooked context behind the volatile personalities and the violence all goes back to the fictive ideas of this region, planted decades ago, but still lingering in the collective conscience like mine tailings.


For years now, all manner of colorful characters have been lured to where I grew up by the promise of anonymity, adventure, employment, unfettered liberty,[vi] or even protection from nuclear catastrophe in the case of one New Age religious organization. While the frontier fantasy du jour shapeshifts with the spirit of the times, the bill of goods being sold is more or less the same.


I know it sounds like I’m picking on my hometown because it’s such a hotspot for transplants, but I in no way mean to idealize communities with a larger contingent of multigenerational families. While it’s tempting to think everybody knows everybody’s business in places where most residents have known each other since birth, that doesn't negate the possibility of violence and abuse. Quite the contrary, the smokescreen of familiarity paired with greater physical distance between neighbors in more ag-based pockets of the state may help preserve the silence and secrecy needed for intimate partner/family violence to flourish. Take the youngest of the two homicide victims I mentioned earlier as a case in point: Though it’s a short distance from the state’s largest population center, Erica’s home area, some 200 miles downstream on the Yellowstone River from mine, formed around an irrigation project completed in 1907 that converted arid south-central Montana grassland into farmland.[vii] If there is any safety to be gained from living in a community defined by century-old family ranches and farms, I sorely wish it could’ve spared Erica’s life.


My “Somewhat Unified Theory of Community Violence” is my way of trying to make sense of the undertone of violence in my hometown that, at its worst, has manifested in the outcome agencies like The Friendship Center are determined to prevent. What I hope I’ve gotten across, though, is that the ahistorical narratives that fuel both interpersonal and collective violence aren’t monolithic, and we’re all vulnerable to them. One of my most stubborn beliefs is that public history is incredibly personal because we all need to know where we come from to know where we’re at and take responsibility for where we’re going. When we’re disconnected from our history, we’re gullible, and we can fall for the lies and the latest moral panics that enable us to perpetuate harm. Conversely, when we know our history, we can spot a falsehood from a mile away and set the record straight.


People will keep coming to the American West with different beliefs about the escape or salvation it promises them. I think it’s important to give those beliefs serious attention, not because they’re true, but because some have a body count. If we’re committed to preventing violence in our communities, we can’t start the cleanup downstream of the metaphorical Superfund site. We have to be willing to rein in the toxic material at its source, especially when the source is a delusion.


 

Notes


[i] These hazards are the subject of probably Lee Whittlesey’s best-known book, Death in Yellowstone, which I believe is essential reading for anybody who wants to have a healthy respect for both the natural and manmade dangers of that singular place.

[ii] Yes, gentle reader, there is also a pretty engaging book about this somewhat overlooked and truly weird episode in Yellowstone history by MSU-Billings history professor Thomas C. Rust, and it’s called Watching Over Yellowstone.

[iii] For more about that, an excellent double-feature is Mark Daniel Barringer’s Selling Yellowstone and Ruth Quinn and Nan Sigrist’s Horses, Hotels, and Hospitality—the latter of which has lots of fun Easter eggs for readers familiar with Helena.

[iv] As a fun tidbit of TFC trivia, one of our previous executive directors, Matt Dale, was central in forming Montana’s fatality review commission, and coordinated with its members in his role as director of Montana’s Office of Consumer Protection and Victim Services until he passed away in 2018.

[v] I say this not with judgment, but as somebody who’s had to learn the hard way to hit the brakes on the nonstop cycle of "self-medication" that's really just self-annihilation.

[vi] Despite all the outside interest in it, Gardiner enjoys some notoriety for still being unincorporated.

[vii] Known as Huntley Project, the district is located in what was the northern part of the Crow Reservation created under the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty. An act of Congress that reduced the size of the reservation to its current boundaries in 1904 cleared the way for government surveyors to assess the viability of an irrigation district that includes the present-day towns of Huntley, Ballantine, Worden, and Pompeys Pillar.

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