Cover Art Description:
In 1935, Governor Frank H. Cooney crowned Mary Catherine "Kay" McCarthy queen of the first annual Montana Winter Sports Carnival during a spectacular ball at the Montana Hotel in Anaconda. The carnival, perhaps the first organized winter sports competition in Montana, had started the previous year. In the main event, top-class ski jumpers from all over the West launched from a new ski jump built southwest of town; other events included figure-skating competitions, speed-skating races, and wrestling. Of the carnival, which continued for several years thereafter, the Montana Standard waxed poetic in a January 20, 1935, editorial: "By its own efforts Anaconda becomes . . . the St. Moritz of the Rockies, the gem of the great frost-covered domain of the Northwest."
Kay McCarthy later married Bennett MacIntyre of Butte and raised six sons and one daughter. The photograph of her that appears on the front cover was taken by Anaconda photographer Albert Schlechten (color added) and appears courtesy of the McCarthy and MacIntyre Families and the Marcus Daly Historical Society, Anaconda, Montana.
On the back cover, Josh Elliott's Ulm Ranch (2006, oil on canvas, 15" x 30", photograph by Tom Ferris) recalls cold winter mornings with farm chores to be done. This painting won the Montana Historical Society's Rendezvous Legacy Award at the 2006 Western Rendezvous of Art. Now part of the Society's Rendezvous Legacy Collection, it appears here courtesy of the artist.
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