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Item Making the west malleable : coal, geohistory, and western expansion, 1800-1920(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2015) Zizzamia, Daniel Francis; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Michael ReidyHistorians have long understood the West as a region shaped by aridity. Yet by analyzing scientific imaginations as they interacted with the materiality of western landscapes, this dissertation argues that the history of the American West was equally influenced by the discovery of the watery deep past of its paleo-landscapes. The physical geography and remnant resources generated through geologic time in the American West decisively influenced western settlement and the advancement of American science in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Through government reports, scientists breathed new life into the ancient denizens and environments of the West. Where others saw an eternal and timeless desert, many scientists saw a plastic and ever-evolving environment. Boosters absorbed the authority of their science to lend credence to visions of a plastic West that would once again become a verdant paradise. Imagined vibrant paleo-environments portrayed once-and-future fertile landscapes that overrode the dominant perception of the American West as arid and hostile to life. With the power granted by coal paired with new technologies, and the Eden-like scientific visions of a former fertile West, vast human-induced climatological changes became an empowering possibility to a nation driven to settle the West. A "paleo-restorative dream" emerged in which the West--by the agency of humans--would return to ancient Edenic landscapes. Indeed, the geoengineering that pervades contemporary discussions concerning climate change and drives hopes to terraform Mars had their origins in the nineteenth century drive to recreate the American frontier.Item History of Sand Coulee, Montana 1880 through 1900(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2008) Erickson, George L.; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Mary Murphy.Sand Coulee is now a bedroom community for Great Falls, laying twelve miles east and south of the larger city. Both town and city had their start at almost exactly the same time during the early 1880s. Sand Coulee was well known throughout the territory because of the tremendous coal field that J. J. Hill exploited to fuel his Great Northern Railway that connected the Twin Cities of Minnesota with the Pacific Northwest. The biggest repository of Sand Coulee history is a small history written by Ruby Giannini titled "A History of Sand Coulee" and a book titled "The Gulch Area History" written by a committee of area residents. "The Gulch Area History" is a genealogy of the area. These two books are the only ones specifically written about Sand Coulee and neither includes documentation. This thesis is heavily documented so that those who disagree with this history or its conclusions will be able to compare sources. Because of Sand Coulee's coal mining importance, its history resides in many newspapers, magazines, official state reports and history books. The footnotes and bibliography of this thesis give the historian a sense for the wide range of material available in bits and scraps about Sand Coulee. This thesis covers areas that are relatively unexplored in Sand Coulee's history, but there is still a lot of history to be written about Sand Coulee.