Distinctly Montana Magazine

w w w . d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m 75 H OWDY. MY NAME IS GARY SHELTON, AND I'M A RANCHER. I grew up in Montana and have always enjoyed West- erns, even though it seems like they don't make as many good ones as they used to do. I like the vistas and the freedom they represent. As a true blue Montanan, I also enjoy horses, cattle, and all creatures that make their home on the range. And I don't mind a little shootout or brawl now and then. I'm old enough to remember the golden age of TV Westerns, when shows like The Rifleman, Have Gun, Will Travel, and Gun- smoke filled the few channels we did get. Hell, I'm old enough to remember getting our first television, an enormous humming Philco that made an awful wheezing racket in its tubes when you turned it on. After settling itself down, it would warm up sufficiently to do its best impression of a snowstorm. Then the rabbit ears on top of the television would somehow gather up, seemingly out of the very aether, the magic, invisible signals that, if rearranged in a certain way, produced Wagon Train. I'd sit about two feet from that great big monster, staring in won- der at a muddy, black and white image that I believe we would call "low resolution" today. But I didn't care. I cared that Marshall Matt Dillon kept the town safe—especially Miss Kitty, whom I found to be an enchanting creature, if a little too old for me. As a man in my late twenties, I also appreciated the 1978 miniseries Centennial, a sprawling epic that began with moun- tain men charting an unexplored West in the early nineteenth century and ended with a group of bell-bottomed urbanites dealing with urban planning. I guess you can figure which end of the series I preferred. If it sounds like all I did was watch TV, you're wrong. I also slept and ate. In all seriousness, there was very little time for television, as work around the ranch, school, and my own designs to stay as far away from home as possible during the sunlit hours kept me away from my beloved boob tube. But the few hours a week that I did spend in front of that elephantine box of tubes were largely spent looking at Westerns because, well, they're the best. And for many of us who grew up in the American West, they're also a way of seeing our own dreams brought to shad- owy life before our very eyes—what boy or girl who grows up in Montana, whether in the mountainous western part or the flat, prairies of the east, doesn't want, at least a little, to be a cowboy or a cowgirl? Then came Lonesome Dove, which some critics credit with bringing the Western back for an audience for whom they had grown old, creaky, and passé. But Gus and Call (played expertly AN OLD BROKE MONTANA RANCHER'S THOUGHTS ON "YELLOWSTONE" by GARY SHELTON Find out more about the Yellowstone TV show... www.distinctlymontana.com/rancher211 DISTINCTLY MONTANA | DIGITAL

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