And as for Overland Rye, I don't suppose they make it anymore. Too bad, because I could use a shot of it today ...

a post a day from the big sky country: history, photos, sights, trivia, quotes.
There was a North Dakotan who lived right on the Montana border. One day some surveyors came to his door to inform him that they had made a mistake years before and now the North Dakotans actually lived in Montana. "Oh, good," said the North Dakotan. "I don't think I could stand another one of those North Dakota winters."
US 10 now winds through lonely badlands. Under an uncompromising sun the sides of the buttes are mottled with brown, buff, and gray. After sundown, as twilight shades into dusk, the masses of guttered rock take on eerie tones of purple and black. Only the bark and scurry of prairie dogs by day, and the dismal howl of coyotes by night, indicate the presence of living things.
Borodin: Do you think they will let me live in Montana?Ramius: I would think they'll let you live wherever you want.Borodin: Good. Then I will live in Montana. And I will marry a round American woman and raise rabbits, and she will cook them for me. And I will have a pickup truck... maybe even a "recreational vehicle." And drive from state to state. Do they let you do that?Ramius: I suppose.Borodin: No papers?Ramius: No papers, state to state.Borodin: Well then, in winter I will live in . . . Arizona. Actually, I think I will need two wives.Ramius: Oh, at least.
Borodin: I would like to have seen Montana.
Butte, a dismal town, was once the roughest and the brightest of the western mining camps. Until a few years ago gambling was legal there, and there was a famous "prostitutes' line" ("Just over there," an Anaconda official remarked to me nostalgically, "you could almost see it from my window.") Now all is drab and dingy, and the few nightclubs, ablaze with tawdry light, are outside the town in a dreary little hamlet among the hills. You can still hear many different languages in the bard of Butte, and on the town boundary there is an official sign which says of the place: "She was a bold, unashamed, rootin', tootin', hell-roarin' camp in days gone by and still drinks her liquor straight." But there is an endless dull slovenliness about the town that is greatly depressing, and frequently you can see cracks in the streets, and green grass growing, and the signs of movement and stress that show a mine shaft is beneath.
It's the kind of country where men are expected to walk tall. I just said I was English and slunk around as I usually do.
Highway 24 is a patchy stretch of asphalt through choppy buttes and valleys ... there are few trees, not even much sage. In the fifty-nine miles between Fort Peck and Highway 200 I see seven cars, two ranch houses, and an unending string of barbed wire near both shoulders. Twenty-five miles north of Highway 200 [the truck] loses radio contact with the world again. I switch to the tape cassette. Merle Haggard sings, "Turn me loose, set me free, somewhere in the middle of Montana . . . Big city, turn me loose and set me free."
We left Whitefish and drove through the afternoon, seeing no one in the last hour and a half except moose, deer, elk, and grouse, all running across the road in great numbers. White daisies lined the one-lane dirt road. . . .We kept driving, climbing, and then we came down off the summit and into the little blue valley.There was nothing but a mercantile and a saloon, one building on either side of the street, and a slow winding river working through the valley (a cow moose and her calf standing in the river behind the mercantile) -- and still no sign of life, no people. It was as if they had all been massacred, I thought happily. We knew immediately that this was where we wanted to live, where we had always wanted to live.We had never felt such magic.
"Montana's real trouble," said an old rancher to me, "is that her graveyards aren't big enough." He explained that he was not advocating a general resort to the hangings of vigilante days, nor even waiting until a new generation came on the scene, but that more Montanans must come to look upon the State as their permanent home and final resting place. From the first pioneers who washed their fortunes out of the gold placers, with hydraulic pressure turning pleasant hillsides into desolate wastes of boulders, nearly all who have come to Montana have looked forward to the day when they would have accumulated sufficient funds to permit them to live out the remainder of their days in southern California, Florida, or New York.
Don't fence me in.Give me land, lots of land,Stretching miles across the West,Don't fence me in.Let me ride where it's wide,For somehow I like it best.I want to see the stars,I want to feel the breeze,I want to smell the sage,And hear the cottonwood trees.Just turn me loose,Let me straddle my old saddleWhere the shining mountains rise.On my cayuseI'll go siftin': I'll go driftin'Underneath those Western skies.I've got to get whereThe West commences,I can't stand hobbles,I can't stand fences,Don't fence me in.