Early Laurel, like many Montana frontier towns, was shaped by tenacious settlers who struggled to carve a living from a harsh, often unforgiving landscape in the wake of the Indian Wars. Laurel started as little more than a railway station and a handful of businesses serving railroad workers, farmers, and ranchers in the early 1880s. Irrigation projects soon transformed the dry, dusty prairies along the Yellowstone River near Laurel into productive...