Shelby and the Northern Rockies Doorstep

Shelby, Montana is a small oil and wheat town that briefly held the heavyweight championship of the world in nineteen twenty-three. It is true. The mayor of Shelby, attempting to put the town on the map, contracted with promoter Tex Rickard to hold the Jack Dempsey versus Tommy Gibbons title fight here on July fourth.

The town spent approximately two hundred thousand dollars building a wooden arena. Dempsey took his guaranteed purse and Rickard collected gate receipts. The fight went fifteen rounds, which is too long for a heavyweight championship, and Dempsey won on points.

The attendance was well below what the arena held. The financial loss nearly bankrupted three local banks. The fight is still the most famous thing that ever happened in Shelby.

North of here, Interstate Fifteen approaches the Canadian border through the Blackfeet Nation, the Blackfoot Confederacy, as it is known in Canada, one of the most historically significant Indigenous political structures on the northern plains. The Blackfeet Reservation sits immediately east of Glacier National Park. The park's eastern boundary is also the western edge of the reservation, which means that the mountains you see to the west are simultaneously inside a national park and the backyard of a reservation whose people have lived in these mountains since long before the park existed.

Glacier holds about twenty-five active glaciers, down from roughly one hundred fifty in the middle of the eighteen hundreds. Earlier projections had them mostly gone within a few decades. The park was partly named for the glaciers.

The name will remain when they are gone. The Canadian border is about thirty-five miles north of Shelby. The country changes more gradually than the fence suggests.