Redefining the Old West: meet the people ushering in a new age

This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).

I meet Bob Dylan down an alleyway in Fargo. He looks at me, his back to the wall, brow furrowed. A cigarette hangs between his fingers and a newspaper is folded beneath his arm. I stop and stare back. The singer spent time here in the late 1950s, and thanks to this enormous art piece, created by Los Angeles muralist Jules Muck in 2022, he’s now a permanent resident. 

Of all the things I’d expected to find in the North Dakota city — often reduced to the ‘small town’ character of its namesake movie and TV show — a giant portrait of Bob Dylan was not one of them. But this place, I soon find, has a great propensity for surprises. 

I’m at the start of a 10-day road trip from North Dakota to the Idaho Panhandle through the American West, a region whose delineations are a constant source of debate. The area is often defined as ‘everything west of the Missouri River’, which slinks from Montana’s Rocky Mountains east into North Dakota. But the West is more than a loosely sketched geographical area. It’s a state of mind — a psyche synonymous with adventure, wildness and a love of the land, captured by old-school Western movies and more recent TV shows like Paramount’s Yellowstone. 

That psyche lives on in traditional ranchers, cowboys and pack guides, but also in the burgeoning crop of artisans who call this place home. It’s why I choose to begin in Fargo. The city lies some 200 miles east of the defining Missouri River, but it has raw Western spirit in spades. For mural artist LesleyAnne Buegel it’s intrinsically bound up with the land. The city rises from the pancake-flat plains of the Red River Valley and defies the cinematic drama of the landscapes further west.

“It’s seemingly unremarkable… because there aren’t mountains, forests or a lot of outdoor recreation,” LesleyAnne says of Fargo’s physical geography. “And then there’s the long-ass winter, which also forces a lot of indoor time. That can be isolating, or it can be connecting and creative.” 

LesleyAnne takes me on a tour of the city’s murals, leading me to one of her own, a splash of cow print covering a brick building. It’s a nod to the region’s agricultural might — there are still some 26,000 farms and ranches across the state — but beyond the aptly named ‘Cow Wall’, whispers of this farming tradition are hushed by Fargo’s urban buzz. LesleyAnne takes me to Parachigo, an arts venue, tattoo parlour and vegetarian cafe that operates out of a former women’s clinic. Clothes rails are thick with tie-dyed T-shirts, shelves heave with graphic prints and the hum of a tattoo gun carries from behind a curtain. 

Later, I sip ‘Revenge of the Hippies’ IPA at Drekker, a brewery built into an 1880s railroad building, where pride flags hang over fat silver beer tanks. In 2023, Drekker also opened Brewhalla, a community-focused food hall and marketplace that sits adjacent to the brewery and hawks everything from vegan mushroom jerky and artisanal gelato to plants and ceramics. As I wander around, vendors are eager to chat, proffering samples or explaining the thought behind a piece of pottery. There’s a fierce pride in the people born of these plains and prairies — and a certain knowing delight in surprising newcomers with their unexpected creative bounty. 

The West is more than a loosely sketched geographical area. It’s a state of mind — a psyche synonymous with adventure, wildness and a love of the land.

Photograph by Donnie Sexton, Visit Fargo/Moorhead

Reclaiming culture  

From Fargo, I push west, past fields of wheat and plains as flat as paper, until I reach New Town on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. It’s the home of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, or the Three Affiliated Tribes, who have occupied the river basin since time immemorial. Each tribe was distinct from one another, with its own traditions and clan systems. But from the late 18th century, as Euro-American settlement increased, they were decimated by smallpox epidemics, and ultimately banded together for survival.

I head to Great Plains Indian Trading on Main Street, a store selling handicrafts made by Indigenous peoples, mostly from the Northern Plains and the Southwest. “This was once the Wall Street of Indian Country,” says shop owner Ryan Wilson, gesturing to the unassuming boulevard outside. He wears a cornflower-blue T-shirt, a Yankees cap and an easy smile. Colonial trading posts were established here by British fur trappers and traders in the 1800s, he tells me, and relied on rapport with local tribes. “This store is the modern version of that — except it’s run by an Indian,” he says with a grin. 

The shop is dense with treasures: belts woven with porcupine quills, intricately beaded moccasins and a buffalo hide painted with a Little Bighorn battle scene. “For the most part, these are modern reflections of adornments and cultural expressions from way back,” Ryan explains. The rise of social media has led to rich cultural exchange between tribes and the contemporising of ancient art forms — tribal styles are becoming more blended; modern materials are used as some traditional shells or animal products become harder to source; and conventional colour palettes have expanded. 

Back on the road, I push further westward. Despite this fierce creative renaissance, I discover the old Wild West of my imagination isn’t hard to find. It lurks in the western North Dakota town of Medora, where I watch from the upper deck of the Little Missouri Saloon as a pack train clip-clops along Pacific Avenue. It’s knitted into Theodore Roosevelt National Park, where shaggy bison roam the peaks and gullies of the badlands. And it thrives in Yellowstone Country in southern Montana, where the mountains loom large, the rivers run deep and Brad Edward leads horse-riding tours in the backcountry, just outside Red Lodge town. 

I join Brad — a born-and-raised Montanan who’s been guiding for 30 years — on a three-hour ride with Elk River Outfitters. We cross creeks and meadows filled with gumweed, until we reach the trail’s crescendo: a panorama that scoops up seven mountain ranges and throws serious weight behind Montana’s ‘Big Sky Country’ moniker. Every shade of blue and green seems to exist on the horizon. The colour of the sky fades from turquoise to forget-me-not and the mountains appear in soft stripes of navy. Spruce forests sink towards plains of scattered sagebrush. Even Brad is dressed head to toe in blue denim, his white cattleman’s hat turned down against the sun. “It’s another world out here,” says Brad. “I love showing people the Western way of life.”

The Western way of life has always been defined by migration. Aeons before the colonial settlers arrived, nomadic Plains tribes travelled on the tail of the buffalo. The animals’ flesh provided food; their bones were whittled into tools; and their hides were used to make clothes and blankets. After the fur trappers and traders arrived, Catholic missionaries followed, farming the land and harvesting lumber. And later came the miners, whose boomtowns flourished as gold was struck across the West, and folded like houses of cards just as quickly.

Among those boomtowns was Red Lodge. The first mine opened here in 1887 and it soon mushroomed into a raucous settlement bristling with saloons. Those saloons have now been replaced with gift shops and fancy restaurants serving small plates. I wander the streets, ducking into Western-wear boutique Paris Montana Mercantile.

 “We’re kind of a Nouveau Western town,” says owner Heidi Martincic, who wears oversized glasses, a leather blazer and a black baseball cap that reads ‘Cowboy Hat’ in gold cursive. “We live in a place that has retained the best parts of the cowboy code.” 

Perhaps no figure evokes the West better than the cowboy. The enigmatic ranger, with his tipped hat and weathered boots, is a cultural icon, romanticised in country ballads and cast in dusty Westerns. And that icon has deep roots in Montana. As the lumber and mining industries burgeoned through the 1800s, their workers hunted the local game to near extinction. The answer? Beef. The first cattle drive from Texas to Montana took place in 1866 and ranchers soon found these to be the finest grasslands in the West. 

The cowboy underpinned the idealised values of the West — hard work, integrity and stewardship of the land. They’re values that Heidi tells me are still linchpins of the town. “Red Lodge is this interesting mix of the Old West and a cosmopolitan town,” she says. “We have these traditional values, but there’s also an appreciation of art and culture.” 

As if to prove the point, she lays out her own creations — frilly lace and leather chaps dyed in sea greens and muted pinks, and billowing bustle skirts that seem like they could float off the hanger of their own volition. “It’s prairie meets Vogue,” I say.

“…sparkle and spurs,” chips in Della Bighair-Stump, a designer and member of the Apsáalooke Crow Tribe, who operates under the brand ‘Designs by Della’ and sells her clothing in boutiques like Heidi’s. 

This land originally belonged to the Apsáalooke, who had lived here for millennia. As demand for ranch land grew, the government set its sights on Indigenous territories. Various land cessations shrank the Native footprint, and tribal peoples were eventually moved on to the Crow Reservation. At about 2.2 million acres today, the reservation covers just a fraction of their original homeland.

Della swirls around the shop, thumbing through Stetson shirts and donning cowboy hats. She settles on a leopard-print number, which clashes with her salmon-pink cardigan and traditional Crow beads, and takes a seat beside me. “I’ve been designing clothes since I was in high school,” she says. “It’s passed from generation to generation. My parents and grandparents showed me how to bead in the traditional style and to make my own dresses. Growing up I always wanted something to represent who I am and where I come from. I take what I was taught and I contemporise it.”

She sells dresses and leggings emblazoned with geometric patterns in burning oranges and electric blues, and accessories adorned with prints of traditional Crow beadwork. Della describes herself as “culturally strong”, living on the Crow Reservation and speaking the Apsáalooke language, which was almost rendered obsolete when Native children were forced into US-run boarding schools from the 1800s. Tribal peoples in the area are committed to preserving these traditions, she tells me. “Creativity is part of the land here.” 

I leave for One Legged Magpie, a low-lit cocktail lounge just down the street, which was a cowboy bar until Mike and Kat Porco took over in 2021. Saloons shown in wistful Western movies have a familiar image: one where weathered cowboys sink whiskey shots between gun fights, and battered wooden doors creak in the breeze. And while there’s a healthy, nostalgic appetite among travellers for those Old West saloons, One Legged Magpie kicks the formula into the dust. Floral paintings cover bare-brick walls that were once swathed in animal hides, and slouchy leather sofas sit in the place of old wooden booths. The bar menu includes elaborate zero-proof drinks — a highlight is the tepache, which is zingy with strawberry and fermented pineapple tea and warm with spices like cinnamon and cloves — and it pulls in locals with live music and drag shows.

But a Western spirit is still palpable even here, says Mike, as we tuck into vegan pizza doused in marinara sauce. “The people who come here are trying to forge their own way, whether they’re creative or entrepreneurial,” he explains. “And that’s like the ranching culture — they’re creating their own way too. Everyone here has to figure out how they’re going to live here and survive. Being resilient and independent is a Western thing.” 

Around 100 miles northwest of Red Lodge, in Bozeman, Montana, there’s a similar story of evolution — though it’s happening much faster. The city has earned itself the nickname ‘BozeAngeles’, after the many Californians who’ve chosen to call it home, and it’s tipped as one of the fastest-growing cities in the US. 

Bozeman is knitted into the Gallatin Valley, which is fringed with peaks wearing thick bonnets of snow, but there is indeed a whiff of LA about the place. Plant-based restaurant Farmacy dishes up rainbow-coloured bowls, while students from Montana State University sip artisanal lattes at hip café-roasteries like Treeline, in the city’s old mill district. Across the street is Misco Mill, a grain elevator built in 1933 and a vestige of Montana’s still-robust agricultural industry; now owned by painter and furniture maker Shaw Thompson and his family, it’s used as a gallery and workshop. 

Shaw was an early migrant, moving from the Bay Area more than 20 years ago after falling in love with Bozeman on a fly-fishing trip as a teenager. He now uses the region’s architectural bones to make art. He collects “anything rusty” turfed out by farmers and ranchers, and warps his findings into items like light fixtures and tables. Inside the mill, the gallery and workshop is filled with Shaw’s creations: there’s a table made out of an old piece of mining equipment, and a bison mask fashioned from a scythe is mounted on the wall. It’s hard to imagine a more visual representation of ‘old meets new’.

Drekker Brewing Co is housed in an 1880s building in Fargo.

Photograph by Urban Toad Media

A bite of heritage

That theme is continued on the last leg of my journey. My trip rounds off in the Idaho Panhandle, where a landscape covered in velvety fir trees offers a visual break from the stark plains and rough badlands of North Dakota, and the cosmic-sized mountains of Montana. I head to the resort town of Coeur d’Alene, whose namesake lake sweeps out like an ocean and where chef Shane Clark sells loaded frybreads from a wood-panelled food truck. 

Shane, who is of Turtle Mountain Chippewa descent, has been a chef for some 15 years and is on a mission to bring pre-colonial-style Native American cuisine to the people of northern Idaho. “Smoked salmon was a primary food for tribes up in this area,” he explains. “That’s on the menu, as well as bison and turkey. The rest revolves around the Three Sisters: beans, corn and squash.” 

Then there’s manoomin, or native wild rice — “it grows right here, on the south end of Lake Coeur d’Alene” — and frybread, which is thought to have originated with the Navajo peoples, who were forced off their ancestral land in Arizona in the 19th century and given meagre rations of bleached flour and sugar by the US government.

Shane whips these ingredients into his own modern recipes, inspired by years of cooking global cuisine everywhere from an upmarket French restaurant to an American steakhouse. I dig into pillowy frybread laden with a mountain of squash, beans and corn — it’s both perfectly crisp and wonderfully chewy, and the accompanying traditional berry-based wojapi sauce walks the tart-sweet line just right. 

“There are spiritual reasons why we eat our food,” Shane says. “Our ancestors ate with purpose: they foraged for their own fruits and hunted their own meat. Hopefully this can be a bridge to the culture in the modern era.”

It’s a perfect epitome of the American West: one delineated by spirit rather than state lines, that is both impossibly nostalgic and perpetually novel, rooted in the past and reaching for the future. It’s a land equally matched in natural and cultural bounty. It’s a new creative frontier.  

Getting there & around
At present, there are no direct flights from the UK to North Dakota, Montana or Idaho. Travel via numerous US gateways, such as Chicago, Minneapolis and Denver. Carriers including American Airlines, Delta and United operate various non-stop flights from these hubs to the likes of Fargo, Bozeman and Spokane, Washington (a 35-minute drive west of Coeur d’Alene).

Public transport in this region is extremely limited, but major hire companies such as Avis, Enterprise and Hertz have a presence at local airports; it’s wise to book in advance to guarantee availability.

When to go
Such a vast area comes with a lot of variation, but the region’s weather is notoriously changeable, with higher elevations typically covered in snow from October to March. Summertime (June to August) offers the most reliably dry and sunny days, but it’s also the busiest and most expensive season. The shoulder months of May and September should provide moderate weather and a reprieve from the summer crowds. 

Where to stay
The Pollard Hotel, Red Lodge, Montana. Doubles from $187 (£150), room only. thepollardhotel.com

The Lark, Bozeman, Montana. Doubles from $174 (£139), room only. larkbozeman.com

Jasper Hotel, Fargo, North Dakota. Doubles from $172 (£137), room only. jasperfargo.com

Blackwell Hotel, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Doubles from $96 (£77), B&B. blackwellboutiquehotel.com 

More info 
greatamericanwest.co.uk
tourism.comvisitmt.com
visitidaho.org

How to do it
Discover North America offers tailor-made touring holidays of the Great American West. A 20-night trip costs from around £2,399 per person, including hotel accommodation, car hire, maps and travel information, and flights from London. For more information, go to discovernorthamerica.co.uk

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