Livingston: Gateway Town, Writers' Town

Livingston, Montana, exists because of two things that have kept it interesting ever since: Yellowstone National Park fifty-three miles to the south, and the Yellowstone River, which comes roaring through a gap in the Absaroka Range and turns east right here, making this valley one of the windiest inhabited places in the American West.

The Northern Pacific Railroad arrived in eighteen eighty-two, its representatives pitching a tent on the riverbank stocked with a hundred forty thousand pounds of goods hauled by ox-drawn wagon. The company platted a town nearby in eighteen eighty-three and named it for Johnston Livingston, a railroad director and major stockholder. The timing was perfect: Yellowstone had been designated the world's first national park in eighteen seventy-two, and wealthy tourists from the East were desperate to see its geysers. For the next quarter century, Livingston was the jumping-off point. Trains discharged their passengers here, and horse-drawn stages carried them south through Paradise Valley to the park's northern entrance at Gardiner.

The Northern Pacific built a grand depot in nineteen oh one to nineteen oh two, a long, low building in Mission Revival style designed by Reed and Stem, the same firm that later designed New York's Grand Central Terminal. That building still stands on Railroad Street, in active use.

By the nineteen seventies, something unexpected had happened to Livingston. Writers and artists had started moving in, drawn by the landscape, the wind, the cheap rents, and the presence of novelist Thomas McGuane, who had arrived in nineteen sixty-eight and began quietly recruiting friends. Richard Brautigan came. Jim Harrison arrived and stayed for decades. William Hjortsberg, Russell Chatham, and Tim Cahill made it home. Sam Peckinpah, the director of The Wild Bunch, lived out the final years of his life in an upstairs suite at the Murray Hotel on Main Street from nineteen seventy-nine until his death in nineteen eighty-four. Jeff Bridges, Peter Fonda, Margot Kidder. The list grew long enough that the phenomenon had a name: the Montana Gang. Livingston became one of those places where serious writers actually lived rather than visited, and some of that gravity persists.