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This chapter compares the administrative costs of public sector defined benefit and defined contribution systems offered by the federal government and many states. Administrative expenses are presented as percentages of both income and assets, and the author discusses how administrative expenses might enter into the decision by a public sector employer as to whether to establish a defined contribution plan.

The identification of the steamboat Montana in September 2002 in the Missouri River near St. Charles, Missouri, by an East Carolina University (ECU) research team unlocked a tantalizing opportunity: a chance for researchers to combine history and archaeology on a known shipwreck. The Montana archaeological site provided researchers the perfect opportunity to amass a body of evidence about the construction details of western river steamers. Archaeology and history had the perfect opportunity to generate comprehensive insight into this understudied genre of historic ship architecture. Archaeologists brought to the excavation their arsenal of documenting tools and analysis while historians sought out archival information concerning the life of the Montana. Together they explored steam vessels of the nineteenth century that represented valuable capital and most often, regardless of the extent of damage, were floated and repaired in a short time. The thorough study of the Montana makes clear the lengths to which steamboat engineering evolved in order to economically compete against railroads. The study of the Montana also revealed the fatal architectural flaw that, in combination with striking the bridge abutment, destroyed the steamboat.

This introductory chapter reviews the US Supreme Court's decisions regarding the refusal of unwanted medical treatment and the states' right to legalize assisted death. As of the time of writing, Oregon, Washington, and Montana allow physician-assisted suicide. The fact that until 1997 physician-assisted suicide was illegal in all states of the union explains the suicide practice of Dr. Jack Krevorkian—a pathologist with no special expertise in end-of-life care—whose conduct, until ended by his imprisonment, probably represented the worst case scenario of a maverick doctor on his own. Equally unsettling is the fact that despite its illegality in most jurisdictions, the deliberate ending of life by physicians occurs rather often. This euthanasia underground, an entirely unregulated aspect of medicine, reveals a pattern that not only is secretive and deceptive but also has great potential for abuse. The question therefore is probably not whether to permit physician-assisted suicide. The real choice we face is whether we seek to regulate and control the practice of assisted death, or whether it is left unregulated and unchecked, which creates great risks for both doctors and patients.

As early as the 1830s, the Old Northwest began to expand and blur into that elusive region known as the Midwest. The post-war Midwest centred on a tier of four states, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, but was divided into two distinct ecological zones, eastern prairie and western plains, each of which encompassed parts of the states bordering the central tier — Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana to the west, and Minnesota, Iowa, and Missouri to the east. The rough dividing line between Plains and Prairies was the 100th meridian, which ran through the middle of the four core states. Plains and Prairies shared one major obstacle to settlement: the local Indians. They were not numerous, but their adoption of the horse and the gun had turned them into extremely formidable light cavalry.

Italian immigrants came to America to pursue an artistic dream, but they remain “immigrant workers” at heart. They strongly maintain the ethos of the artisan, with its mixture of manual labor and creativity, more than pretenses of artistic genius. They tell their stories in the quiet mode that links our autobiographies. One of them in particular who does not find success, Luigi Olari, strikes a very human note in his description of failure. Even the quite well-known Alfred Crimi, a painter, Pietro Montana, a sculptor, and Luigi Lombardi, an orchestra director, never put on airs about the position they acquired but always highlighted their struggles, being men of survival. Two of them, the actors Rocco De Russo and Emanuel Gatti, directly experience the decline of theater due to television, and their autobiographies become narratives of the end of an era more than tales of personal triumph. All of these artists started at the bottom, and they unabashedly admit that.

It was supposed to be a day of short, easy paddles and portages. But that is before the winds show up, gale force and pummeling wave after wave against us, determined to lock us down on the island. We pull our three canoes laden with children and camping gear along the edges of the rocky shore to try to find an easier launching point. The teens then take steering positions, as we throw our shoulders into our paddles and dig, over, and over into those icy blasts of heavy, strong-armed water. Any lapse sends the canoe back. One slip of weight, and we’ll tip, losing all our gear, and we’ll have to struggle to stay alive against hypothermia, even in August. We’re tired. We’re cold. And we’re swearing against the powers that push at us, testing us. But we’re alive and we know it. We feel it in our bones and spirit like never at home. And we’re so darned grateful to be here. This is the wilderness. No directions came with this country—the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA) between Minnesota and Ontario. They could have been so easily lost. In the 1930s and 1940s, Aldo Leopold, Sigurd Olson, and other lovers of the outdoors saw these granite-sheathed lakes for what they were—places of rugged beauty and unspoiled wild communities that once developed could not be recovered. They called a halt to unthinking “progress” for a chance to rest in what was and preserve it for the future. Leopold explained that “Recreation is valuable in proportion to the degree to which it differs from and contrasts with workaday life.” So if Leopold were here, what progress would he note on the wilderness front, where the waves of progress push so hard against the concept? First, he would have admired the persistence of his comrade Howard Zahniser from the Wilderness Society. How “Zahnie” patiently built partnerships over his ten years as secretary of the Society and then persevered for another nine crafting the Wilderness Act. He endured 65 drafts and all the associated lobbying of Congress.

This chapter is concerned with the role yodeling played in mass media constructions of the fictional cowboy in the early twentieth century. With the emphasis on semiotics and musical connotation, it examines the relationship of yodeling to the attributes of the idealized cowboy in a mythic American West as presented on radio and in film. It relates elements of the cowboy construct, for example bravado and braggadocio, to the specific features of the yodeling heard in the recordings, such as speed and virtuosity. Also considered is the emergence of singing cowgirls, whose themes and styles contrast with those of their male counterparts. Using Wilf Carter as a paradigm for cowboy-style yodeling, the discussion extends to Elton Britt, Slim Whitman, Patsy Montana, harmony yodeling, the Girls of the Golden West, and the DeZurik Sisters, among others. The musical features characterizing cowboy yodeling styles are differentiated from those of hillbilly yodeling styles.

Sacramento may be the capital of California, but the city has a long history of a hardscrabble underbelly. Among the attractions are the waterways that run through the city—the clear American and the muddy Sacramento rivers join near downtown. The draw is not the presence of water in rare quantity for parched California, but the riverbanks thick with vegetation that conceals the camps of the homeless “river people.” Michael S. Williamson and Dale Maharidge spent a lot of time in these camps back in the 1980s and fittingly end their journey in the place where it began—Sacramento and the surrounding Central Valley. The camps Michael and Dale found in the early 1980s weren't as elaborate as those photographed by Dorothea Lange. One camp later grew in size, a village of shanties belonging to Montana Blackie and his hobo buddies. The cops kept the river people cowering in the shadows through the 1980s. Dale wrote stories about most of those sweeps, for the newspaper and in a book about Blackie, The Last Great American Hobo. Then he left town.

Incorporating standard Phase II predisturbance procedures allowing maximum data collection for the least survey time and cost, the East Carolina archaeological team documented the remains of the Montana on the Missouri River bottomlands across from St. Charles, Missouri. The wreck site's position on the riverbank allowed easy documentation of half the hull, including the stern, and logical inference of what the submerged half looked like. Survey of the Montana site included documentation of the prominent features on site, as well as documentation of associated artifact scatters and other site features. The journey of understanding from the initial riverbank view of the Montana's wreckage has been profound. Western river steamers were not simply barges with engines; they represented a wholly integrated marine technology specifically designed to deal with and conquer an unpredictable freshwater river environment. Powerful, imaginative, and seemingly unbound by ship-construction standards and traditions, western engineers found startlingly practical solutions to engineering problems, proving their shipbuilding prowess.

A scale model of the stern section of the Montana, based on measurements, drawings, and photographs compiled during the archaeological project, was developed specifically to answer questions concerning the engineering of the vessel. As an added bonus, the activity of model construction provided much-needed insight into how the Montana was constructed. It seems likely from the model construction that the Montana was built in simple prefabricated pieces and assembled on the ways. This method would have been cost effective and efficient given the ship's abnormally large size and the constraints imposed by it. The engines on the Montana were powerful for their size, converting the 130 to 160 pounds (59 to 75.6 kg) of steam pressure supplied by the boilers to locomotive power. The Montana was driven by two of these engines: one mounted on each set of cylinder timbers, port and starboard. The Montana carried boilers specially developed for western river use called flue boilers. Just as steamer hulls and engines had been adapted to the particular exigencies of a riverine environment, the western river flue boiler was a regional variation of accepted boiler technology. And like the other components of the western river steamer, it was designed to contend with the harsh elements of river use while advancing engineers' aims to make boats that were powerful, light, and maneuverable.

The Montana's archaeology offered many answers to questions concerning mountain steamers that researchers have been unable to answer with reference to history alone. The wreck site also enabled them to ask intelligent questions that would not have occurred to them had they not studied it. History and archaeology have taken them far in this quest for knowledge of the western river steamer. More questions can be asked and answered with more work on site. The material culture carried aboard the vessel has, as yet, barely been examined. Yet, the Montana carried in her hull the goods of everyday life on the western frontier. While the Montana's hull demonstrates the pinnacle of wooden ship construction for inland transportation, the goods it carried represent the everyday lives of all who braved the American West. The Montana's history and subsequent archaeological investigation can be utilized as a case study for understanding and appreciating the development of the trans-Mississippi West. Through the Montana's activities, trade, transportation, and population patterns that shaped both the past and present are discovered.

Herbert Hoover’s America was a dismal place in 1931. The president had failed to end or even mitigate the economic crisis, which began with the stock market crash of 1929. Unemployment had spiraled out of control; the number of jobless Americans had soared from 429,000 in 1929 to more than nine million in 1931. The Hoover White House had undermined its credibility in 1929 and 1930 by erroneously predicting economic recovery. But by late summer 1931 even some of the president’s closest congressional allies were glumly admitting that the end of the Depression was not in sight. Breadlines and shantytowns—dubbed “Hoovervilles” to mock the impotent president—had spread across the nation, grim testimony to the hunger and homelessness wrought by the Great Depression. Municipalities and private charities could not keep pace with the need of millions of unemployed Americans for economic assistance. Relief workers, local officials, and liberals on Capitol Hill in August 1931 called for a special session of Congress to legislate aid for the unemployed; they warned that without federal relief dollars, the coming winter would bring widespread starvation. That same month, as their elders in Washington fretted over how to ready themselves for another year of Depression, students at the University of California at Berkeley also began to prepare for the coming year. But for Berkeley students that preparation did not include discussions of hunger, poverty, or other Depression-related problems. As the fall 1931 semester began, fraternities arid football, sororities and parties, were the talk of the campus. In its opening editorial of the semester, the Daily Californian, Berkeley’s student newspaper, gave advice to new students, making it sound as if their most serious problems would be chosing the proper Greek house and deciding whether to participate “in sports, in dramatics or publications.” The editor also informed the freshmen that they were “fortunate to have a classmate in [football] coach Bill Ingram . . . [who will] bring back another ‘Golden Era’ for California athletics.”

A framework for conservation planning was developed to evaluate options for reducing development impacts on Greater Sage-Grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) in Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, Utah, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Lek-count data (2,336 leks) were used to delineate high-abundance population centers, termed core regions, that contained 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% of the known breeding population. Sage-grouse abundance varied by state. Wyoming contains 64% of the known sage-grouse population and more active leks than all the other states combined within the study area. Montana contains fewer sage-grouse (24%) than Wyoming, but actions that reduce sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) tillage by providing private landowners incentives to maintain sagebrush-dominated landscapes would provide lasting benefits because core regions in Montana are at comparatively low development risk. Habitat restoration in areas with low risk of development but containing fewer sage-grouse fit into the overall conservation strategy by targeting populations that promote connectivity of core regions.

In a 1957 speech, the legendary and controversial scientist and submariner Admiral Hyman G. Rickover noted, “Our civilization rests upon a technological base which requires enormous quantities of fossil fuels.” Rickover understood that the United States was producing and using as much oil in the 1950s as we had in all our previous history and worried, “What assurance do we . . . have that our energy needs will continue to be supplied by fossil fuels: The answer is—in the long run—none.” Rickover also warned that failing to conserve our oil wealth could leave us destitute. The United States doubled oil production and consumption again in the 1960s, and again in the 1970s—ignoring Rickover’s appeal “to think soberly about our responsibilities to our descendents—those who will ring out the Fossil Fuel Age.” Unrestrained fossil fuel consumption has propelled the United States to a level of affluence previously unknown in human history. Fossil fuels, petroleum (oil and natural gas), and coal, represent the “stored sunlight of millions and millions of years deposited in an energy bank account in the Earth by geological processes.” Since the early twentieth century, the whole world has been using up this inheritance “in a geological instant.” Cars and other transportation consume the major proportion of the world’s oil, but petroleum also is the raw material for a wide variety of industrial products, fabrics, and medicines (see appendix 3). Without it, every facet of modern life would be less convenient, less comfortable, and far less mobile. Massive energy consumption has addicted Americans to cheap fossil fuels. Energy addicts overheat the house and wear T-shirts all winter, tend to own two or more refrigerators, and maintain a vehicular fleet. Many believe that having and driving cars is a more important American liberty than voting (see chapter 5). Along with U.S. Senator Trent Lott, they feel that “the American people have a right to drive a great big road-hog SUV if they want to.”

Renewable energy from the sun—which includes solar, wind, and water energy— can meet all of our energy needs and will allow us to eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels for electricity production. At least, that is the “Siren song” that seduces many people. Amory Lovins, the head of the Rocky Mountain Institute, has been one of the strongest proponents of getting all of our energy from renewable sources (what he calls “soft energy paths”) (1) and one of the most vociferous opponents of nuclear power. A recent article in Scientific American proposes that the entire world’s needs for power can be supplied by wind, solar, and water (2). Is this truly the nirvana of unlimited and pollution-free energy? Can we have our cake and eat it, too? Let’s take a critical look at the issues surrounding solar and wind power. Let me be clear that I am a proponent of solar energy. I built a mountain cabin a few years ago that is entirely off the grid. All of the electricity comes from solar photovoltaic (PV) panels with battery storage. The 24 volt DC is converted to AC with an inverter and is fed into a conventional electrical panel. It provides enough energy to power the lights, run a 240 volt, three-quarter horsepower water pump 320 feet deep in the well, and electrical appliances such as a coffee pot, toaster, and vacuum cleaner. But I am not implying that all of my energy needs come from solar. The big energy hogs—kitchen range, hot water heater, and a stove in the bedroom—are all powered with propane. Solar is not adequate to power these appliances. In 2010 I also had a 2.5 kW solar PV system installed on my house that ties into the utility grid. When the sun is shining, I use the electricity from the solar panels, and if I use less than I generate, it goes out on the grid to other users. If it does not produce enough for my needs, then I buy electricity from the grid.

Meza’s archival dissolution had profound effects on his contemporaries, among them Teddy Sandoval. This chapter examines how two disparate sites, the home and public art space, conjoin in shared networks of ceramics repatriated after his death in 1995. Focusing on the custodial efforts of his partner and estate executor, Paul Polubinsaks, the chapter utilizes an archive elicitation process to unpack Sandoval’s diverse art practices and avant-garde collaborations ranging from faux finishes, renegade street graffiti, transgender fictions of self, and mail art personae. It also discusses the posthumous completion of his Gateway to Highland Park for a commuter rail station in Los Angeles and details what became LA’s first Latinx AIDS memorial.

This chapter describes the stoneflies located in the Glacier National Park and Flathead River basin in Montana. It explains that 58 species were documented in the Flathead River, 58 from Glacier Park, and 95 and 74 species respectively from west and east of the continental divide. The chapter stresses the need to conduct more studies on the number of Lentic stoneflies in this region and on hyporheic stonefly fauna.