Articles
John Clayton writes longform nonfiction for magazines and websites. These are John's narrative and feature stories, as distinguished from his op-eds or weekly Substack essays.
Lessons in burying hatchets
On the 50th anniversary of the Little Bighorn, Montanans took small steps toward reconciliation.
Sinclair Lewis’ Yellowstone
The famed novelist came west looking for class divisions—but also found their antidote.

Yellowstone's 1917 trailblazer
A profile of little-known Alice Parmelee Morris, who scouted the backcountry for the newly-formed National Park Service.
Trails (print-only, issue 13)
Cars, Shuttles and Congestion in Yellowstone
Lessons from Greater Yellowstone’s forgotten public transportation experiment, and why the solution to park traffic congestion proves so elusive.
Charlie Russell vs. the automobile
The famous Old West painter had a worthy nemesis: what he and his Blackfeet friends called a "skunk wagon."

A legacy of speed
Bob Marshall made quick work of conservation, but that wasn't always for the better. A profile, for the magazine's issue focused on "efficiency."
Trails (issue 10, print only)
Howard Zahniser's wilderness awakening
The moment in 1947 when the man who would write the 1964 Wilderness Act first got on a horse for a ten-day pack trip into the Wyoming wilderness.
Thomas Wolfe's West
The giant entered Yellowstone National Park squeezed into the back seat of a white Ford Model 81A DeLuxe sedan, arms akimbo, knees spread wide. It was June 27, 1938, and he was a famous writer scribbling notes for a big novel.
Yellowstone's forgotten woman
In the 1930s, Rosalie Edge helped spark the park's revolution in predator ecology. Why has nobody heard of her?

Edge's Montana pelican crusade
Rosalie Edge also raised hell in Montana, to the great benefit of its American white pelicans.
Montana Quarterly (fall 2024)
Lake Solitude and wilderness
Howard Zahniser's inspriation for the 1964 Wilderness Act came at a potential dam site in Wyoming's Bighorn mountains.
Banishing the Tukudika
In 1879, Yellowstone superintendent Philetus Norris made a fateful call that epitomized the park’s relationship with Indigenous people—and thus with the world
Starker Leopold's innovation
After Yellowstone rangers slaughtered 4,300 elk in 1961 , zoologist Starker Leopold advocated systematic, scientific management of natural areas—a revolutionary approach at the time.
The noble horseman
Like a country music song, the rise of fall of the 1910s cowboy movie actor William S. Hart ends with a sort of redemption—and a surprising Montana twist.
Big Sky Journal (Feb. 2023)
Dashiell Hammett's Montana
A literary giant, Dashiell Hammett invented the American private detective novel. His books The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man became legendary movies. Why did he set his first novel in Butte?
WriterL the book
In the 1990s, when I was a young writer hoping to improve, I did a very ‘90s thing. I joined a listserv. WriterL was like my MFA in Creative Nonfiction, except that it was just a few minutes of my Inbox every day for fifteen years.
Journey of the Yalies
At 2:00 a.m. on June 7, 1896, a Great Northern train pulled into the station at Blackfoot, Montana, bringing three Yale graduates to some of the last great stretches of the fabled American West.
Previous stories
The Glidden Auto Tour, famous in its day, made its final run along Montana’s barely passable Hi-Line Route. In Montana Quarterly (fall 2022):
The nine-day Glidden Tour of 1913 was the first automobile-based planned road trip through Montana. Discomforts and mechanical problems limited participants to an average of only 178 miles per day.
But the Glidden Tour glitters because it was the first Montana event to see the road trip as a destination itself, rather than a mere journey. And one surprise is how wrong its vision was of how road-tripping should work.
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When touring was tough

In Big Sky Journal (summer 2022): The Mountain West in the 2020s has been characterized by increasing crowds. In 2021, Montana’s Flathead County grew by 3.5 percent and Billings was briefly ranked as the top emerging market in the entire nation. By February 2022, the median value of a single-family home in Montana’s Gallatin Valley was $896,000. In 2021, Yellowstone National Park’s 4.9 million visits represented the most ever and a 44 percent increase over 2011; Glacier’s 3.1 million visits were a 63 percent increase. In many areas, restaurants, campsites, and trails are oversubscribed.
This sudden influx has historical precedent. An early-1900s trend, often summarized by the catchphrase See America First, brought waves of tourists and transplants who defined the region’s culture and economy for decades. If we’re wondering what happens next, we could start by looking at what happened then.
See America First
In Montana Quarterly (fall 2021): Like the horse, railroad, tractor, and cellphone, the all-electric vehicle (EV) is a technology that will transform life in Montana. We are about to see how that transition will play out.
“Electric pickup trucks like the F-150 Lightning will be a game-changer,” says Kyla Maki, who works on electric vehicle and alternative fuels for the Montana Department of Environmental Quality. In May, Ford announced the 2022 release of an all-electric version of America’s most popular pickup truck, starting at about $40,000.
With up to $7,500 in federal tax credits, the truck could have cost parity with gas-powered pickups. In early reviews, Motor Trend said that it will also have improved ride and handling, going from zero to 60 in 4.4 seconds. The only question, then, will be the question hanging over the entire EV sector in a vast, sparsely-populated state.
How will you charge it?
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Montana's electric vehicle frontier

The "Named Highway Trilogy"
I wrote about the very first automobile roads, which had names instead of numbers. And I did it as a trilogy, because much great art, like "The Naked Gun," comes in trilogies.
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We meet the granddaddy of named roads, and investigate its curious recent Wyoming resurgence.
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Going very deep on named roads, this episode, like The Naked Gun 2½, is arguably the funniest of the three, and the most relevant to today’s politics.
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A Grand Unifying Theory of named roads: all roads lead to Yellowstone.
Selected previous work
A.A. Anderson and the Yellowstone Forest Reserve (WyoHistory.org, 2017)
The man who invented dude ranching (Magic magazine, 2017)
Ansel Adams in Yellowstone (Big Sky Journal, 2016, unavailable online)
Steve Mather and the founding of the National Park Service (Magic magazine, 2016)
Understanding the 1988 Yellowstone fires (Points West, 2016, unavailable online)
How to survive a Montana snowstorm (Last Best News, 2014, unavailable online)
John Steinbeck's Montana (Montana Quarterly, 2015, unavailable online)





























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