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Mario Lopez is the John W. & Carol L.H. Green Executive Director for the Billings Symphony, and he joined the staff in January 2023. Lopez has a background in leadership, education, and fundraising, working with Sarasota Orchestra and the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra.

On the final episode of this season’s Field Days, Laurel farmer Carah Ronin makes her market bouquets.

On a frigid January morning in 1870, Colonel Eugene Baker led a raid on what he thought was the camp of a band of Piegan Indians led by Mountain Chief, who had been accused of killing a rancher near Helena. Unfortunately, Baker chose to ignore one of his scouts, who informed him they had the wrong encampment, and he ordered 380 soldiers to attack the camp of Chief Heavy Runner, who was known to be friendly to the settlers and even had a document to prove it. But when Heavy Runner tried to show Baker this document, another scout, Joseph Cobell, who happened to be married to Mountain Chief's sister, shot Heavy Runner, and the slaughter was on.

On this episode of Field Days, Laurel farmer Carah Ronan harvests snapdragons for market.

Chris La Tray is Missoula-based poet and essayist and an enrolled member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians. His first book, One-Sentence Journal: Short Poems and Essays from the World at Large, was the Winner of the 2018 Montana Book Award. The book was a finalist for Best Book by Indigenous Writer at the 2019 High Plains Book Award and won for the Best First Book.

15 September 2023

18 September 2023

During the mid-1800s, one of the fastest growing industries in Montana was cattle ranching. After the Civil War, Texas was overstocked with livestock, and prices had sunk to only about three or four dollars a head, so cattlemen decided to move their stock north, where there were stories about abundant grassland. The influx of cattle came fast, with not enough infrastructure to manage the business. It was a problem that Mother Nature eventually addressed with a massive blizzard during the winter of 1886-7, where cattlemen lost as much as 80 percent of their herd. The storm came to be known as The Big Die-Up. This month's episode features the music of Tom Catmull of Missoula.

20 November 2023

The Depression hit Montana harder than many of the other western states in large part because of a drought that hit the state more than ten years before the Stock Market Crash, just after thousands of people had moved here to establish homesteads. Half of the banks in Montana closed during the 1920s, and we were the only state in the union to lose population during that decade. But there were a couple of important figures, John Wesley Powell and Hardy Campbell, that had a significant impact on the way events played out in the West before the Depression hit.