​Conclusion

“Engstrom said he ‘wouldn’t dwell’ on the causes behind the enrollment drop, a statement that boggles the mind. The president of the University of Montana should most certainly dwell on why enrollment headcount has fallen by about 2,600 students since it peaked in 2011, the year he took office.”
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Cozy, aren't they?

Carol Juneau

In her own home, education has also taken a top priority. Both of Juneau’s children have advanced college degrees.
 
And unlike many other Browning-area teachers, Juneau raised her family right in the sometimes-rough reservation town of Browning.
 
‘I wanted my kids to grow up in an Indian community,’ Juneau said, adding, ‘You need to be part of the community where you live and work.’
 
Above all, Juneau wants to make clear that while Indian tribes are sovereign nations, tribal members ‘are citizens of the state of Montana, the same as any other citizens.’
 
‘I’d like to see that Indian people and Indian tribes in Montana aren’t left outside of everything,’ she said.”
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​Denise Juneau

Denise Juneau, Feb 2013

“The popular version of Montana’s history was essentially written by two men. Joseph Kinsey Howard said the place was high, wide, handsome – and a colony of eastern corporations. K. Ross Toole said it was an uncommon land, a state of extremes – and the plaything of reactionary capital. There was little subtlety to either man’s analysis: from the fur traders of the nineteenth century to the coal barons of the twentieth, Montana gave up its material treasure as well as its political chastity to plunderers.” (Emmons, p 121)
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High Montana Wages with Extraction

“In 1946 ACM produced 3.7 million ounces of silver; 30,000 ounces of gold; 1.47 million pounds of molybdenum; 1.55 million pounds of cadmium; 4,883 tons of arsenic; 15.6 million pounds of lead; 1.5 million pounds of zinc; 111,397 tons of manganese; and 742 million pounds of copper. It was the largest and most diversified copper company among the big five and probably in the world.” (Emmons, p 123)
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Anaconda Closes Down

The Railroads Decline

“Between 1960 and 1970, thirty-nine of Montana’s fifty-six counties lost population. Most of those thirty-nine were in the wheat and cattle country in the eastern part of the state. All told, the rural farm population fell from 175,707 in 1940 to 88,460 in 1970 to under 80,000 in 1990.”

“The result was a classic Montana boom, followed by a classic Montana bust. The numbers are too sad to recount. Suffice it to say that for a time, there were jobs, the state and county coffers were full, roads were repaired, schools were built, the poor and marginalized of the state were treated with the dignity they deserved. (Midwestern consumers of Montana coal even paid the state the ultimate compliment” they referred to Montanans as “blue eyed Arabs.”)”

“Montana historically had one simple responsibility: give up treasures. It discharged that responsibility in a variety of ways. It grew wheat, raised cattle, mined ores, cut trees, milled raw lumber, dug coal, drilled for oil and natural gas, and dammed and put turbines on its rivers. Discovering the world no longer needed what generations of Montanans had made had a far more chilling effect on the state’s collective psyche than had any alleged subservience to ACM.” (Emmons, p 128)
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​Conclusion

David Emmons

“More certain is that the present generation of Montanans will have to reinvent the state and cast it in a new image. A great deal is riding on them. They can succeed only if they pay proper attention and respect to the old ways of making a Montana living as they go about the task of finding new ways.”
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“Some returning veterans felt dread and anxiety about the world after the war. They had witnessed the unbelievable inhumanity of the concentration camps…after these horrors, people wondered if life would ever feel normal and peaceful again.”

​Montana's LeRoy Anderson

LeRoy Anderson, 1959