Vanishing Montana
By A great photo gallery of the vanishing towns of Montana, where just a few people hold on in isolated places. Or sometimes they disappear from the map entirely. The American West is full of these places. Driving around the West, you see isolated homes in the middle of nowhere and you just ask why. Why would someone settle here? There are of course concrete reasons–the Homestead Act, railroad land grants, the wheat boom of World War I. But many of them failed in the face of drought, social isolation, and poverty. The ruins still exist. Sometimes so do the memories.