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Distinctly Montana Stories

Distinctly Montana Stories

Written by: Joseph Shelton
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 Someone threw a pitcher at Bob Weir and the Grateful Dead never came back to Missoula. Masked men forced a sheepherder to make them coffee before spending eight hours clubbing his flock to death. A 19-year-old named Cromwell Dixon became the first person to fly over the Continental Divide — and was dead a month later. An entrepreneur carted a 365-pound "petrified man" from Montana to New York City and failed spectacularly. Long George Francis, outlaw and poet, crashed his car on Christmas Eve with a broken leg and crawled through a blizzard toward an increasingly uncertain safety. These are true stories, drawn from the literary journalism of Distinctly Montana magazine and adapted into produced audio by editor-in-chief Joe Shelton. The show takes Montana's mythology seriously enough to look at it honestly — and what it finds is both darker and more wonderful than the postcard version. Each episode pairs careful narration with sound design and music in service of the story. Episodes run between twelve and twenty-two minutes and release monthly. Subscribe to Distinctly Montana magazine at www.distinctlymontana.com/subscribe. Social Sciences World
Episodes
  • I Didn't Die in Montana: Hank Williams Jr. on Ajax MT

    I Didn't Die in Montana: Hank Williams Jr. on Ajax MT
    May 1 2026
    On August 8, 1975, Hank Williams Jr. set out to hunt mountain goats on Ajax Peak, on the Montana-Idaho border near Wisdom. He was 26, the son of a country music legend, and the heaviest of the three hikers crossing a late-summer snowfield near the summit. He stepped into his guide's footprint. Something under his right foot moved. What followed was a fall so catastrophic that the men who reached his body couldn't believe he was still alive.
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    13 mins
  • Conquering the Divide

    Conquering the Divide
    Mar 30 2026
    In the early days of aviation, Montana's Continental Divide was the prize every flyboy wanted — and the mountain range that kept breaking their planes. A barnstormer crashed in a gulch. A racing legend couldn't catch a break in Butte. Then a nineteen-year-old kid who'd built his first flying machine at fourteen arrived in Helena with something to prove. He had one month left to live. Distinctly Montana Stories brings literary journalism from the pages of Distinctly Montana magazine to life in audio. Sound effects and music sourced from Epidemic Sound.
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    19 mins
  • Frank Lloyd Wright's Montana Dreams

    Frank Lloyd Wright's Montana Dreams
    Mar 11 2026
    In 1909, Frank Lloyd Wright was exhausted, trapped in a failing marriage, and desperate to run away with another man's wife. That same year, Chicago financiers hired him to design a utopian orchard town in the Bitterroot Valley—an ambitious vision that would never be built. What Wright left behind in Montana, and what was taken from it a century later, is a story of ambition, loss, and the strange persistence of dreams. Written by Joseph Shelton. Music licensed through Epidemic Sound. Subscribe to the magazine at www.distinctlymontana.com/subscribe
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    21 mins
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