Author Description

Everyone dreams of jumping in their car and hitting the road for parts unknown, and ultimately discovering the mysteries of the "Old West." In the summer of 1989, Barnaby Conrad did just that. For five months, he journeyed nine thousand miles through all the rough terrain of the Montana landscape in search of adventure, his family roots, and the history still breathing in the carcass of myth. With humor and insight, Conrad encounters car-fighting cowboys, wolf biologists, modern-day mountainmen with flintlock rifles, xenophobic fly fishermen, philosophical Indians, New Age religious groups, and even grizzly bears drunk on fermented corn. Between accounts of his adventures, he pays literary homage to Montana's originals, like Charlie Russell, Will James, A. B. Guthrie, and Thomas McGuane. While traveling through such historic sites as Fort Benton and Glacier Park, Conrad revives such colorful ghosts as Calamity Jane, Butch Cassidy, General Custer, and the Sundance Kid. GHOST HUNTING IN MONTANA provides an engaging insight into the past and present of this mystifying known as Big Sky Country. In this evocation of the old and new West, Conrad discovers not just the insider's Montana, but also the American in himself.