If you or your family have ever lived in Montana, this is a wonderful reference book. Have you ever wondered how some particular Montana town got its name? That's what Cheney's book will tell you. Every Montana city or town that ever had a postoffice is listed, and so are some that didn't. Many of these towns are completely gone-- only the names and a few fading family memories remain. In other cases, a single sturdy brick building sits in a field. And of course, the biggest towns in Montana, like Billings, Missoula, Great Falls and Butte, are listed too.

Unless you're the sort of person who reads dictionaries for fun, you won't want to read this all the way through. You might, however, want to dip into it over and over again. And you might want to make sure that your local library owns a copy, so you and others can do just that.

Winter Counts were the historical calendars of the Sioux Nation. An historian, appointed by the tribe, drew one pictograph on a buffalo or deer skin at the end of each winter season. The Big Missouri Winter Count is housed in the Sioux Museum in Rapid City, South Dakota and is one of the best preserved of all these Native American calendars. This winter count calendar commemorates 131 years (1796 to 1926) in the lives of the Sioux bands who lived along the Missouri River, spanning a century which brought devastating changes for them. Sioux Winter Count: A 131-year Calendar Of Events is a superbly produced, informative study of that calendar and will prove to be of immense interest to students of Native American culture in general, and the Sioux Nation in particular.