Jolly Good Press

BBC’s View of Montana: Oil, Cowboys and Gladiators

By Amy Linn, 10-19-09

	Flickr photo by Justin Brockie

Should we feel happy that the wild West still tantalizes European journalists, or should we feel bad that a BBC radio reporter recently got sent all the way from England—and apparently only got to visit Glendive and Sidney, Montana? (All due respects to Glendive and Sidney, of course: those are great places in windswept, cold, vast Eastern Montana. Did I mention windswept and cold?)

At any rate, reporter Kevin Connolly from the BBC Radio 4’s “From Our Own Correspondent” program apparently had a smashing good time in Montana. At least, when he stopped feeling scared.

According to his broadcast, Glendive was the type of place where you find “taciturn men on horseback.”

“Walking into a Stetsoned and booted town like Glendive, Montana, feels like walking into a bar in Rome and finding gladiators relaxing over an espresso,” he said.

The gladiator-cowboys aren’t just fierce, he added. Cowboys are “living reminders of the toughness and determination with which America claimed and tamed the great oceans of land between its coasts.”

Hmm. Depressed, surly, horseback riders in Stetsons, symbolizing a bloody conquering of the nation. Is that what we’re really all about?

Well, maybe not. In a second, more newsy story, Connolly talks about the oil boom in Sidney. (It’s the type of place, he says, where “outside one bar amidst the many pick-up trucks I noticed one with a huge set of bull horns stuck jauntily to the cab.")

Connolly notes that the landscape is dotted with oil wells above the deep reserves of the famed Bakken Formation. America might be toying with notions about greening the economy, but coal and oil are still keeping us fueled, he observes. And as to the cowboys?

Well, their eyes no longer “speak of long, lonely days watching the endless skies and rolling plains chasing each other towards the horizon,” he concludes. “The cowboy himself seems a little like an endangered species,” he writes. And in this part of the world, that means he can come off the endangered species list and start getting rifles aimed at him. The wild West, indeed.

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