"sorry, i forgot my bison teeth were in there."

I've been so busy wrangling octopus-headsets that I forgot to tell you about Bozeman!

Bozeman! Bozeman is a marvelous town. The citizenry numbers about 40,000. It is just the rural/antiquitous/recreative/chic kind of demo you'd expect from the fourth-largest city in Montana. It names its schools after Native Americans, and according to the ChamCom website, it has forty Historic Properties and nine Historic Districts.

The Cardis and I went to Bozeman because in a severe packing misstep, I packed all of one skirt when I came to Mammoth. So, I drove the eighty-six point six miles to Bozeman in search of some churchier attire*.

Thus I learned that Montana has absolutely zero sales tax. None at all! The tag price is the actual price! It's like a miracle. I have no idea how they fund government projects or anything, and at the end of the day I'm frankly glad I live in the Wyo where we have fire stations, but whatevs.

Anyway. Fiscal duty to the Montanan economy complete, I drove to Gallatin Historical Society HQ. (To get a graveyard guide, naturally. These old settler towns have fantastic headstones.)

However, I was distracted from my quest by the alluring Gallatin Pioneer Museum. They've taken that old Bozeman prison and filled it with HISTORY: replicas and archives and heirlooms that Bozemen and women donate and occasionally ask for back and then the display is ruined but the museumaires are too nice to complain. And also it has a bookstore, with such literary gems as Cowboys, Mountain Men and Grizzly Bears: Fifty of the Grittiest Moments of the American West or Sherlock Holmes: The Montana Chronicles. For $5 you can have Lars the intern take you all around the place and share interesting facts. So I did!

And I learned about coal and coke and the opium habits of Bozeman's Chinese citizenry. I learned about John Bozeman, womanizing schmuck, and his mysterious death and the prison's only hanging. I learned about the Pepperbox revolver firing six shots at a time and calf-weaners and whiskey stills and the perils of using gasoline to make coffee. I learned about Alice Sisty's Roman jump and Babyland magazine and the mountain collapse that buried a city. I learned that Gary Cooper graduated from the school across the street and who in the Sam Hill Gallatin is. I learned to be envious that my ancestors were so peaceful, industrious, and polygamous while their Montanan counterparts were having a rollicking time up north. I learned about prize-winning cows and mattress-soaked mortar and the intricacies of modern quilting. Lars, you gave an excellent tour. I was enchanted with the place.

At length I took my postcards and grave-guide and bid the historians farewell, and departed to get lost and soaked and footsore in a dewy cemetery. If you have a million dollars in 1880, you get a headstone as big as a house, and if you're a foreign indigent, you don't get one at all.

After a while it started to get late, so I started back, racing the train to Livingston. On a whim, I stopped at a so-called-trading post. It was flanked by goats out back and Chinese-British-Columbians having noodles in their van out front, so I thought it might be open.

'Twas. Turns out, they had an amazing assemblage of antlers, stoves, goat scat, beads, bones, pelts, carvings, dagger-sheaths, jewelry, furniture, and taxidermy--a veritable poacher's paradise. I stroked bison pelts and fingered elk-teeth and wandered around in a transportative haze, eventually stepping through a simple kitchen with kettle, cot, and Dell to chat up the owner. He was a strikingly silver-bearded man of unknown history and name, tanning a bison hide, beloved goats nearby to pat and to scold. I handed him some cash and let him get back to his work, pocketing a mouthful of bison molars and waving to the CBCs on the way out, marveling at the day I had had.

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*And, after being helped by an abundance of teens with lip studs, I bought some. In the form of a maxi-dress. This is a thing that I highly recommend. I feel like an Austenian hippie-heroine. Plus, I don't have to razor my legs or wage nylon-run warfare. Très awesome!