Little Moscow on the Prairie:

The Rise and Fall of Communism in Sheridan County, Montana

Setting the Stage: The Northeastern Corner

Sheridan County occupies the farthest northeastern corner of Montana, sharing its northern border with the Canadian province of Saskatchewan and its eastern edge with North Dakota. It is remote, windswept, and flat — a landscape of glacial till plains, rolling prairie pothole wetlands, and grain fields stretching in every direction to a horizon that seems improbably distant. The county seat of Plentywood, incorporated in 1912 and home today to fewer than 1,700 residents, is roughly 80 miles from the nearest city of any significance. It is not the sort of place that readily conjures associations with revolutionary politics, Communist Party USA, or the names Lenin and Trotsky. And yet, for roughly a decade beginning in the early 1920s, Sheridan County was — by any credible measure — the most successful rural outpost of American Communism in the nation’s history. Outsiders came to call the county seat “Little Moscow,” a nickname that captured both the unease of outside observers and the genuine depth of radical political sentiment that had taken root on the northern plains.

Understanding how that came to be requires looking at the land, the people who came to it, and the economic forces that shaped — and very nearly destroyed — their livelihoods.

The Land Before the Plow

Long before Euro-American settlers arrived, the region that would become Sheridan County was Assiniboine territory. The Assiniboine people, known in their own language as the Nakoda, occupied the Northern Plains from the Missouri River drainage northward into present-day Saskatchewan and Manitoba. They were skilled hunters, essential participants in the fur trade, and reliable intermediaries between European trading companies and other Indigenous peoples. The Big Muddy Creek, a 191-mile-long tributary that cuts through Sheridan County, fell within their seasonal range, and the surrounding plains served as prime bison habitat. Plentywood, the future county seat, sits on land that served as hunting grounds for the Assiniboine and other Northern Plains groups for generations before the first homesteaders broke the sod.

The transition from Indigenous hunting territory to American agricultural settlement was not gradual — it was a rapid disruption driven by federal land policy, railroad investment, and promotional campaigns that promised far more than the northern plains could reliably deliver. The Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 doubled the amount of land available to individual settlers to 320 acres, and a sustained wet-climate cycle from approximately 1909 to 1917, combined with artificially inflated wheat prices driven by World War I demand, attracted thousands of settlers to eastern Montana (Strahn, Explore Big Sky). Towns like Plentywood seemed to emerge overnight. The first business in Plentywood opened in 1900; the post office was established in 1902; the Great Northern Railway surveyed a route through the area in 1911; and the Dakota and Great Northern Townsite Company platted the town in 1913, with residents marking 1912 as the city’s birth (Montana History Portal, mtmemory.org). Between the first decade of the twentieth century and World War I, the county filled with Scandinavian immigrants — Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish families who brought with them traditions of cooperative farming, labor organizing, and political dissent that would prove consequential in ways few anticipated.

Drought, Debt, and Discontent

The economic conditions that fueled agrarian radicalism in Sheridan County were not unique, but their severity in this corner of Montana was exceptional. Following World War I, global wheat prices collapsed, and the brief wet cycle that had made northeastern Montana appear viable reversed sharply into drought. By the early 1920s, Montana’s farmers had lost approximately two million acres of land across some 11,000 farms — roughly 20 percent of all farmland in the state (Taylor biography, Newspapers.com). In Sheridan County, farmers who had gone heavily into debt to buy land, equipment, and supplies during the boom years found themselves trapped between falling crop revenues, high railroad shipping rates, and bank loan payments that could not be met. Foreclosures accelerated. The promises of the homestead era had evaporated into the dry prairie wind.

It was in this environment of genuine economic distress that radical politics found fertile ground. Sheridan County’s Scandinavian immigrant farmers were not receptive to Communism because they were ideological theorists; they were receptive because they were desperate, and because they had some experience with cooperative and socialist traditions from their countries of origin. As the historian Verlaine Stoner McDonald notes in her 2010 study of the period, these were people whose “dreams and promises vanished with the windblown soil,” and who “looked for a way to express their frustrations and anger” in a remote region that offered both “the promises of prosperity and the chance for destitution” (McDonald, The Red Corner). The political movements that arrived in northeastern Montana in the late 1910s found an audience prepared by hardship.

Charley Taylor and the Producers News

The instrument through which radical politics entered Sheridan County arrived in 1918 in the person of Charles Edwin Taylor, a small-town journalist from Minnesota. Taylor had been dispatched to Plentywood by the Nonpartisan League — a socialist-leaning organization founded in North Dakota in 1915 with strong support among Upper Midwest grain farmers — with instructions to establish a newspaper that would serve as, in the words of the Bozeman Daily Chronicle’s account of the period, “a loud voice for rural reform” (Bozeman Daily Chronicle, 20 Oct. 2010). On April 19, 1918, Taylor published the first issue of the Producers News. Within two years, the paper claimed a circulation of 2,500 in a county of roughly 12,000 residents (Newspapers.com, “The Producers News Archive”).

Taylor was a gifted populist communicator. His prose, as McDonald characterizes it in The Red Corner, was “a mix of earthiness, humor, wordplay, and occasional outright abusiveness,” and it was well-suited to an audience of farmers who felt they were being exploited by railroads, bankers, and the merchant class of the county’s small towns (McDonald, as cited in Front Porch Republic review). Taylor identified his enemies as “small town Kaisers, crop grabbers, and paytriotic profiteers” and ran the motto “A Paper of the People, by the People, for the People” beneath the masthead of the Producers News (Newspapers.com). He was handsome, energetic, and effective at a podium. Even his political opponents conceded that he was a capable problem-solver who understood his readership intimately.

Initially, Taylor kept his deepest ideological commitments concealed. According to FBI interview records cited in subsequent scholarship, Taylor joined the Communist Party of America in 1922, though he did not announce this affiliation publicly (McDonald, The Red Corner; Newspapers.com archive). For the first several years of the Producers News, the paper’s radicalism was expressed through the language of the Nonpartisan League — regulated rail rates, state-controlled banks and grain elevators — rather than through explicit Communist doctrine. This deliberate strategy of operating through more mainstream agrarian organizations while quietly building toward a more radical agenda was a defining characteristic of the Sheridan County movement, and it was central to its early electoral success.

The Red Years: Electoral Success and Community Institutions

The political ascent of Sheridan County’s radicals was rapid and, by the standards of American Communist history, remarkable. In the county elections of 1922, radical candidates running under League-affiliated banners took multiple county offices. Two years later, voters sent Taylor to the Montana State Senate in Helena, elected Danish immigrant Hans Rasmussen as county surveyor, and installed Rodney Salisbury as county sheriff (Front Porch Republic review of McDonald). Sheridan County had, in effect, handed control of its local government to a network of men who had secretly pledged their allegiance to the Communist Party at a closed meeting in 1920. By 1924, Taylor’s Producers News had begun more openly reprinting articles from Communist newspapers and defending events in the Soviet Union (Front Porch Republic review of McDonald).

The institutional infrastructure of the movement extended beyond electoral politics. A Farmer-Labor Temple became a community gathering space for the county’s radical organizations. Summer camps organized by local activists drew the county’s young people into Communist Youth League activities. A Young Pioneers group — a Communist youth organization — was established in the county. The Producers News continued to grow in influence, eventually absorbing six competing area weeklies (Newspapers.com). By the late 1920s, radicals occupied virtually every elected county office. The county had also attracted national attention: William Z. Foster, the perennial Communist Party candidate for the presidency, visited Sheridan County in 1932 at Taylor’s invitation (Many Things Considered, manythingsconsidered.com).

Not everyone in Sheridan County embraced the movement, of course. A bitter newspaper war erupted between the Producers News and more conservative regional papers, including the Sheridan County Farmer — a paper established specifically by a local doctor who had been personally attacked in print by Taylor — and the Daniels County Leader, edited by Burley Bowler, whom McDonald characterizes as a sometime FBI informant (Goodreads review of McDonald). The lines between “reds” and “Mainstreeters,” the county’s merchant and professional class, were sharply drawn and deeply felt. The Producers News accused its opponents of serving corporate and railroad interests; the opposition papers accused Taylor of thuggery, defamation, and sedition.

Scholars have since debated the precise character of Sheridan County’s radicalism. The historian Charles Vindex, writing in Montana: The Magazine of Western History in 1968, argued that the actual number of committed Communists in Sheridan County never exceeded 575, a figure he derived from the number of residents who voted the straight Communist Party ticket in 1932 (Vindex, Montana: The Magazine of Western History, vol. 18, 1968). A graduate thesis later submitted to the University of Montana challenged the assumption that the movement constituted genuine Marxist radicalism at all, arguing that it operated “within a familiar, non-Communist framework with roots in American protest politics” and never seriously attempted to abolish private property or implement collectivization (University of Montana Scholarworks, ETD 6270). This interpretive debate — was this truly Communism, or was it American populism wearing a red hat? — has animated scholarly discussion of the Sheridan County episode for decades.

Corruption, Scandal, and Fracture

Even at the height of its influence, the radical movement in Sheridan County was shadowed by persistent allegations of corruption. Sheriff Rodney Salisbury, one of Taylor’s closest political allies and the county’s most visible Communist-affiliated official, was repeatedly accused of colluding with Prohibition-era bootleggers crossing the Canadian border and of tolerating prostitution within the county (McDonald, The Red Corner; AbeBooks description). On the night of November 30, 1926, masked robbers stole more than $100,000 in property taxes from the county treasury as they were being placed in the vault late in the evening. Circumstantial evidence pointed strongly toward an inside job, and suspicion centered on Salisbury. Though he was never charged, the scandal destroyed his reputation among the farming families who had been the movement’s most loyal supporters. Salisbury lost his position as sheriff shortly thereafter (Montana Senior News, “Communists of Sheridan County”).

The federal government had been watching Sheridan County for years. FBI agents descended on the county and gathered reports detailing the Communist Party’s control of local offices, its connections to bootlegging and the Producers News’s alleged use of its platform in what agents characterized as a blackmailing operation (FBI synopsis documents, as reproduced in McDonald, The Red Corner). Some of the movement’s key figures were surveilled by federal investigators into the 1960s (McDonald, AbeBooks).

The Beginning of the End

The events of 1932 marked a turning point from which the movement did not recover. That year, the Producers News published a story headlined “Bolshevik Funeral for Valiant Young Pioneer,” describing the non-religious funeral service held for Janis Salisbury, a fourteen-year-old who had died from complications of appendicitis. Rather than a church service, the funeral was held at the Farmer-Labor Temple, with speakers from the United Farmers League and members of the local Communist youth group. The article’s framing alienated a farming population that was, by and large, religiously observant. For many families who had voted for radical candidates on economic grounds while maintaining traditional religious and cultural identities, the funeral coverage made visible a cultural gulf between Communist ideology and community values that could no longer be ignored (McDonald, The Red Corner; AbeBooks).

Internal divisions within the national Communist Party further corroded the Sheridan County movement. Bitter factionalism within the CPUSA produced shifting directives from New York and Moscow that local activists found difficult to follow and sometimes incomprehensible. The national party’s interests and the interests of northeastern Montana wheat farmers were not, in the end, the same interests. Taylor was eventually removed from the editorship of the Producers News by its board of directors amid factional disputes, though he attempted to reclaim control (Newspapers.com). The paper limped along until March 1937, when Taylor closed it permanently — nineteen years after he had brought it to Plentywood (Newspapers.com).

The New Deal administered what historian Donald Spritzer has characterized as the final blow. Franklin Roosevelt’s federal relief programs — the Works Progress Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration — offered struggling farmers concrete economic relief without requiring ideological commitment to Communism. The WPA built a courthouse in Plentywood. Federal programs addressed, however imperfectly, the same economic grievances that had driven farmers toward radical politics in the first place (Many Things Considered; Montana Senior News). With an alternative source of relief available, the political argument for Communism collapsed.

Forgetting and Remembering

In the decades that followed, Sheridan County’s residents made a collective effort to put their Red years behind them. During the McCarthy period of the 1950s, as Verlaine Stoner McDonald observed in The Red Corner, the people of northeastern Montana actively tried to forget their association with radical politics. McDonald herself grew up in Sheridan County without ever hearing about the Communist movement, despite being descended from one of its key organizers, Clair Stoner, who had been elected to the state legislature in the 1920s. She discovered the history only as an adult scholar, through a faded newspaper headline (Many Things Considered; Amazon listing for The Red Corner).

McDonald’s book, published by the Montana Historical Society Press in 2010, played a significant role in bringing the episode back into public awareness. Reviewing it in Great Plains Quarterly, Bradley D. Snow described it as addressing “a little-known but fascinating chapter in Montana, and western, history” (Snow, Great Plains Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 4, Fall 2011). The Sheridan County Free Museum has since incorporated the period into its local history programming. Pat Tange, a docent at the museum, characterized the Communist episode as “the county’s historical claim to fame” — a phrase that captures the complicated mixture of local pride and ambivalence with which the history is still received (Montana Senior News, “Communists of Sheridan County”). Historian Spritzer noted in his assessment that today “residents are not particularly proud of what occurred in that bygone era,” but added that “they are no longer so ashamed that they seek to hide it from their schoolchildren” (Many Things Considered).

What Sheridan County’s radical moment actually represents is still a matter of interpretation. It was, at minimum, a genuine political insurgency driven by real economic desperation in a remote agricultural community. It was an episode in which ordinary farmers — not professional revolutionaries — briefly installed Communist-aligned officials at every level of local government. It was also a story about the limits of that insurgency: its susceptibility to corruption, its dependence on a single charismatic communicator, its ultimate incompatibility with the cultural and religious values of the community it claimed to represent. And it was a story that the community itself, for decades, chose not to tell.

Works Cited

Aasheim, Magnus, comp. Sheridan’s Daybreak: A Story of Sheridan County and Its Pioneers. Great Falls: Sheridan County Historical Association, 1970. Print.

McDonald, Verlaine Stoner. The Red Corner: The Rise and Fall of Communism in Northeastern Montana. Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 2010. Print.

Montana History Portal. “Plentywood.” Montana Memory Project. Montana Historical Society Library and Archives. https://www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/128460. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

Newspapers.com. “The Producers News Archive.” Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2025. https://www.newspapers.com/paper/the-producers-news/4403/. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

Snow, Bradley D. “Review of The Red Corner: The Rise and Fall of Communism in Northeastern Montana by Verlaine Stoner McDonald.” Great Plains Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 4, Fall 2011. University of Nebraska Digital Commons. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/2715/. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

Strahn, Derek. “Back 40: ‘Tsunami of Settlement’ Reaches Montana During First Decade of 20th Century.” Explore Big Sky, 7 Jan. 2025. https://www.explorebigsky.com/tsunami-of-settlement-reaches-montana-during-first-decade-of-20th-century/22050. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

University of Montana Scholarworks. “Sheridan County ‘Reds’?: A New Look at the Social and Political Origins of the Radical Movement in Sheridan County, Montana.” ETD Collection, University of Montana. https://scholarworks.umt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6270&context=etd. Accessed 15 Apr. 2026.

Vindex, Charles. “Radical Rule in Montana.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, vol. 18, no. 1, Jan. 1968, pp. 3–18. Montana Historical Society Press.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​