Articles and Essays
John Clayton has published articles and essays in such magazines as Montana Quarterly, Big Sky Journal, Horizon Air, Montana Magazine, and High Country News. His occasional columns on the American West have appeared in dozens of Western newspapers through the High Country News "Writers on the Range" series.
"I’m thinking of naming my dog Obamacare"
A humorous essay from Writers on the Range
(June 2016)
Articles and Essays
John Clayton has published articles and essays in Montana Quarterly, Big Sky Journal, Newsweek, Salon, National Parks Traveler, Mountain Journal, Horizon Air, High Desert Journal, Montana Magazine, and High Country News, among others. His occasional columns on the American West appeared in dozens of Western newspapers through the High Country News "Writers on the Range" series.
In Big Sky Journal (forthcoming): In 1914, as the fad for silent movies overtook the nation, Hollywood’s biggest character was Jim Stokes, the Two-Gun Man. In the film “The Bargain,” Jim wore a six-shooter on each thigh. He rolled his cigarettes one-handed. He rode a brown and white pinto named Fritz. He was good bad man, in a storyline with morality to match the action.
That fame also enveloped the actor who portrayed him, William S. Hart. Hart’s own story, his rise and fall, has a theatricality that would be marvelously fitting if it didn’t feel so tragic. But like a country music song, it ends with a sort of redemption—and a surprising Montana twist.
[coming soon]
The noble horseman
At Nieman Storyboard (Nov. 2022): In the 1990s, when I was a young writer hoping to improve, I did a very ‘90s thing. I joined a listserv. I added my email address to a list of writers who received, every evening, the latest missive from a moderated discussion board. It was called WriterL, the “writer listserv.”
I think about it often—or, at least, as often as I assume other writers think about their graduate school experiences. WriterL was like my MFA in Creative Nonfiction, except that it was just a few minutes of my Inbox every day for fifteen years.
WriterL the book
In Big Sky Journal (fall 2022): 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.
By the 1890s, Americans of European descent had been heading to the West for decades. Some, such as Harvard graduates Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister, had come from a similarly elite background. But these three Yalies had a unique combination of diverse interests, youthful spirit, and access to levers of cultural influence. Over the next five weeks, they would engage vigorously with the landscape and its inhabitants. What the Yalies saw—and what they didn’t see—matched the triumphs and blind spots of the West’s subsequent history.
Journey of the Yalies
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.
Dashiell Hammett's Montana
In Montana Quarterly (summer 2021): A literary giant, Dashiell Hammett invented the American private detective novel. His books The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man became legendary movies. Some say his stripped-down style surpassed even Hemingway in defining both American prose and American masculinity. And his first novel was set in Butte...
[Continue reading at the Montana Quarterly site]
Father of the Elk, Stephen Leek
WyoHistory.org
(November 2020)
Seeing double in Yellowstone
The unbelievable journey of Charles Le Raye
Big Sky Journal
(Flyfishing, 2021)
Montana Quarterly
(spring 2021)
When White People Stopped Indigenous Elk Hunts In Jackson
Mountain Journal
(October 2020)
Racism and Race Horse
Was John Muir racist?
WyoHistory.org
(October 2020)
WyoHistory.org
(August 2020)
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Essay: "A place no longer special"
Why does Yellowstone lap over into Montana?
The ultimate Yellowstone
bear story
THINK Journal
(Winter/Spring 2020)
Big Sky Journal
(late winter 2020)
Big Sky Journal
(summer 2020)
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John Muir's first mountain stream
Discomfuddled
hero
Wyoming's "parkitecture"
storySouth
(Autumn 2019)
Big Sky Journal
(winter 2020)
WyoHistory.org
(March 2019)
Lake McDonald's hidden history
It's my
Prerogative
Jackson Pollock's Wyoming
Big Sky Journal
(Autumn 2019)
Montana Quarterly
(summer 2019)
WyoHistory
(July 2022)
Lessons from a previous environmental catastrophe
Mission 66 in Wyoming
When rivals collaborate
National Parks Traveler
(July 2019)
WyoHistory.org
(fall 2019)
John Clayton's blog
(June 2019)
John Muir in Yellowstone
The meaning of Yellowstone's bears
Thomas Moran's quest
WyoHistory.org
(August 2018)
Big Sky Journal
(Summer 2018)
Big Sky Journal
(early 2019)
How I conquered my addiction to memoirs about drinking
Slack thread under a photo of Betsy Ross' new flag design
Bio-pics of forbidden love
a humorous essay for
Points in Case
(June 2019)
a humorous essay for
Points in Case
(July 2019)
a humorous essay for
Points in Case
(August 2019)
Camp Monaco: Buffalo Bill Cody's last hunt
WyoHistory.org
(October 2017)
Last floats
of the Bighorn
"Dear restaurant, Please tell me about my grass"
Montana Quarterly
(Winter 2018)
An essay for Writers on the Range (October 2017)
More previous work
Previous work
Understanding the 1988 Yellowstone fires
Points West, the journal of the Buffalo Bill Center for the West (spring and summer, 2016)
John Steinbeck's Montana
"How to survive a Montana snowstorm"
Montana Quarterly
(Winter 2015)
An essay for LastBestNews (December 2014)
Photos from public domain or copyright John Clayton.
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Additional work
Ansel Adams in Yellowstone
Big Sky Journal
(Summer 2016))
Steve Mather and the founding of the National Park Service
Magic City Magazine
(July 2016)
"I’m thinking of naming my dog Obamacare"
A humorous essay for Writers on the Range
(June 2016)