The Flathead Valley has a narrow sky that is often gray and full of rain. It has been a smuggling conduit to Canada, a refuge for the national mafia to cool its killers, a town for hustlers and opportunists, and the proud location of the Outlaw Inn. Whitefish with its rich dabblers should be called “Rotfish.”
I know this from the Sixties art scene; a writer of crime novels who used me as a source (Gary J.Cook); the U of Montana writing caucuses over half-a-century; and the small guarded Unitarian Universalist fellowship in Missoula. There is also, of course, the millennia-old opinion of Blackfeet. Only Easterners blunder into some bar and think they are in Montana. They are in fact in quasi-Idaho, the missing piece of the Idaho panhandle. Books remain to be written.
“With a crime rate of 38 per one thousand residents, Kalispell has one of the highest crime rates in America compared to all communities of all sizes — from the smallest towns to the very largest cities. One’s chance of becoming a victim of either violent or property crime here is one in 27.”
All I know is by word of mouth — nothing in writing. I have no interest in the west side of the Rockies except for a few situations like briefly serving the UU congregation. For decades I’ve been telling people not to go over to the Flathead side of the Rockies and not to sign up for Facebook. They are both corrupt and dangerous for some of the same reasons: ambition and greed. Most literature-focused people who go to Missoula feel they have found a more romantic and tolerant version of the big ivy-covered schools. Certainly they are nothing like the Montana East Side institutions who are scoured by the wind sweeping the Big Sky.
Montana State University is in Bozeman which is not a valley town, at 4820 ft. altitude in the midst of Bridger Mountains, Gallatin Mountains, Madison Mountains, Tobacco Root Mountains, Big Belt Mountains, Absaroka Mountains, and Crazy Mountains. People are more likely to speak of Switzerland than Concord.
Billings also hardly seems to be in Montana, though it’s the only city big enough to qualify (over 117,000) as a “city”. It feels like part of Denver since so many businesses have ties. “According to the FBI, in 2019, the rate of violent crime in the country as a whole was 370 crimes per 100,000 people,” said Billings Mayor Bill Cole. “Surprisingly, Montana was still higher at 405, and in Billings, the rate of violent crime was 610, an astonishing 65% higher than the national average.” Their prairie verges on badlands.
This is all opinion, of course. Just notable because of snorting at puff-pieces about the Flathead.
