Discovering Montana
Excerpt from Other People’s Pets: Critters, Careers, and Capitalism in Yellowstone Country
The year 2020, with its pandemic pandemonium, wasn’t the first time during the past fifty years that Southwest Montana has been rapidly invaded by enthusiastic immigrants.
In the 1970s, a flock of famous writers and actors found refuge in the Livingston area: Thomas McGuane, Richard Brautigan, Margot Kidder, Jim Harrison, Peter Fonda, Jeff Bridges, Tim Cahill… .
In the 1980s, thousands of members of Church Universal and Triumphant followed Elizabeth Clare Prophet to the Paradise Valley just north of Yellowstone National Park. There they erected prefabricated houses and utilitarian buildings on pristine wildlife habitat near the Gardner River. They also built fallout shelters. They buried fuel storage tanks, which later leaked into the soil and ground water. The shelters were supposed to protect church members from the nuclear war Elizabeth Clare Prophet had predicted. In March of 1990, members hunkered down in their shelters and waited for an apocalypse that never came. After they resurfaced and Prophet developed Alzheimer’s, many of the faithful left the Paradise Valley and melted into the populace of Livingston and Bozeman.
In 1992 and 1994, two popular films starring Brad Pitt and Western Montana’s spectacular landscapes—A River Runs Through It and Legends of the Fall—ignited another real estate boom when hordes of movie fans arrived, looking for a mythic version of The West that has never existed, except in fiction. Before that, in 1991, during the filming of A River Runs Through It, cast and crew members augmented their incomes with quick real estate transactions. They bought houses in Montana—cheap by California standards—and re-sold them to friends in L.A. for three times what they’d paid. I heard about this at a party where the people making all the money were bragging to each other. They were so proud of themselves, unaware that, almost overnight, their actions had caused the cost of housing for locals to triple without a commensurate increase in their incomes.
The release of the film The Horse Whisperer in 1998 added another layer of mystique to Southwestern Montana. The film was based on a book written by British author Nicholas Evans, who admitted his boyhood addiction to Hollywood westerns. During interviews about his book and the movie version of The Horse Whisperer, Evans acknowledged the mystical, metaphoric, and mythic aspects of his stories. But moviegoers took what they saw on the screen literally. They arrived in Montana expecting to encounter stoic cowboys and their adoring horses. Instead, they found small towns populated by conservative-minded folks who depended on agriculture and tourism for their livelihoods. Nary a Starbucks or wine store in sight. Lots of grain elevators and iceberg lettuce, though, as well as bad attitudes toward outsiders.
One day in the late 1990s, a grant writer I knew, and sometimes worked with, announced that he and his wife were moving back to Kentucky, where they were from. “We’ve been living out here on the frontier for five years now,” he said, “and I’m tired of struggling to earn a living.”
Wow, I thought: You don’t often think of Kentucky as an ample source of financial prosperity, which put Montana’s per capita income in grim perspective. That man and his wife left Bozeman. However, most people who moved here stayed—either because they couldn’t make enough money to leave or because they had so much money they could leave and return whenever they pleased.
The summer of 2020 eclipsed all previous population surges, however. The pandemic and fans of the Paramount TV series Yellowstone fueled a real estate feeding frenzy like nothing Montanans on the west side of the state had ever seen before. Not since the gold rush days of the 1860s, anyway.
After months of sheltering in place, people became restless. The wide-open spaces and clean air in Montana appealed to everyone who wanted to escape crowded cities, masks, and the restrictions of the pandemic. Yellowstone National Park was overrun by enthusiastic, wannabe outdoor recreationists. They trampled vegetation, littered, ignored warnings about thermal pools, and risked their lives trying to take selfies on the edges of cliffs or next to bison, bears, and moose. The national park frenzy was fueled by social media images and blog articles that touted a campervan lifestyle in which glamorous people earned a living from anywhere on the planet. Each post featured an enticing unpopulated landscape in the background. The posts and photos—like the characters and storylines in Yellowstone—were pure, highly-improbable fiction. But oh, how deluded viewers yearned to believe.
By the way, until reliable Internet connections were available in Montana, people with enough money to buy land and/or homes didn’t live here full-time, unless they were retired. By the twenty-teens, however, most of Montana had access to high-speed Internet, and most professionals could work remotely—a fact thoroughly proven by the pandemic shut down. That changed everything.
Considering that the pandemic real estate feeding-frenzy didn’t begin in earnest until June of 2020, the meteoric rise in the median price of a house in Bozeman during that year was impressive. The cost of a single-family house increased from the mid-$300,000s to nearly $500,000 before the end of 2020. By the end of 2021, a local real estate broker published statistics in Bozeman Magazine that showed the median price as $650,000. In October of 2022, a local television reporter stated the average home price in Bozeman as $869,000. Almost overnight, Western Montana became a place where only wealthy people could afford to buy a house. Locals struggled—financially, emotionally, and mentally—with the abrupt changes to their small towns.
One man, Sean Hawksford, became so desperate that he began begging, literally, for someone to sell him a house. He stood on street corners, wearing a sandwich sign made from cardboard. One side read Please sell me a home with his email address printed in large black letters. The other side showed a list of checkboxes: down payment, check, financing, check, solid income, check. The final item on the list: home. No check mark in that box. He held a third sign in his hand that read, Local Business Owner, Wife Pregnant, Paid Rent Here For 10 Years, Anything Helps, God Bless.
By the time Sean took to the streets, he and his wife had made twenty offers on twenty houses. They were pre-approved for a mortgage loan. But whenever they made an offer, someone else swooped in and bought it with cash, usually paying far more than the asking price—sometimes without even seeing the house in person. With a budget max of $500,000, Sean and his wife became desperate. They wanted to get settled into a house before their baby arrived.
During many cold days in October of 2021, Sean stood on sidewalks in downtown Bozeman wearing his sandwich boards and holding his sign. People took pictures and posted them on social media. He gave interviews to newspaper, television, and radio reporters. Bloggers blogged. Talking heads talked. Meanwhile, social media sites teamed with scathing opinions about the “outsiders.” Californians were especially vilified online and in person—because they were assumed to be the people with all the cash, although plenty of people from New York, Seattle, Houston, Denver, and elsewhere, bought houses and land in the Bozeman area. Vehicles with California license plates were keyed, and frustrated locals shouted hateful words at the drivers of those vehicles.
Sean became a regional hero, a symbol of the fight against injustice—a member of the ninety-nine percent single-handedly battling the wealthy one percent. He represented the mythical David, a small common man, fighting Goliath. In that story, even though the giant seemed to have all the odds in his favor, David won the fight. Sean also won.
In a follow-up story one year later, KZBK-TV reported, "A homeowner whose family had recently experienced tragedy and loss reached out to the young family, insisting they buy his home." The video showed footage of the Hawksford’s house, beginning with the nursery where their baby boy slept—a sweet victory for the common people.
Sean Hawksford’s triumph encouraged me, as well. If he could win that colossal battle, which had seemed so daunting at the start, maybe I could, too. That hopeful feeling didn’t last long, however. Every day, the cost of everything—groceries, hardware and office supplies, fuel and vehicle maintenance, restaurant meals, etcetera—increased, partly the result of higher wages for workers who had to pay more for housing. A ruthless, vicious circle.
