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Beginning in 1953, in response to a particularly deadly Labor Day weekend the summer before, the American Legion post in Missoula began a ritual: marking the site of every fatal road accident with an identical white cross. The simple act sought to curb the state’s remarkably high rate of road fatalities–the worst in the country at times–by making death ever-present in Montana’s cultural memory, folding the living, the dead, and the land into one. All the while, the state has had a number of varying speed laws, and for a time, no speed limit at all.
Montana Road Wreck looks at these two overlapping phenomena: the state’s thousands of identical roadside crosses and its history as a place of limitless speed. Photographs of fatality markers are intertwined with local newspaper excerpts (1953 to present) presenting these two partial and intersecting narratives. In doing so, they loosely reconstruct a history of Montana’s perceived identity as one of the last great outposts of the American West, and a borderland where the line between legend and reality becomes indistinguishable. The project explores the irrevocable imprint of the automobile on the American landscape, politics of place in the American West, and the vulnerability of collective memory.