The Journalist Who Gave Montana Its Conscience:

The Life and Work of Joseph Kinsey Howard

Early Life and the Making of a Montana Voice

Joseph Kinsey Howard was born on February 28, 1906, in Oskaloosa, Iowa, and spent his earliest years in Lethbridge, Alberta, where his family lived before circumstances redirected his upbringing. In 1918, when Howard was twelve, he moved with his mother Josephine to Great Falls, Montana — a city that would define him as thoroughly as he would later define it for the rest of the country. He graduated from Great Falls High School in 1923 and immediately joined the staff of the Great Falls Leader, the city's afternoon daily newspaper, as a reporter. Three years later, at the age of twenty, he was promoted to copy desk editor, and later to news desk editor, a position he would hold for nearly two decades (Montana Historical Society, "Joseph Kinsey Howard [1906-1951]: Montana's Conscience"; Archives West, "Joseph Kinsey Howard Papers, 1927-1954").

Howard never attended college. He substituted formal education with an intensity of reading that left few gaps, immersing himself in history, economics, and political theory while covering the rhythms of a mid-sized Montana city. The Leader, though an afternoon daily with modest reach, proved to be a demanding classroom. Howard developed what the Montana Historical Society later characterized as a writing style of "sparse, clear, emotive language and vivid images" — qualities that would eventually earn him a national readership and the attention of major university presses (Montana Historical Society, "Joseph Kinsey Howard [1906-1951]: Montana's Conscience").

His years at the Leader were not limited to the craft of writing. In 1936, Howard led the effort to establish the Great Falls Newspaper Guild, a union that organized workers at both the Leader and its crosstown rival, the Great Falls Daily Tribune. The Guild secured higher wages and improved working conditions for its members, and the effort revealed a dimension of Howard's character that would animate all of his subsequent work: a consistent, principled concern for people who labored without institutional protection, particularly in industries and regions where corporate power went largely unchallenged (Archives West, "Joseph Kinsey Howard Collection, 1937-1945"; Social Networks and Archival Context, "Howard, Joseph Kinsey, 1906-1951").

Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome — A Landmark Reckoning

Through the late 1930s, Howard began submitting articles about Montana to national publications, including Survey Graphic and The Progressive. The attention these pieces attracted was sufficient for Yale University Press to approach him with a book contract for a full-length history of the state. Five years of research and writing followed, and in 1943 Yale published Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome — a book that would prove, by almost any measure, to be the most consequential work of nonfiction ever written about the state.

The book was simultaneously a popular history, an economic analysis, and an extended indictment of what Howard described as the "plundered province" problem: the systematic exploitation of Montana's natural wealth by outside corporate interests that extracted resources and profits while leaving the state's citizens impoverished and politically subordinate. His primary targets were the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, which exercised enormous influence over Montana's economy and its press, and the Great Northern Railway, which Howard argued had lured thousands of homesteaders onto high plains land entirely unsuitable for dryland farming, then watched them fail while collecting on land sales and freight rates. Howard also addressed the mismanagement of water resources and the persistent inequities visited upon the state's Native American communities (Howard, Joseph Kinsey, Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome, Yale University Press, 1943).

The book's reception was immediate and substantial. It went through ten printings and into eight editions within its first three years. A review in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review by Herbert S. Schell, published in March 1944, treated it as a serious contribution to regional historiography, even as it noted Howard's unapologetically partisan posture. The "plundered province" framework — the idea that Montana functioned as an internal colony, its wealth siphoned outward while its democratic institutions were compromised from within — became the dominant interpretive lens for a generation of Montana historians who followed Howard. Most notably, the framework was adopted and extended by K. Ross Toole, the state's leading academic historian of the postwar decades (Schell, Herbert S., review of Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome, Journal of American History, vol. 30, no. 4, March 1944, pp. 590-591; Social Networks and Archival Context, "Howard, Joseph Kinsey, 1906-1951").

The book's financial success gave Howard the economic footing to leave the Leader in 1944 and devote himself fully to writing and advocacy. It also brought him into direct contact with some of the most prominent literary and intellectual figures in the American West, including Bernard DeVoto, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Harper's Magazine columnist who would become one of Howard's most ardent admirers.

The Montana Study and an Anthology of the State

In 1944, Howard accepted a position as research associate and co-director of the Montana Study, a project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and administered through Montana State University in Missoula(now know as University of Montana). The study's director was Baker Brownell, a sociologist from Northwestern University who had made the problems of rural American communities a central professional concern. The Montana Study's purpose was specific and ambitious: to examine life in small-town Montana, identify ways of improving the cultural and civic quality of that life, and develop strategies for stabilizing communities that were losing population and economic vitality to urbanization (Archives West, "Montana Study Research Collection, 1943-1954"; Archives West, "Joseph Kinsey Howard Papers, 1927-1954").

The study organized community groups in a series of Montana towns — Lonepine, Darby, Stevensville, Conrad, Lewistown, Libby, Hamilton, and others — as well as study groups on the Flathead Indian Reservation. Local citizens were convened to examine their own community's history and character and to envision its future. Howard threw himself into the work with characteristic energy, traveling extensively and producing reports, speeches, and articles throughout his two years with the project (Archives West, "Montana Study Research Collection, 1943-1954").

The Montana Study was not without controversy. Some communities found the effort intrusive, and when the Rockefeller Foundation grant was exhausted, it was not renewed — suggesting that results were mixed and consensus elusive. Howard himself had always been more drawn to the intellectual and moral dimensions of the work than to the procedural machinery of social science. Nevertheless, the years he spent crisscrossing the state in service of the study gave him an unparalleled direct knowledge of Montana's rural communities, their strengths, their frustrations, and their specific histories (Archives West, "Joseph Kinsey Howard papers, 1883-1959").

The experience fed directly into his second book. Montana Margins: A State Anthology, published in 1946, gathered writings about Montana from a broad range of contributors and presented them with Howard's own introductory essays. It was the first literary anthology dedicated to the state and reflected Howard's conviction that Montana possessed a distinct cultural identity worthy of careful documentation. The anthology was well received and extended Howard's reputation as the preeminent interpreter of Montana life for a national audience (Social Networks and Archival Context, "Howard, Joseph Kinsey, 1906-1951"; Archives West, "Joseph Kinsey Howard papers, 1883-1959").

Advocacy in Print: The National Magazines and a Multiplying Platform

Howard's work during the 1930s and 1940s extended well beyond books and the Leader. From the mid-1930s through the late 1940s, he produced Montana-based journalism for a wide array of national publications. Survey Graphic, Pacific Spectator, The Nation, Common Sense, and Harper's Magazine all carried his byline. He wrote short fiction for Collier's, the Saturday Evening Post, and Esquire. He served as Montana stringer for Time and Life, filed editorial correspondence for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and wrote book reviews for the New York Times (Montana Historical Society, "Joseph Kinsey Howard [1906-1951]: Montana's Conscience").

The subjects of his national journalism were telling. He challenged the Anaconda Copper Mining Company's dominance of Montana's economic and political institutions. He advocated for the creation of a Missouri Valley Authority — a federal development program modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority — that would rationalize water use and deliver greater economic equity to the northern Great Plains. He investigated the circumstances of Montana's Native American communities with a seriousness and sympathy that were uncommon in mainstream journalism of the era. He turned a similar attention on Montana's Hutterite colonies and on the Metis people of the northern borderlands, communities that mainstream American journalism routinely ignored or caricatured (Montana Historical Society, "Joseph Kinsey Howard [1906-1951]: Montana's Conscience"; Archives West, "Joseph Kinsey Howard Papers, 1927-1954").

This multiplicity of platforms and causes was not accidental. Howard believed that journalism at its best was a form of civic action, that naming structural injustices in precise, accessible prose was among the most important things a writer could do for a democratic society. His voice was morally engaged without being sentimental, analytically rigorous without becoming inaccessible. These qualities distinguished him from boosters and from propagandists alike, and they explain why his criticism of the Anaconda Company and of federal agricultural policy retained intellectual credibility even among readers who were skeptical of his progressive politics.

Strange Empire and the Late Career

In 1947, Howard received a Guggenheim Fellowship — the first of two he would ultimately hold — to support research for an ambitious project: a narrative history of the Metis people and their leader Louis Riel, whose two resistance movements against the Canadian government in 1869-70 and 1885 had ended in military defeat, exile, and execution. Howard spent the late 1940s researching and writing what would become Strange Empire: A Narrative of the Northwest, traveling into Canada, consulting archives, and working the subject with the same sustained energy he had brought to Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome (Social Networks and Archival Context, "Howard, Joseph Kinsey, 1906-1951"; Barnes and Noble, Strange Empire publisher description).

The Metis were a people of particular relevance to Howard's longstanding concerns. Descended from French Canadian fur traders and Indigenous women, they had built a distinct culture and a coherent political identity across the northern plains, only to find that identity subjected to precisely the kinds of external pressure — colonial administrative violence, displacement, cultural erasure — that Howard had spent his career documenting in American contexts. The Riel rebellions were, in his reading, not curiosities of Canadian history but episodes in a broader story of how Indigenous and mixed-heritage communities were systematically dispossessed across the entire continental interior (Barnes and Noble, Strange Empire publisher description; Everand, Strange Empire publisher description).

Howard was still completing the manuscript when he died of a heart attack on August 25, 1951, at his cabin near Choteau, Montana. He was forty-five years old. Strange Empire was published posthumously the following year, in 1952. A.B. Guthrie, Jr., the Montana novelist and Pulitzer Prize winner, provided an introduction and wrote of Howard that his book was "history reflective of his humanity, as it is reflective of his integrity, his scholarship, his depth, his informed respect for language" (Minnesota Historical Society, Strange Empire product description; Social Networks and Archival Context, "Howard, Joseph Kinsey, 1906-1951").

During the final years of his life, Howard had also devoted considerable energy to building Montana's institutional cultural infrastructure. He helped found the Montana Institute of the Arts and created the Northern Rocky Mountain Roundup of Regional Arts, which became Montana's annual writers' conference. He served as a staff member of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont — then, as now, one of the most prestigious gatherings of American literary talent — and directed the writers' conference at Montana State University from 1948 to 1950. These efforts reflected his conviction, consistent throughout his career, that regional culture required active institutional support to survive the homogenizing pressures of modern life (Montana Historical Society, "Joseph Kinsey Howard [1906-1951]: Montana's Conscience"; Archives West, "Joseph Kinsey Howard Papers, 1927-1954").

Legacy and Enduring Significance

Howard's death at mid-career prompted tributes from the most respected literary voices of his era. Bernard DeVoto, whose own historical work on the American West had earned him a Pulitzer Prize, wrote in 1952: "By the time Howard died, he came closer to being the spokesman of the West than any other writer has ever been." A.B. Guthrie offered the assessment that became Howard's most-quoted epitaph: "With Joe's death, Montana lost her conscience" — a phrase that has since attached itself to Howard so durably that "Montana's Conscience" became a standard appellation in histories, school curricula, and public commemorations of his work (Montana Historical Society, "Joseph Kinsey Howard [1906-1951]: Montana's Conscience").

The durability of that reputation rests on something more substantive than eulogistic sentiment. Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome has remained in print and in use for more than eight decades. It is still assigned in Montana history courses, still cited in academic work, and still read by general readers seeking to understand how the state arrived at its present economic and political condition. The "plundered province" framework has been contested, refined, and in some respects complicated by subsequent scholarship — historians have questioned its degree of determinism and noted that it leaves limited room for the agency of Montana's own political and business class — but it has never been displaced as the starting point for serious engagement with Montana's economic history.

Howard also bequeathed a model of journalistic practice that remains instructive. He demonstrated that a writer working entirely within a regional context could produce work of national significance without simplifying or sensationalizing that context. He showed that journalism could sustain serious historical analysis and that advocacy need not compromise intellectual rigor. He treated communities and individuals — whether Native American, Hutterite, Metis, or homesteader — with specificity and respect, resisting the reductive stereotypes that were standard in the national journalism of his era.

That he accomplished all of this without a college degree, while working for much of his career as a newspaper editor in a mid-sized Montana city, is a measure of both his unusual individual capacity and the quality of attention he brought to the place where he lived. Howard was not a detached observer of Montana. He was, in the fullest sense of the phrase, a participant in its civic life — organizer, advocate, educator, and interpreter — and it was that participation, as much as his evident literary gifts, that gave his work its lasting authority.

Works Cited

Archives West. "Joseph Kinsey Howard Collection, 1937-1945." Orbis Cascade Alliance, https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:80444/xv26338. Accessed 23 May 2026.

Archives West. "Joseph Kinsey Howard Papers, 1927-1954." Orbis Cascade Alliance, https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:80444/xv53356. Accessed 23 May 2026.

Archives West. "Joseph Kinsey Howard papers, 1883-1959." Orbis Cascade Alliance, https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:80444/xv80717. Accessed 23 May 2026.

Archives West. "Montana Study Research Collection, 1943-1954." Orbis Cascade Alliance, https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:80444/xv88931. Accessed 23 May 2026.

Howard, Joseph Kinsey. Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome. Yale University Press, 1943.

Howard, Joseph Kinsey. Strange Empire: A Narrative of the Northwest. William Morrow, 1952.

Minnesota Historical Society. Strange Empire. Minnesota Historical Society Press, https://shop.mnhs.org/products/strange-empire. Accessed 23 May 2026.

Montana Historical Society. "Joseph Kinsey Howard (1906-1951): Montana's Conscience." Montana Historical Society Education, https://mhs.mt.gov/education/Montanans/howard.pdf. Accessed 23 May 2026.

Schell, Herbert S. Review of Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome, by Joseph Kinsey Howard. Journal of American History, vol. 30, no. 4, Mar. 1944, pp. 590-591. https://doi.org/10.2307/1916728.

Social Networks and Archival Context. "Howard, Joseph Kinsey, 1906-1951." SNAC Cooperative, https://snaccooperative.org/ark:/99166/w6k36gx9. Accessed 23 May 2026.