Montana State University bus tour visits southeast Montana communities

BOZEMAN - Montana State University administrators, deans, faculty members, staff and student leaders visited eight southeast Montana communities in mid-June during the 13th annual President's Bus Tour, meeting with rural residents and asking how the state's largest land-grant institution can better serve Montanans who live far from the campus.

"It's an opportunity to really meet with people, engage and better understand how to meet the needs of the people and the places of Montana," said Cody Stone, executive director of MSU Extension, whose 97 agents and 45 subject matter experts serve local needs in Montana's 56 counties and seven Indian reservations.

Over three days and hundreds of miles, the MSU contingent followed the Yellowstone and Powder rivers, crossing nutrient-rich grasslands that once motivated Texas cattlemen to drive their herds northward, passing through landscapes where generations of Indigenous tribes hunted and settlers homesteaded, and traversing the visible Cretaceous-Paleocene boundary that separates the Age of Dinosaurs from the Age of Mammals. Those natural features and cultural heritage continue to define the identity and economies of southeast Montana, and people who live there are working to harness those assets for local benefit, often with assistance from MSU researchers, programs and resources.

"As you go across Montana, you'll see a lot of communities struggling with economic development," said John Amsden, an MSU alumnus who grew up in the Broadus area. "We all went away and came back and are doing what we can to develop the things about eastern Montana that we love."

Residents of Forsyth, Miles City, Terry, Glendive, Ekalaka, Broadus, Huntley and Crow Agency told the visitors about successes resulting from their partnerships with MSU and about remaining challenges and potential opportunities for further collaboration - exactly the sort of feedback the tour hoped to elicit.

"It's our job to learn from you so we can better support you," said MSU President Brock Tessman during a community dinner at the Range Riders Museum in Miles City on the first night of the tour. "It is about learning. It is about what we can gather from you all in this room, from high school students and teachers and counselors, from healthcare professionals, from producers, from community leaders, from small business owners.

"It doesn't matter who it is," Tessman said. "We serve Montana."

On the first afternoon, the tour stopped in Forsyth, a railroad town whose economy depends on the agriculture and the energy industries. Downsizing by the railroad and nearby Colstrip power plant and coal mine can be correlated to the size of the high school's graduating classes, which has dropped from about 75 to 25 students over the past few decades.

For six years, Forsyth has participated in Reimagining Rural, a program launched by MSU Extension in 2019 to help small towns build capacity and renew community. Forsyth has built on the momentum generated through that initiative by forming a community development nonprofit, Forever Forsyth, Inc., and becoming part of the Montana Main Street program, which awards competitive grants. The projects have engaged the community, according to Angela Campbell, a Forsyth business owner and president of Forever Forsyth.

"One thing Reimagining Rural has really done is force us to drill down and focus on what are our assets, what can we do to enhance them, improve them, make them better, and to stop thinking about what we can do to bring people to our town and think about what we can do to retain people in our town," Campbell said. "That idea really resonated."

Reimagining Rural taught Forsyth residents that "small towns can have nice things," a phrase echoed by community leaders in Glendive, another Reimagining Rural community, during the tour's stop at Makoshika State Park. Glendive has chosen to use the park's stunning, natural landscape as a backdrop for revitalized infrastructure to attract tourists and showcase local businesses and events.

"Reimagining Rural has been really wonderful with providing guidance to get those things in place," said Jaime Shanks, community development specialist with the Eastern Plains Economic Development Corp., a private, nonprofit organization that helps fund economic development projects in Prairie, Dawson, Wibaux, Fallon and Carter counties.

In Prairie County, where "everything is on a small scale except ranches," MSU Extension agent Sharla Sackman works closely with EPEDC and local government officials on numerous economic development initiatives. During a tour stop in Terry, the only incorporated town in the county with a population of 574, Sackman described some challenges faced by local farmers due to the climate, landscape and limited infrastructure that make it difficult to market area crops.

"We're on the edge of drought all the time," Sackman said.

Named for Gen. Alfred Terry after the Civil War, the town showcases the hardships that pioneers endured there in the decades before the Buffalo Rapids Irrigation Project was conceived along the Yellowstone River between Miles City and Glendive in the 1930s. MSU visitors toured the Prairie County Museum and Evelyn Cameron Gallery, which displays many of the hundreds of photographs taken by Cameron, an Englishwoman who settled in Prairie County in 1889. She also documented day-to-day life in her journal, noting in one entry that she harvested 953 pounds of potatoes by herself in a single day - a matter-of-fact example of the grit required to survive in the region's remote, harsh environment before there were modern amenities.

"It was a really tough life out here," acknowledged Miah Chalfant Real Bird in Broadus, located two hours south of Terry, on the third day of the tour. "It was not for the weak, for sure."

Real Bird, a Cheyenne artist from Powder River County, is committed to honoring the lives of the area's Indigenous and non-Indigenous people through her artwork. For the Kingsley History Project, founded by Amsden and his sisters, including former MSU Extension agent Julie Riley, Real Bird painted a ledger art-style mural at the junction of U.S. Highway 212 and state highway 59, Broadus' main crossroads.

It's one of many examples of new infrastructure and initiatives supported by the county's 1,700 residents who rely upon MSU Extension, according to Extension's self-described "everything agent" Jackie Rumph.

"This community is incredible with its support for Montana State University Extension, and they're vocal about their needs and expectations of Montana State University Extension," Rumph said after listing the numerous community improvement projects and programs she manages as MSU Extension's agent in Powder River County.

In Ekalaka, home to the Carter County Museum that is about to undergo a major expansion to showcase more of its massive dinosaur fossil collection, tour members were welcomed by MSU alumni and museum employees Nathan Carroll, Stew Cook and Sabre Moore.

"We're a community of people who live among dinosaurs," said Carroll, curator of paleontology, while describing the scientific and economic riches being continually unearthed by scientists, farmers and road construction crews in the county.

Near Ekalaka lie the fossilized remains of dinosaurs and aquatic creatures that lived there more than 66 million years ago, as well as fossils of primates and other mammals that came later. With assistance, in part, from Reimagining Rural, Ekalaka has embraced its paleontological bounty, which draws 10,000 visitors each year and contributes $10 million to the region's economy.

"Paleontology has had a very positive impact in our area. We make sure paleontologists buy groceries at our local grocery store and drink at our local bar," said Moore, the museum's executive director. "Paleontology brings new dollars into the community. We're thankful for the tourism piece."

The Carter County Museum collaborates regularly with researchers at MSU's Museum of the Rockies, one of several research partnerships highlighted during the tour. At the first tour stop at the Southern Agricultural Research Center in Huntley, MSU scientists provided an overview of their current research related to perennial forage, weed science for sustainable agriculture, barley adaptation to abiotic stress and nitrogen responses to different weed varieties.

At Little Big Horn College in Crow Agency, the final tour stop, MSU visitors learned about faculty and student collaborations with university researchers in various disciplines, including Native American studies, nursing, environmental health, and land resources and environmental sciences. Also highlighted was the Guardians of the Living Water program, a partnership between the Crow Environmental Health Steering Committee, Crow Agency School, Little Big Horn College and MSU to empower youth to research and protect local waterways - and to engage students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics education.

"We have the future with all these young children," said Jonna Chavez, a teacher at Crow Agency Public School. "We're trying to build the seed so they can go on and get their degrees and work in the community."

Throughout the tour, Bobcat fans and alumni turned out to greet the visitors from Bozeman, admire the FCS National Championship trophy and join enthusiastically in the "Go, 'Cats, Go!" cheer led by Tessman as he shared highlights of what is happening at Montana State. Also at each stop, MSU's president said the university will continue to prioritize statewide outreach in the new strategic plan currently being developed.

"There will be opportunities for you not only to tell us what we're doing well and what we should keep doing but what we should be doing differently," he said in Miles City. "We want to continue learning from you."