The Devil's Brigade in Helena

The Life and Afterlife of Comanche

On a hot Sunday afternoon in June of 1876, thousands of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors surrounded 210 cavalrymen and cut them down. Two days later, when General Terry's column arrived, the bodies on the field had been so changed by sun and wind and the hands of the victors that Terry mistook them for buffalo carcasses. The burial party had eight shovels among them. They used bullet casings to pin paper names to the makeshift grave markers. They shot the wounded horses where they stood, after letting them drink. One horse they did not shoot. His name was Comanche.

The Devil's Brigade in Helena

In 1942, a secret joint American-Canadian commando unit trained in the hills outside Helena, Montana, learning to ski, parachute, and kill silently with a custom-designed knife built for one purpose. By night, the same men crowded into Last Chance Gulch bars and danced at the USO. Before they shipped out, more than two hundred had married Helena girls. They went on to fight some of the most brutal engagements of the European war. After, some of them came back to Helena, to the wives they'd married in a rush, and tried to be ordinary men again.

I Didn't Die in Montana: Hank Williams Jr. on Ajax MT

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.

Conquering the Divide

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.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Montana Dreams

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