The Reading Room

Fifteen issues of the Kings Crier, Showdown’s own newsletters, forty years of the mountain’s trail-map brochures, a 1962 magazine that gave a whole issue to skiing in Montana, two founding-era scrapbooks, the 1956 list of everyone who pledged to buy a share in the hill, the engineering plan drawn in the autumn of 1963, and the old painted trail board. You can search every word on every page — type a name, a run, a price, a lift.

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48 documents · 406 pages · every word searchable

These are documents of their time

Every page here is reproduced exactly as it was printed, between the 1930s and the 2000s. Some of it carries language about Native people, about race and about women that is unacceptable today, and some of it reports private things about named individuals in a tone a club newsletter of the period took for granted. Some of it is bar-room and soldiers’ humor — the songs a ski club sang at its dinners in 1940, including the one the mountain troops brought back, which is coarse about a woman. None of it has been removed or softened. Editing a primary source falsifies the record, and keeping the record is what this archive is for — so it is here as evidence of how people wrote, not as anything this project endorses. Where a page needed saying more about, the archive’s own source record says it.