“To me it’s unbelievable we’ve reached that size,” said Dave Carr, a Nature Conservancy program manager in Helena and a 24-year employee. “That’s a very large amount of land we have helped protect and conserve, and many of those lands are what I call working lands. They’re still being used. They just won’t be subdivided.”

It took 35 years for TNC to reach the million-acre milestone, which the group announced earlier this month. The largest conservation organization in the world, TNC opened its doors in Big Sky Country in 1978 when it secured its first conservation easement in the Blackfoot River Valley, one of the state’s first private conservation easements, Carr said.

Today, the organization has had a hand in protecting 1,004,308 acres of land statewide, from ranches in the Rocky Mountain foothills of northcentral Montana in grizzly bear habitat to unbroken native prairie on the northeastern plains to forested land in the river valleys of western Montana.

Lands TNC works to protect often are privately owned ranches that feature native habitat and wildlife, but the aim isn’t to end agricultural uses.

“We very much like to see lands stay in some productive use,” Carr said. “We feel that for long-term conservation, if the community is not part of that decision or doesn’t buy into that, it won’t be lasting.”

MORE>>>Great Falls Tribune

The anniversary comes as wildlife officials in the northern Rockies are considering lifting protections for hundreds of grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone National Park, a move environmental groups decry as short-sighted. The grizzlies were first granted federal protections in 1975 after they had been wiped out across much of their historical range.

They have since made a slow comeback, prompting the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to advance plans on whether to take more than 700 bears across the Yellowstone region of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming off the threatened-species list.

A decision is expected in January. It would open the door for limited sport hunting of the bears in the area, though protections for their habitat would remain in place.

 MORE>>>USA Today

Three days before Christmas 1913, Anna Held, one of the most famous actresses of her day, stepped out of her special train in Billings and began hawking The Billings Gazette.

“Paper mister,” the Polish-born star all but commanded as she strode through downtown businesses, accepting any amount dazzled customers wanted to pay. Chorus girls from her comic opera “Mademoiselle Baby” followed in her wake with great stacks of newspapers.

In the hour before the matinee at the Babcock Theater, the “vivacious, the queenly, the favorite of cosmopolitan audiences,” had sold $200 worth — a princely sum 100 years ago.

Proceeds went to the Big Brother Christmas Tree at the Elks Club. Every cent would benefit the community, especially hundreds of poor swept into the city in a spectacular period of growth.

After her evening performance, Held and her entourage waded into the crowded theater and sold another $100 worth of the evening edition.

The millionaire actress, famous for a vast and stylish wardrobe that included a $20,000 Russian sable coat, had recently split from her common-law relationship with legendary Broadway impresario Florenz Ziegfeld. Held has been credited with concocting the showgirl format that became the Ziegfeld Follies.

MORE>>>Billings Gazette

A man reported that someone got into his unlocked car and turned the lights on, draining the battery; a woman had questions about a man who wanted to trade a gun for a puppy; a caller wanted to know how to get his mother to stop harassing him.

In this mountain town (pop. 39,000), police officers' duties extend beyond the daily rounds and reports. They provide fodder for one of the hottest books in town, "We Don't Make This Stuff Up: The Very Best of the Bozeman Daily Chronicle Police Reports."

While some newspapers are banking on the Internet and video to move their business into the 21st century, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle is taking a different tack: turning its police blotter into literature. After more than 100 years of printing, the local broadsheet curates the confusion and mishaps of everyday life and puts these things into a $10 paperback whose second edition is hot off the presses.

MORE>>>Wall Street Journal