History Book Club Celebrates 20 Years of Conversation and Community
Since 2006, readers at the Northwest Montana History Museum have dug into diverse accounts of life in Big Sky country
By Zoë Buhrmaster
The retirees and history buffs who make up the History Book Club at the Northwest Montana History Museum have read most, if not all, the existing literature on what it was like to homestead in the Treasure State. They’re 20 years of monthly museum meetings and more than 200 diverse Montana history books deep — but who’s counting?
“I mean, how many can you read? We must have heard 20 times how hard it is to clean the cream separator,” longtime member Diane Etter said of accounts of life on the prairie, laughing at the repeated references to a hand-cranked device used to separate cream from milk.
Her fellow club members teased her but proceeded to list the genre’s predictable topics, from weather patterns and disease to troubles with 19th-century technology.
The book club launched in 2006 at the urging of the museum’s then-director Gil Jordan. The bibliophiles started with Montana nonfiction, including books like “Montana Women Homesteaders: A Field of One’s Own,” “Grandmother’s Grandchild: My Crow Indian Life,” and “Bloody Bozeman: The Perilous Trail to Montana’s Gold.”
Topics expanded beyond pioneers and famous Montanans to include “lentils, Glacier Park, Glacial Lake Missoula, sapphires, bears, basketball, forest fires, mining, all kinds of disasters, the Great Depression, off-the-beaten-track stories from the World Wars, communism, the Ku Klux Klan, UFOs, the Olympics, not so famous good and bad guys and girls,” longtime member Betsy Wood said at the group’s 20th anniversary celebration in October. “Bicycling, prisons, barbed wire, circuses, railroads, murder, empire building, photography, and more.”
Running out of Montana nonfiction to choose from, the group branched out to those covering the Mountain West region, along with historical fiction and a few exceptions for noteworthy nonfiction such as “The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder” by bestselling author David Grann. As books on the state’s history released, the group added titles like “People Before the Park: The Kootenai and Blackfeet Before Glacier National Park” and “Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town” to the list.
For a long time, the group met in the museum’s basement in the evenings. When they moved upstairs and switched to afternoons, attendance grew, particularly among those who had been wary of driving to the museum at night.
Most of the 15 or so regular attendees are retired, but the group also draws in some younger members with flexible work schedules, including a stay-at-home mom. Sometimes authors visit, and recently a pair of authors played guitar and sang for the group. Those meetings tend to draw a larger crowd, book club leader Tim Christenson said.
Banter flows freely among the long-time attendees as they discuss each month’s reading. Not everyone loves the same books or shares the same political views, but discussions are engaging and “civil,” a word Wood heard repeated in reviews she collected ahead of the 20th anniversary party. Members also credit the absence of wine or other alcohol from the club’s rituals with keeping tension at bay.
“Everybody’s kind of aware that we don’t all share the same political point of view,” seasoned member Tammy Yonkers noted.
“But nobody makes a big deal out of it,” Wood added.
A former history professor, Christenson folds in questions examining authors’ potential biases, as well as ones that bring the past into present day. The club’s November book, “The Middle Kingdom Under the Big Sky: A History of the Chinese Experience in Montana,” touches on the experience of Chinese immigrants who at one point made up more than 10% of early Montana settlement, yet whose acceptance in the state was turbulent.
Christenson steered discussion to the history of discrimination toward immigrants in Montana, its lasting effects and attitudes toward immigrants in the state today.
“Those are the kinds of social issues that I feel uncomfortable talking about in a lot of social situations,” Christenson said. “But at a book club … we can be civil with each other before and after and even during those conversations. I think that’s a real nice privilege to be able to do that.”
The group has gone on road trips to Great Falls’ museums, White Sulphur Springs, Fort Benton and Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site.
Etter, who led the club before Christenson, said she would love to visit Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. Several other members chimed in with agreement, hatching plans for a future road trip. “The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn” was on the group’s reading list in 2025.
“Now that I’ve read it, it would make the battlefield even more meaningful,” Etter said.
Ultimately what brings the hodgepodge of readers together is a love for history and deepening their knowledge of the place where they live. The bonds formed at the monthly meetings also include a romance between two widowed members who met at the museum.
“I look forward to at least another 20 years of good reading and good discussion with good friends,” Wood said.
The group meets at the museum 2 to 3 p.m. the first Wednesday of every month, save a summer break in July and August. Meetings are open to the public and admission is always free.