It was the summer of 1975. My dad and I cruised into town riding low in his red 1962 Chevy Impala. We had been on a 10-day camping trip that included Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains, the Bitterroot Range, and southwest Montana’s Wise River country, a long way from home in southern California. We were ready for a stop for the night, a comfortable motel, a hot shower, and a roof over our heads between camping spots. We motored into downtown Bozeman, checking out the fine two- and three-story brick buildings that dominated Main Street (Figs. 1 and 2). We settled into a well-aged motel, the modest Alpine Lodge ($14/night) on the east side of town. Our evening stroll took us into the heart of a pleasant cow and college town (population 18,000), home to Montana State University, a plethora of farm and ranch businesses, and the usual midtown accumulation of bars, banks, and hardware stores. Little did I realize that evening that I was beginning a long-term relationship with a place and a landscape that became an integral part of my own career as a geographer. As it happened, downtown Bozeman has also been a setting that has changed a great deal, right along with me. It has become a fascinating laboratory of an American West that took the modest little town I met in 1975 and transformed it into the trendy Bozone (or “Boz Angeles”) that I know today.
As I thought about the ways in which downtown Bozeman and I have mingled with one another over the past 50 years, I recalled Donald Meinig’s seminal essay, “The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene” (Meinig 1979). Meinig argues we can gaze at the same landscape and interpret it in many ways, depending on our interests, points of view, and what we see as important. In my case, downtown Bozeman is not the same scene it was fifty years ago, but it has intersected with my personal and professional life in multiple and formative ways. Including my initial visit as a curious teenager, one can ponder my downtown digs as…
• A stop for the night
• An urban land use district
• A historical palimpsest
• An expression of the Amenity West
• A signpost of regional ecological fragility
• A place I call home
Fast forward eight years from my casual stop for the night at the affordable Alpine Lodge. It was a busy decade: an undergraduate college degree in Geography from California State University, Northridge, a master’s and Ph.D. in Geography from Syracuse University, and then a sudden, brutal encounter with an unfriendly academic job market. I was lucky: a temporary one-year position at Montana State University opened and I got the job, teaching a whirlwind of new quarter classes in Economic Geography, Urban Geography, the Geography of Manufacturing, and Trade and Transportation. Suddenly, I was back in Bozeman, living in a rental place only a block from Main Street. It was 1983 and the town, then home to about 21,000 residents, had seen modest growth since my earlier visit. Scrambling for lecture material for my new classes (how do you teach “Urban Geography” in a cow town?!), I decided to take a field trip around Bozeman and create a slide show for my class to demonstrate that smaller settlements also contained examples of the varied land uses found in a large metropolitan area. For me, downtown Bozeman became an urban land use district.
Camera in hand, I walked the downtown streets, especially drawn to the city’s signature landmark, the venerable Baxter Hotel (Fig. 3), as well as to some of the older brick buildings in the center of town. Most downtown businesses served the local population, including several banks, restaurants, and clothing and hardware stores. For the remainder of my slide show, I visited Bozeman’s small suburban subdivisions, an older industrial neighborhood near the railroad tracks, and a few thinly settled exurban districts beyond the south side of town. The images demonstrated Bozeman’s “urban character” to the class and were an effective way for me to learn the local landscape.
My first stay in Bozeman was brief (1983-1984), but after two years away (teaching geography at the University of Georgia), I returned to take a tenure-track position at Montana State in 1986, making the Bozone my home ever since. My new list of teaching assignments was right up my alley and one of my favorite classes was the Historical Geography of North America. Beginning in the early 1990s, I created a class project entitled “Bozeman’s Changing Urban Landscape” in which I returned to downtown Bozeman, seeing it as a historical palimpsest for my students to explore (Smith 1996).
The project was straightforward. Student groups of two or three chose a block downtown to research. The idea was to reconstruct land use activities on the block for 1891, 1927, 1963, and the present-day. Working with the Special Collections Librarian at Montana State University’s Library, we made available copies of Sanborn Insurance Company’s maps for 1891 and 1927 which showed detailed maps of businesses and buildings on their assigned block. We also made available Polk’s Bozeman City Directories for 1927 and 1963 which helped reconstruct business names and addresses for those eras. Finally, students went into the field to map contemporary activities for their block. Each group prepared a final report that included the four maps for 1891 (Fig. 4), 1927 (Fig. 5), 1963 (Fig. 6), and the current year (Fig. 7). They were also asked to comment on how the downtown landscape and land uses had changed over time, what that could tell them about broader changes in the community, how Bozeman’s trends paralleled or departed from broader regional trends, and what research challenges they encountered along the way. Students were able to see how older livery businesses, cigar shops, and department stores evolved towards modern-day clothing stores and fly-fishing shops. More generally, it was a useful way to integrate primary archival research with time in the field and to see how contemporary Bozeman had come to be. It also deepened my own understanding of the Bozone’s roots in the past, especially as historic preservation of that downtown landscape became a larger local issue after 1990.
The 1990s proved to be a watershed era for downtown Bozeman. The city’s accelerating growth made it clear that it was becoming an expression of the Amenity West (Travis and Robb 1997). The city’s population increased by more than 20 percent between 1990 (22,000) and 2000 (27,000). More importantly, surrounding Gallatin County grew 34 percent, reaching more than 67,000 residents by the turn of the century. Much of Bozeman’s urban growth was taking place in unincorporated areas beyond the city limits or in older nearby towns (such as Belgrade) where affordable housing attracted new migrants. Many of these new residents found jobs in the region’s expanding tourist industry (fly fishing, skiing, proximity to Yellowstone National Park, etc.), in growing opportunities at the university and hospital, and in entrepreneurial businesses based in technology, construction, and outdoor recreation.
Downtown Bozeman reflected these changes, already apparent in the early 1990s (see Fig. 7). It remained the center of the local economy and community but also became the destination for more travelers or retirees arriving in the region. Downtown was a mixed bag: On Main Street between Tracy and Black, for example, locally oriented businesses such as Country Flower Shop, Western Drug, and Owenhouse Ace Hardware increasingly shared downtown space with Powderhorn Sporting Goods, two fly fishing shops, and Stylon (an upscale women’s clothing store), all of which depended on both locals and visitors for business. The 1990s also saw increased interest in historic preservation. In 1991, Bozeman initiated its Neighborhood Conservation Overlay District which drew attention to preserving the city’s historical character, both downtown and in several nearby residential districts (City of Bozeman 2024). There was an understanding that new construction was inevitable, but also that maintaining the city’s historical fabric was integral to its success as an amenity-based place to live and visit.
What I witnessed everyday was a terrific laboratory of how the American West was changing. At the university, I participated in public panels on the “New American West,” I consulted with local planners on creatively designing new public spaces around town, and I taught workshops for Montana teachers on the “New American West.” In my own research publications, I tried to ponder the consequences of what I was seeing in the Bozone and beyond. In 1998, in my “Inside the New West: A View from Suburban Montana,” I lamented “I have seen the Gallatin Valley fill with subdivisions even as my house value has tripled. I now enjoy the amenity of tolerably digestible Thai food, although the traffic around town has multiplied faster than the good restaurants” (Wyckoff 1998, 401). Subsequent opportunities to write about changes afoot in Montana came between 2000 and 2010 (Wyckoff 2002, 2003, 2006; Bryson and Wyckoff 2010). In a larger work on the western American landscape (How to Read the American West: A Field guide) published in 2014, I devoted chapters to “Cities and Suburbs” as well as “Playgrounds,” and much of my own lived experience of these regional settings was shaped by my time in the Bozone which continued to be transformed before my eyes (Wyckoff 2014).
Since 2010, the pace of change, seemingly relentless and unstoppable, has accelerated in Bozeman and across the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) which surrounds it. Bozeman’s population at the turn of the century (27,000) has more than doubled (59,000) in just twenty-five years. Similar rates of growth countywide (68,000 to 130,000) suggest that surrounding areas beyond the city limits continue to be transformed into subdivisions and exurban housing tracts. Just since 2018, more fuel has been added to the fire. The globe-reaching popularity of the television program “Yellowstone”—set in the “New West” of the twenty-first century—has arguably sparked a new inrush of people to the region in search of what they see on the screen (Middleton 2024; Wilson 2024). Since 2020, the COVID pandemic also spurred outmigration from metropolitan areas. Smaller cities and rural areas in the amenity-rich northern Rockies have been on the receiving end of many of these migrants (Peterson, Winkler, and Mockrin 2024).
The spectacular growth of the local airport west of town has been indicative of these accelerating changes (Bozeman Yellowstone International Airport 2025). When I arrived in Bozeman 40 years ago, “Gallatin Field” was a sleepy little airport with two or three departure gates and a handful of regional flights per day. By 2024, the “Bozeman Yellowstone International Airport” had become Montana’s busiest, boasting more than 2.6 million annual arrivals. Both the growing local population and the ever-increasing inflow of tourists account for the change and travelers can now count on direct flights between Bozeman and Boston, New York City, Charlotte, Atlanta, Houston, and Los Angeles. A $150 million expansion project will be completed by the end of the decade, boosting the number of gates from 12 to 15.
Specific to Bozeman itself, the proximity of large tracts of private land (formerly agricultural), especially north and west of the city, has offered a ready template for rapid, large-scale suburbanization. The relative abundance of water in the Gallatin Valley has also encouraged developers. And growth attracts more growth. As the Bozone’s fame has spread, a plethora of publicity about one of the nation’s “most rapidly growing” small cities garners media attention and attracts more visitors, entrepreneurs, workers, and retirees (Bozeman Convention and Visitors Bureau 2024; Bozeman Realty Group 2022; Fox Business News 2024). As is often the case, growth is a double-edged sword. Many local businesses struggle to find available workers in a high-cost setting. The median listing price for a home in Bozeman (2024) was about $800,000, higher than the average in California. On the other hand, Bozeman’s homeless population has also surged, and growing numbers of people are forced to live out of their cars and campers, creating tensions with residents and nearby businesses (Bozeman Daily Chronicle 2023b). Indeed, many of the challenges of metropolitan life including traffic jams, higher crime rates, and illegal drug use have complicated life within the Bozone.
What has this meant for downtown? At first glance, the pace of change has been more measured here because many of the buildings along Main Street retain their brick facades and historical patina. In fact, several downtown buildings have recently undergone expensive facelifts designed to restore their vintage look to remove “modern” building fronts added in the 1970s and 1980s (Fig. 8) (Bozeman Daily Chronicle 2023a). Some of the biggest physical changes to downtown involve its commercial expansion, especially on its western and eastern fringes and along its north side (Fig. 9). Mendenhall Street, paralleling Main (see Fig. 1), has attracted major new investments in high-end condos, hotels, and restaurants that have transformed several blocks of the once quiet street (Fig. 10). The wider spillover effects are also notable in adjacent residential blocks just north of downtown where older houses are biting the dust and new lofts and blocks of condominiums and apartments offer residents walking-distance amenities to downtown restaurants and nightspots (Fig. 11 and Fig. 12).
The other fundamental change on Main Street itself can easily be discovered on a casual stroll, a quite different saunter than I took with my dad a half century ago. Today, Main Street caters to a global clientele of visitors and to new residents more inclined to purchase high-end clothing, real estate, and artwork than they are to buy an appliance or grab a quick meal. I returned to the block between Tracy and Black streets, visited by my former student thirty years earlier. I sketched out my findings as she had, adding a 2024 map to our downtown palimpsest (Fig. 13).
Only one business has persevered since 1994, the local Owenhouse Ace Hardware Store (on the scene in the 1920s, see Fig. 5). The rest of the commercial landscape has been totally transformed, much of it catering to upscale visitors and newer, affluent residents (Fig. 14 and Fig. 15). Trendy apparel stores, with a western and outdoor bent, make it easy to drop one’s bankroll on a jacket or a pair of sturdy hiking boots. While some shops have local roots like Schnees Boots and Shoes, global capital has arrived in force. Lululemon, Fjällräven, Voormi, and Athleta make it easy to enhance one’s performance apparel. Your Yoga, the Nectar Skin Shop, and Shelter Interiors invite us to increase flexibility, indulge in a spa facial, or redecorate one’s living room. The venerable Plonk wine bar has been on Main Street for more than a decade, but The Heist—the city’s high-end steakhouse—is a newer arrival, peddling fine service and a killer $85 ribeye. And just in case one cannot resist, The Agency Luxury Real Estate office is there to ponder seven-figure options.
More broadly, my recent walk down Main Street suggests yet another way to look at downtown Bozeman. As pleasant as it is, today’s Bozone is also a signpost of regional ecological fragility. All the refashioning that I encountered between Tracy and Black streets reflects larger-scale changes that are rapidly fragmenting the GYE, threatening the integrity and vitality of one of the continent’s remaining large-scale ecosystems. Given all the growth evident in Bozeman and across the GYE, a growing number of observers worry that the long-term ecological health of the region is under threat (Ray, Thoma, Legg, Diamond, and Hansen 2019; Wilkinson 2022, 2024). How can the GYE remain an intact, functioning ecosystem capable of supporting a diverse array of plants and animals if it is being ever more fragmented by resorts, second homes, highways and fences? Seen this way, downtown Bozeman and the degrading natural landscape that surrounds it are simply different sides of the same coin, a set of interrelated economic and ecological processes that threaten the viability of the very amenities that attracted so many people here.
One of the key challenges to the integrity of the GYE is the seasonal migration of elk, pronghorn, and bison. These large, hoofed animals also support the bears, wolves, and eagles at the top of the food chain. While many of these creatures spend their summers in more protected lands (national parks, national forests, wildlife refuges), they winter in lower valley locations and these places are largely in private hands, often being more rapidly developed than ever before, and predictably fenced and fragmented in ways that complicate and limit the ability of these animals to survive and reproduce. One environmental scientist, for example, conservatively estimates that there are 16,000 miles of fences in winter elk ranges across the GYE and that total continues to grow (Middleton 2024). While conservation groups are having some success in creating new migration corridors across busy highways and in limiting development on private lands through planned conservation easements, the longer-term trends for the region seem difficult to reverse. Athleta, Lululemon, and Agency Luxury Real Estate are here to stay. Like a canary in a coal mine, downtown Bozeman tells the tale.
Despite all this environmental pessimism and frustration with the not-so-very-thoughtful growth that seems hellbent on forever changing this part of Montana and more, downtown Bozeman remains a place I call home. I have spent the last forty years here and much of my life has played out amid a landscape now rich with my own experiences and memories. My fondness for the past mingles with my apprehension for the future, topophilia chastened by unease. My wife, Linda, worked jobs downtown as an insurance agent, as a manager for a department store, and as a fundraiser for a local non-profit agency. We toasted dozens of anniversaries and celebrated birthdays here with parents and children. The annual Christmas stroll, Memorial Day parades, and summer’s Sweet Pea Festival all revolved around this Main Street landscape. I have given public lectures here at the local bookstore and public library, taken out a loan here to build a new home, and paid parking tickets here—numerous times—for overstaying my welcome.
Decades have slipped by since my first casual stay in Bozeman. Who knows what it may be like in another 50 years? New histories will be written across its buildings and along its streets. A new generation of visitors and residents will experience a place shaped by everything from the evolving amenity economy to global climate change and no doubt they will possess their own versions of the Bozone. It seems likely that they will find a larger urban place, perhaps a surrounding metropolitan area of several hundred thousand residents, challenged by the realities of growing income inequality and an ever more threatened natural environment. For me, Bozeman nourished my geographical appetite, sparked my curiosity about what landscapes might mean, and gently aged my youthful optimism about the world I leave behind. For that, I am forever grateful…to these six versions of a changing scene.