Livingston

Livingston is a weird place. Stand by the jukebox at a downtown bar and a lovely woman in evening dress may invite you to party with author Tom McGuane and actor Peter Fonda. Or maybe you’ll be the lucky person to meet the guy dressed in full buckskins, up visiting from Los Angeles. At the very least you’ll hear a good fishing story.

While Bozeman [1] quickly gained a reputation as a straitlaced town, Livingston, 26 miles east, never had any such opprobrium to live down. It’s a town with a history of such Wild West legends as Calamity Jane [2] and Kitty O’Leary, also know as Madame Bulldog.

Few towns have seen the gentrification boom as much as Livingston. What was, a few years back, a sleepy and rough-edged town with a local artist and a writer or two is now a mandatory way station on the glam tour of Montana. For lively Livingston-based fiction, read Jamie Harrison’s The Edge of the Crazies or any of Thomas McGuane’s books set in Montana.

Livingston (pop. 7,279, elev. 4,490 feet), the Park County seat, is situated at the wind-tossed northern end of the Paradise Valley [3] on the banks of the Yellowstone River [4]. The Absaroka Range, rising up in the south, dominates the town, and the Crazy Mountains show up to the northeast. After its northerly run up from Yellowstone National Park, the Yellowstone River turns east at Livingston, where I-90/94 meets the river and ushers it from the state.