Book excerpt: The Roadside History series charts a course to the present through carefully selected and thoroughly researched stories relating what we see today with what happened before. Through vivid anecdotes, old photographs, and maps, the Roadside History guides provide entertaining insight into the states they describe.Each state is divided into geographical and historical regions, and each region is described in the context of highways that pass through it. This road log approach helps place modern travelers in the past.Roadside History of Montana goes well beyond cowboy stories to tell of some of Montana's most fascinating people, from the copper kings of Butte to the Freemen of Garfield County.