The Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives’ Brown Bag Lunch Series welcomes Donna Erickson to present on her book, Rooted at the Edge: Ranching Where the Old West and New West Collide, which is about ranching in the North Hills area of Missoula and the struggles that ranchers of North Hill face in combating suburban sprawl.
Rooted at the Edge paints a portrait of a ranching community in a threatened landscape steeped in history, conflict, and beauty. In this narrative nonfiction work, Donna L. Erickson explores the hilly skirt of ground at the northern boundary of Missoula, Montana, separating the town from the wilderness beyond. The North Hills region represents the critical—and often highly personal—issues at play at the edge of many western towns.
The urban-rural fringe is both valuable and vulnerable. Across the West rural lifestyles are increasingly compromised by suburbanization, economic hardship, and family dynamics; a way of life and a way of work are vanishing. Ranchland may be simultaneously cherished by a family for the life its members have made there and coveted by urban neighbors for open space. Community residents may love a place for its scenery and wildlife habitat while others wish it converted to a commercial parking lot. Complex ecological relationships can be bulldozed in a single afternoon. And the threats of climate change and shifting populations compromise the edge even more.
In the tension between love and loss, Erickson wrote this story of a landscape’s soft contours, piney ridges, shady draws, and grassy slopes, and its potential disappearance under an expanding city. Rooted at the Edge conveys, in a way that statistics cannot, what’s at stake when ranches at the urban fringe are threatened.
The Brown Bag presentation will begin at noon on Wednesday, June 25th, 2025, and will last about an hour. The presentation will be held in the auditorium at the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives located at 17 W. Quartz Street. Guests are encouraged to bring a sack lunch. Coffee and water will be provided.
Brown Bag Lunches are held on the second and fourth Wednesdays of every month. Upcoming lectures will focus on topics of local interest. For more information, contact the Archives at (406)782-3280.
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