Description
Montana: A Paper Trail; is a story of two journeys. Thomas Minckler has spent a half century on a personal journey to collect nineteenth- and early twentieth-century letters and documents, vintage photographs, rare books, paintings and sketches, and territorial imprints on Montana and the northern Plains. Years of collecting and research on these items has uncovered valuable insights on previously unknown aspects of Montana history. Every artifact in the collection has a unique paper trail, a journey that reveals the colorful and fascinating story of Montana. Noted historian Dr. Brian W. Dippie wrote, “In this sumptuous book, Tom lays his treasures out before our eyes, and provides the context necessary to understand the claim each holds on his attention. When I look at what he has packed in his treasure chest, I find my vision tinged with green. Montana is known as The Treasure State for good reason. Gold coursed through its early history and gold dust still clings to the treasures in Tom’s collection. Appropriately, his record of his adventures on Montana’s paper trail is ambitious in scope and full of rewards for those who would accompany him on his journey.” Thomas Ernest Minckler’s love of history; cats and flowers; chess, tennis, and baseball; music and poetry; astronomy; rare books, art, photographs, and letters; travel, food, and wine; and reading, research and collecting have sustained his life―beginning in Cut Bank to Great Falls to San Francisco to Billings to New York City and back―a life filled with wonder and curiosity of the world in the past, the present, and the future. The author’s previous book, In Poetic Silence: The Flower Paintings of Joseph Henry Sharp, was the beginning of a mid- to later-life creative output that continues with Montana: A Paper Trail. Highlights to be found in Montana: A Paper Trail: • Chief Joseph tintype • Custer to President Grant written in the White House six weeks before the LBHB. • Charlie Russell drawings from the Granville Stuart and Teddy Blue Abbott collection. • Thomas Francis Meagher’s 1865 letter after he received the appointment by President Andrew Johnson to be secretary of Montana Territory which turned into an acting Governor immediately. • James Kipp tintype. • The largest archive of letters and photographs of Granville Stuart and Teddy Blue Abbott in private hands and perhaps the most important archive in any library in the country. • the largest and most important photographic collection of the Crow photographer Richard Throssel.
