Jim Dullenty, one of the state’s leading journalists and a nationally known historian, was born Feb. 28, 1941, in Marcus Daly Memorial Hospital in Hamilton. His parents, Fred Allen Dullenty and Sheila Marion Grant Dullenty, were dairy farmers on a farm/ranch located seven miles southwest of Victor in the foothills of the Bitterroot Mountains.
About 1950, Jim’s father bought an adjoining farm and expanded his operations to include beef cattle. He continued as a dairy farmer and was proud of his herd of registered guernseys. Jim’s father died in 1957 from a heart attack. His mother, sister June, and he, moved to Havre where his mother attended Northern Montana College and in 1959 earned a teaching certificate.
Jim was a 1959 graduate of Havre High School where he excelled in journalism, history and theatrical pursuits. He was editor of the Havre High School newspaper, he received the Charles Palmer Davis award in history, among other awards, and the play he starred in won first in the state at Interscholastics in Missoula in 1959. He was inducted into the National Honor Society and was selected to attend Boy’s State in Dillon where he was editor of the Boy’s State newspaper.
In the fall of 1959, he entered the University of Montana School of Journalism and became associate editor of the Montana Kaimin, the student newspaper. He also was selected for Bear Paws honorary, was initiated into Sigma Delta Chi, a journalism fraternity, and received other awards. He graduated in 1963 and immediately went to work for the Williston (ND) Herald.
In 1965, Jim helped start a Missoula weekly newspaper, the Hellgate Herald. It was while serving as editor of that paper that Jim interviewed Richard Nixon in Billings. Nixon was campaigning for other Republicans at the time. Later, when President Nixon opened the 1974 World’s Fair in Spokane, Jim interviewed Nixon again. So although he interviewed only one president – he interviewed him twice!
When that Missoula weekly did not work out, he entered the graduate school in history at the University of Montana and took his final seminar under Dr. K. Ross Toole. In 1967, he was hired by the Spokane Daily Chronicle, a newspaper of 63,000 circulation. For the next eight and a half years he was the military reporter for that paper as well as the writer of a weekly nightlife column called “On the Town.”
During those years he interviewed scores of celebrities from Jack Benny to Bing Crosby to Charles Bronson. He got to know Rory Calhoun and Agnes Moorehead because of their mutual interest in politics. But his closest relationship to a “movie star” was to Martin Kove. Kove was in many films including a Rambo movie with Sylvester Stallone. For two summers, Kove was featured at western history conventions that Jim organized.
Jim also was among a handful of reporters invited to greet America’s returning Vietnam War prisoners of war. The Chronicle sent him to Travis Air Force Base, Calif., for that.
Also unusual, the Chronicle copyrighted a series of stories Jim did on outlaw Butch Cassidy. From 1972 until shortly before his death, Jim was involved in researching and writing western history with
an emphasis on outlaws of the Old West. Butch Cassidy was his primary interest, but his biography of outlaw Harry Tracy was published as was a booklet he wrote on Wyatt Earp.
In 1975, Jim left the Chronicle and drove to New York City where he hoped to become, as he said, “the Hemingway of western writers.” He did not attain that goal although he did use the six months he lived in New York to write a considerable number of magazine articles dealing with western history. While he was in New York and could have used the money, none of these sold. In the next year or two all of his stories sold to magazines or newspapers.
After a few months of unemployment, Jim was hired by the Tri-City Herald newspaper in Pasco, Richland and Kennewick, Wash. He was the energy writer for that paper and nearly every weekend he spent on the West Coast attending meetings of agencies and businesses who had activities going on at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation near Richland.
While at the Tri-City Herald, Jim was selected by the Associated Press as one of three Washington state journalists to go to Washington D.C., and spend a week investigating why the state of Washington had the three most powerful political figures in Congress, Senators Warren G. Magnuson and Henry Jackson, and Speaker of the House Thomas S. Foley. Jim was assigned to do a story on Foley.
Also while at the Tri-City Herald, Jim’s testimony at a trial in Seattle put two of Washington state’s most powerful politicians in prison for 10 years.
It was while at the Herald that Jim was offered the editorship of the nation’s three most popular and influential western history magazines, True West, Frontier Times and Old West. The magazines were produced by a firm in Iola, Wis., so Jim moved there. But by the mid-1980s, Jim wanted to be his own boss. So he resigned as editor of the magazines and opened a book store and antique shop in Hamilton.
He did this for the next 17 years during which he did much traveling, most of it in search of rare books. He made four trips to Europe, one trip through the Caribbean and repeatedly flew to New York, Denver, Phoenix, and elsewhere. When he closed his store in 2003, he had acquired more than 1,600 books and a huge assortment of antiques.
By 2003, Jim’s mother, a retired teacher at Fort Benton, was ailing and he needed to be closer to her. Also, his sister, June, was a teacher at Grass Range. When a job became available at the News-Argus newspaper in Lewistown, about half way between Fort Benton and Grass Range, he took it.
Jim began writing when he was 15 (in 1956) and a student at Victor High School. He still had copies of two stories he wrote that first year. Although he retired from the News-Argus at the end of 2009, he continued to write feature stories for that paper. When he left Lewistown in May 2018, and returned to Hamilton, Jim had been a writer for print for 62 years, longer than anyone else in Montana at that time.
Because of his long and successful journalism career, the Montana Newspaper Association, in July 2017, awarded Jim its highest honor for a journalist, the President’s Award, saying it was given to him for his “excellence in journalism.”
In the history field, Jim was equally involved. In 1974, he was co-founder of the National Association for Outlaw and Lawman History. Then in 1991, he founded the Western Outlaw and Lawman History Association. In recent years the two organizations merged and the resulting group is known as the Wild West History Association.
Jim’s expertise in Cassidy history resulted in the University of Nebraska inviting him to write a new introduction to James D. Horan’s popular Cassidy history “Desperate Men.”
In the 1990s, he appeared on at least 10 national television shows as a western historian beginning with “Unsolved Mysteries,” with Robert Stack on NBC-TV. He also appeared in shows on A&E, Biography, Lifetime and other channels. Some of those programs are still being re-run on cable channels.
In April 2018, Jim donated his entire collection of western history research materials, including rare photos and published items, to the Museum of Northwest Colorado at Craig, CO. Although not much happened in Craig itself, the town is located about at the center of the outlaw activity Jim wrote about.
Jim’s mother died in 2008. He is survived by his sister, June, at Libby, a niece, Jessamyn Lair, Prineville, Ore., a nephew, James Watt, in Virginia, four great-nephews and nieces, and several cousins.
There will be no funeral and the remains will be interred in the Victor cemetery where his parents are buried.