On any given day, thousands of packages from Walmarts, Targets, and stores around the country travel north along a two-lane road out of Billings, Montana — past the Tumbleweed Saloon, past cows grazing on empty rangeland, past the Busy Bee Cafe and stands of short pines — to the town of Roundup, where they will be unboxed, re-boxed, and sent off to Amazon.
At first glance, Roundup does not appear to be a hub for much of anything. Founded by homesteaders and ranchers in the late 19th century, it enjoyed boomlets as a coal town and a station along the Milwaukee railroad, but the coal tapped out and the train shut down, and the town’s population has now sunk below 2,000. Its Main Street is lined with homages to its frontier past: silhouettes of cowboys painted on boarded-up windows; dust-covered wagon wheels in otherwise empty storefronts; a noose dangling from “the hanging tree,” which a plaque explains was used to execute three cattle rustlers and two unlucky bystanders, cattle rustling being “considered one of the lowest forms of crime.