Here’s the good news: In a “Wild West Smackdown: Montana Versus Wyoming” posted on Yahoo! Travel, 67 percent of readers who had voted by Wednesday evening picked Montana over Wyoming.
Here’s the bad news: There are so many laughable mistakes in the description of Montana that one wonders if the contest is worth winning. I’ve made a few blunders in my journalism career, some of them mortifying, but for the love of God, how many mistakes can be made in one short article?
We read, for instance, of the Montana towns of Bannock (change that o to an a, please), and Harlowtown (-ton, please!). And then we read that the Yellowstone River is “the last free-flowing undammed river in the Lower 48.”
What the hell? We have dozens of free-flowing undammed rivers in Montana. Nationwide there must be hundreds, if not thousands. Yellowstone’s distinction is that it is the longest undammed river in the Lower 48. It’s probably not even accurate to call it free-flowing, given the miles of rip-rap, weirs and diversion dams.
Speaking of the Yellowstone, we also read: “From Paradise Valley, Montana, where the Yellowstone comes out of the mountains, it runs for 200 miles to Big Timber.” This isn’t technically a mistake, but one is left to wonder whether the author knows that beyond Big Timber the Yellowstone flows for nearly another 500 miles before its confluence with the Missouri.
What else? How about this: “Natives include Gary Cooper, Michelle Williams, David Lynch, General George Custer, the author Wallace Stegner.” Custer was born in Ohio, Stegner in Iowa. “Native” does not mean either “once lived here” or “once died here.”
Speaking of Custer—and calling him General Custer is such a small sin that we won’t mention it—the article also makes reference to the Battle of the Little Bighorn, after which it goes on: “But the old West was gone by then, surviving mostly as a neon bucking bronco outside the Cowboy Saloon in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.”
Wait. At the time of the Battle of the Little Bighorn there was already a Cowboy Saloon in Jackson Hole? With neon? That alone should make Wyoming a much cooler state than Montana.
