The Setting

The vast watershed of the Yellowstone River covers portions of Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming, as well as large areas of federally managed land, including Custer, Gallatin and Shoshone National Forests, and the Northern Cheyenne and Crow Indian Reservations. It is a region flush with historic, cultural, and natural resources. Because of a depressed economy, sparse infrastructure, and expensive transportation costs due to long distances between attractions, the area is looking for ways to develop cultural tourism programs that will build on its unique features and attract some of Yellowstone National Park’s 3 million annual visitors.

The Yellowstone River Valley is a wide open space with big legends to match. Visual records, stories, art, and lore persist even hundreds of years after Native Americans traversed the wide plains, hunting buffalo for survival. After white trappers and coal miners took freely from the land. After ranchers settled in the grassy prairies and cowboys came along to tend their huge herds of cattle. After armies came and fought and left behind a scarred land and population. The legacies of all this history reside in the scores of sites, museums, and parks throughout the region that range from the world-famous Little Big Horn Battlefield National Monument to Makoshika State Park in Glendive.

Just like the place and its past, tourism in Montana can be big. But the open spaces and charm that make the state what it is also present challenges for tourism. The Pictograph Caves National Park near Billings features 4,500-year-old cave drawings. Over near Ekalaka is Medicine Rocks State Park, where other prehistoric remnants—huge irregular-shaped masses of sandstone—jut high above the grassy plains. Must-see sites, both. But you’re looking at a 260-mile journey. And that’s in only one part of the state.

With minuscule annual budgets and one- or two-person staffs, some of these cultural attractions are hurting, unable to market to tourists or even effectively communicate with rural in-state audiences. One of the biggest museums in Montana—with five full-time staff people—is the Western Heritage Center (WHC) in Billings. “ We figured since we were a museum charged with interpreting a huge region, maybe we could play a central role in overcoming the state’s tourism challenges,” says Lynda Bourque Moss, WHC executive director.

With a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the center began an extensive research and interpretive project involving other historical, arts, and cultural facilities in Montana as well as humanities scholars and community representatives. “We invited everyone we could think of with a stake in the Yellowstone region’s cultural preservation,” says Moss.

Fifty people accepted and together the consortium created the first long-term exhibit, Our Place in the West: Places, Pasts and Images of the Yellowstone Region from 1880-1940. An extension of that exhibit was a series of NEH-funded public Gatherings, which featured scholars who made presentations at museums and cultural sites in small rural communities in the Yellowstone region. Publications including Along the Yellowstone: A Guide to Historic Sites in the Yellowstone Region provided other ways to interpret the project’s themes.

“Through our research and the work with the map and narrative guide for Along the Yellowstone, we became aware of the wealth of sites and stories in the region,” Moss says. “It became clear to us that what we needed was a way to coordinate educational activities and develop regional marketing campaigns to benefit the sites as well as the communities.”

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