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Cow Poke Aesthetic / Ski Resort Chic

By: Steven Rinella

Bozeman, Montana, is an old frontier town which has maintained its cow poke aesthetic while cleverly managing to blend in the high fashion of modern flyfishing and ski resort chic, with a topping of college town hipness.

The New West?

Anybody looking for a handmade $1,200 Bowie knife or a set of designer long johns should be doing their shopping along Bozeman’s Main Street. The storefronts of boutiques, galleries and fly fishing shops alternate with saloons featuring a set of steer horns and an elk rack over the bar, perhaps a girl with a pierced lip and a cowboy hat playing Hank Sr.’s “Your Cheatin’ Heart” on the juke box while trying to phone to someone who can give her a reliable ski report for the local Bridger Bowl and Big Sky ski areas.

Bozeman took its name from John Bozeman, an explorer who mapped and promoted in 1864 what he thought would make a good shortcut route from the Oregon Trail near Casper, Wyoming, to some new gold digs along Grasshopper Creek, a tributary of the Beaverhead River. His route followed the Yellowstone River, went over the Bozeman Pass at the north end of the Gallatin Range, then dropped down into the Gallatin Valley where the city of Bozeman now sits at 4,795 feet above sea level. The most famous of all the tougher-than-nails mountain men, Jim Bridger was the first guide to lead a wagon train over Bozeman’s route. In the couple of years following Bridger’s initial success, enough wagons were ambushed and ransacked by Sioux and Cheyenne warriors that the trail fell out of favor with miners and immigrants. So John Bozeman may have made a questionable judgement call back in 1864, but here in the new millenium he has his name attached to one the West’s most happening ski towns, which lies within easy striking distance of Yellowstone National Park and over 2,000 linear miles of excellent trout streams. Jim Bridger was rewarded with the name of the mountain chain running north of the city. From the air, Bozeman seems to sit at the southern tip of the Bridger Range like a light on top of a giant Christmas tree.

It’s not fair to categorize Bozeman strictly as a outdoor sports town catering to the finer tastes in apparel. At the foot of all those amazing mountains is a full-fledged community of about 50,000 people. Montana State University is a land grant school offering a wide variety of undergraduate and advanced degrees, some of the most popular being in architecture, engineering, agriculture and biological sciences. The university also has a nationally respected film school.

Bozeman can fall short for students once they get their degrees, however, because there are not a lot of professional or technological jobs in the area. Agriculture still leads the economy; Farms raising wheat, barley, and beef border the town in all the surrounding valleys. Much of the money being spent in Bozeman was not earned there, though, as tourism is closing in behind agriculture as a leading economic factor. Most new jobs are in the service and retail sectors. Some notable exceptions to this are a few outfits that manufacture high quality sporting equipment, like Dana Designs and Sims. A lot of people aren’t complaining about the job scene in Bozeman, though, because if there were good full-time jobs being offered everyday in the morning newspaper then one might feel compelled to take one. And nothing is harder on a skier and fisherman’s schedule than a Monday through Friday nine-to-fiver.

Bozeman has the types of draws that one would expect from a Western city that caters to tourism – Edgerley’s Railroad Museum, Gallatin County Pioneer Museum – but it also has a couple of surprises, like the American Computer Museum and the Emerson Cultural Center, which promotes opera and theatre. Bozeman’s flagship historical draw is the Museum of the Rockies. This is a very popular museum that holds a world-renowned collection of dinosaur bones and other artifacts with vintages that range back billions of years. The museum also holds large collections of Native American artifacts and items of significance to the regional history of Bozeman.

Late night hours in Bozeman are best spent hopping the many bars, restaurants, and live music venues that make up the core of the downtown area. There is enough variety in watering holes that almost anyone with a somewhat open mind could find a crowd to match their style and mood. The bars close at 2 a.m. Come morning, a soak in one of several natural hot springs around town can make a rough night feel a little smoother. Hot spring enthusiasts attribute all kinds of medical powers to the waters, including the ability to cure everything from dermatological ailments to alcoholism to arthritis. Others just go because it feels good to kick back with your friends and relax for awhile.

With some things about the art and culture of Bozeman having been said, it’s important to revisit the fact that Bozeman is first and foremost an outdoor town. For immediate accessibility of quality fishing, hunting, skiing, rock climbing, whitewater rafting, kayaking, and hiking, you can do no better in Montana, perhaps anywhere in the Northern Rockies, than you can in Bozeman. A morning’s drive can put you out onto the Great Plains or it can land you in some of the most rugged, remote mountain ranges in the lower forty-eight. Jim Bridger, now in statue form at a park in Bozeman, must still feel totally at home.