Linking Up the Mountains

Linking Up the Mountains

Nellie Bandelier may not be a typical Internet pioneer, but then, Dillon, Mont., isn’t Silicon Valley.

When many of her neighbors saw little use for computers in 1996, the retired schoolteacher spotted the potential. She started Dillon-Net with her husband, Ken, and some committed volunteers to bring the Internet to rural Montanans and help teach computer skills to people who may have never used a calculator.

Some 80 mountainous miles from Yellowstone National Park, Dillon (pop. 3,752) sits in Beaverhead County—which has fewer than two people per square mile—in a valley surrounded on three sides by the Continental Divide. There, the nonprofit Dillon-Net—started with a $95,000 technology grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce—set up a free computing center where volunteers teach anything from typing a letter to surfing the World Wide Web.

The group also placed computers at remote sites outside of Dillon in Beaverhead, Silverbow, and Madison counties. Dillon-Net put computers in schools, libraries, businesses, and low-income apartment complexes in towns separated by high mountains and sometimes 100 miles. Even tiny Grant, with just six people, got a computer at the elementary school.

“I just got really fascinated with the Internet and started looking around,” says Bandelier, 72, who first introduced her students to computers in the early 1980s with a “Robby Robot” game she programmed herself. “They need economic development here to keep up. I thought it would just be ideal for the community.”

Soon others agreed. Ranchers could order tractor parts online instead of driving for hours in search of them. Single mothers and others used Dillon-Net’s computers to write resumes. Business owners discovered they could take their enterprises—cowboy hats, fishing flies, hunting guides—and promote them to a much bigger audience online.

“Dillon-Net has been an extraordinary boon for the community in general,” says Mary-Jo E. Perry, “particularly for those of us who are not able to purchase computers or Internet time.”

Perry started a business making old-fashioned bonnets in 1988, selling them mostly at town fairs for 11 years. Then she put her Frontier Bonnets business on the Web (www.frontierbonnets.com). Now, about half her orders come from online customers. Some are school theater companies. Others are chemotherapy patients.

“It’s an old-fashioned business, but we’re doing it the new-fashioned way,” Perry says. She doesn’t have her own computer but stops in at the Dillon-Net office a couple times a week, checks her e-mail, and maintains her website. When she runs into problems, someone’s there to help.

Dillon-Net also helps people stay in touch with loved ones. Often, that means senior citizens e-mailing grandchildren who left in search of jobs, says Dan Compton, who formed Blue Moon Technologies to provide Internet service for the area’s growing number of computer users. “It’s a way to keep them tied back to the community,” he says.

Dillon-Net’s central office is open 40 hours a week, with online desktop computers, rental laptops, scanners, even cameras. It’s staffed by volunteers who tutor, arrange Internet classes, and lead workshops on online marketing. Additional grants and donations have purchased new technology. The group’s work has twice made Dillon-Net a finalist for American Online’s Rural Telecommunications Leadership Awards and for The Bangemann Challenge, a Swedish competition for progressive uses of information technology. “We were thrilled at what people helped us do,” Bandelier says. “We couldn’t have done it unless the community helped us out.”

Often, she says, the most remote communities are the ones that have benefited most from computers. Sometimes, that means families bridging thousands of miles with the Internet. Or, it’s people on a bike tour who stop to send an e-mail from “the boonies.” Once, she says, it was a cowboy on horseback who left his cattle drive to get online.

Regardless of who is using Dillon-Net’s computers for what, in this remote corner of southwestern Montana, “I think it’s gotten people connected with the world better.”

David M. Frey is a frequent contributor to American Profile.

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