Guest column: An ocean view on the Montana prairie

I attended a social gathering several years ago in the Bitterroot Valley. As the hostess stood nearby, I admired the mountains framed by the tall windows in her home. “The view out my window is the most stunning in the state!” she said. “It’s why we moved here!”

I told her I had an ocean view out my window and she looked puzzled. “I thought you lived in eastern Montana?”

“I do!” I replied.

My genetic roots run deep in the high plains of northern and southeastern Montana. In the early 1900s, when my homesteader grandparents stepped off the Empire Builder in Rudyard, the open space that swallowe...