from the Montana Historical Society:
Courtesy NPS Glacier
The Society will have the grand opening of the new exhibit Thursday, Nov. 5, at 6:30 p.m. with opening remarks and ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda. Society Director Richard Sims, Glacier Park Deputy Superintendent Stephanie Dubois and other dignitaries will offer opening remarks.
The keynote talk for the event will be by Tim Cahill, founding editor of Outside Magazine. After the talk attendees will be invited across the street to tour the new exhibit with trail mix and coffee, tea and water for authentic refreshments.
The exhibit, which will be up from Nov. 5, 2009, until Feb. 26, 2011, is designed so that visitors actually have the experience of finding their way through it — as though they were on a hike. It is one of the Society’s most ambitious exhibits ever.
The park will be commemorating its centennial in 2010, and the exhibit honors the role it has played in the history of the state. The exhibit features historic photos from the Society collection, artwork, and
artifacts.
It features the important people in the parks history including George Bird
Grinnell, who first came to the area in 1885. “No words can describe the grandeur and majesty of these mountains, and even photographs seem hopelessly to dwarf and belittle the most impressive peaks … the region is a wonderful attraction for the lover of nature,”
Bird wrote.
Others not so famous like Elizabeth Collins, called the Cattle Queen of Montana later used as the title for a motion picture, are also featured. Collins mined with meager luck for three years along a creek in the park now named in her honor.
The exhibit takes the museumgoer from the days that Native Americans honored and used the land now knows as Glacier, all the way up to modern times and the pressures on America’s last wild areas. Bear management, forest fires, the environment, and how people have used the park over the years, are dealt with around different corners of the new exhibit.
The exhibit is a cooperative effort between the Society, Glacier National Park-National Park Service and is made possible by the generosity of Glacier National Park Fund and Burlington Northern Santa Fe Foundation.
The Society’s Montana’s Museum is located just across the street east of the State Capitol in Helena. It is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday.
-
