Livingston, Montana and the Paradise Valley

Like so many writers, artists, actors and a steady stream of celebrities drawn to Montana’s splendor where landscape is muse, the late, great motion picture director “Bloody Sam” Peckinpah likewise succumbed to the lure. Known for such iconic Western masterpieces as “Ride the High Country” (1962) and “The Wild Bunch,” (1969) Peckinpah settled in Livingston, sixty miles north of Yellowstone National Park, where he lived out the remainder of his complex and contentious life. From 1978 to 1985 when he died of heart failure, Peck called an expansive upstairs suite at the four-story Murray Hotel home. Whether he came for inspiration or respite, judging by the epics he assembled during his fabled career and his wild, drug and alcohol-fueled life, Sam Peckinpah belonged in Livingston; he has become part of the rough-edged, Western fabric that shapes the region’s lore to this day.