That’s a lot for Roscoe. Just 24 people live here, making it Montana’s 425th (out of 469) most populated place. La Tray attracted more people than the town usually holds. There aren’t a lot of places left on the planet where you can do that and still fit them in a single room.

Roscoe, which is carved into a little divot out on the plains and the foothills, beneath the towering Beartooths, is pretty — achingly so, the kind that makes your heart catch in your throat a little bit. But even in a state that is known for anonymity, this place is remote.

Could you place Roscoe on a map? It’s OK if you can’t — few can. In fact, if you know anything about Roscoe it’s probably that nobody knows where it is. “Where the hell is Roscoe?” has become the town’s unofficial slogan, and you can buy it emblazoned on T-shirts and bumper stickers at the Grizzly Bar.

Or you can during the summer, at least. The Grizzly is only open seasonally. Come by here in the winter and there’ll be so few people around that you can’t even buy the funny T-shirt about how few people there are around.

Except at River Arts and Books. Peixoto doesn’t keep regular hours during the winter, but if you email her she’ll almost always let you in. She opened River Arts in July of last year to be a cultural resource in a place that doesn't have a lot of those.

Roscoe is her home, so she doesn’t have to come far to unlock the doors. When her son was born a couple years ago, he was the first baby born in Roscoe in 42 years. That little guy will always know where the hell this place is.

“Everybody goes to Missoula and Bozeman and Billings, and nobody comes to the smaller communities” La Tray said. “I’ve definitely put a priority on that.”

La Tray became Montana’s poet laureate — basically meaning he’s the top ambassador for the poetic arts in the state — in August 2023. It’s a two-year term, so he’ll be on the job until later this summer.

In that time he’s been on the road a lot. Part of that was for an extensive book tour — his memoir “Becoming Little Shell” was released to raves last August. But as poet laureate, La Tray does readings all over the state. People or organizations in small towns will reach out to him and if he can make it work, he’ll hop in the car. Poet laureate might sound glamorous, and sometimes it is, but there’s a lot of highway miles and gas stations in between.

“People can bring me in to have an Indigenous person come in and talk about Indigenous stuff,” said La Tray, who is Métis and a member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians in Montana. “And the fact that I’m poet laureate gives them an opportunity to do two things at once. An arts thing and an indigenous thing.”

Later this month he’ll do a reading in Big Timber. And he’s got dates on the books for Wibaux and Ekalaka, spots that even lifelong Montanans might struggle to place, or remember as anything other than a highway exit.

Part of La Tray’s commitment to travel reflects the goal of the Montana Arts Council, who oversee the poet laureate program. But this is personal to him, too. La Tray lives in Frenchtown, a small town just up the Clark Fork from Missoula. It’s less remote than Roscoe and has lots more people, with a population just short of 2,000, but they’re both unincorporated communities.

He always says he’s from Frenchtown, not Missoula, partially to joke that nobody needs another writer from Missoula, but also because Frenchtown is a lot closer to some of the more rural communities he likes to read at.

Montana is a big state. You could look at a place like Broadus and wonder what it’s got in common economically and culturally with Missoula. But La Tray doesn’t really see it that way. He approaches all of these readings the same way.

“I don’t have a set program,” he explained. “I don’t really plan things. I just show up and feel my way through it.”

He’ll read some of the more recent poems he’s written, or reflect on observations made on his popular Substack, “An Irritable Métis.” No reading is the same as the one before, but he’s not tailoring them to reach certain audiences. We’re all Montanans, we can all hear this.

“I’m a storyteller, and as a storyteller I want a certain element of danger,” he noted. “I don’t know what the next word out of my mouth is going to be. I don’t say anything different based on where I am.”

You get that danger talking to him. The title poet laureate might sound high and mighty but La Tray is approachable and funny and utterly unpredictable. Part of what makes him so invigorating to see live is that he makes you feel like he’s having a conversation with just you, even in a crowded room.

He also doesn’t pull his punches — about anything. Right before the Roscoe reading the Trump Administration issued a freeze on all federal assistance. Like many executive orders it was almost immediately caught up in litigation, where it still largely is today, but if the order goes through it could impact the poet laureate program. La Tray doesn’t receive a salary, but his travels and readings are funded through the Arts Council and Humanities Montana. But La Tray isn’t worried.

“I’d still do it,” he said. “I’m not going to let some petty tyrant and his clueless decisions impact my ability to speak to my people.”

He paused there, not to take anything back, but to reiterate that “petty tyrant” was on the record. He might call some of the words that come out his mouth “dangerous,” but that doesn’t mean he’s scared of a single one.

“There’s more to this than making money,” La Tray continued. “And if you saw what I get paid you’d see that you pretty much have to be in this to not make money.”

La Tray is partial to the word “otipemisiwak” that is a Plains Cree term for the Métis people. It means “the people who own themselves.”

“I own myself,” he said. “I don’t let anybody tell me what to do. And if they said I couldn’t be poet laureate anymore because of the things I say, then fine. I’m not going to stop going to these places.”

If people go to La Tray readings, especially in the smaller, more isolated parts of the state, and don’t agree with him, that’s all the better.

“It’s better if people are hearing a perspective they don’t hear every day,” the poet said. “I’m not going to let fear determine where I go and what I say and what I do.”

He sure didn’t in Roscoe. He read about “robe wearing devils preaching salvation from behind the muzzles of colonial rifles disguised as scripture” while wearing a beaded necklace he bought from a Shoshone-Bannock woman. The poet, who joked that if something isn’t tattooed onto his body he’s likely to forget it, has the number 574 tattooed on his left hand knuckles, a reference to the Little Shell being the 574th recognized tribe in the United States. The story continues to be told every time he does one of these readings.

La Tray spoke plenty of his own words, but also read work (a cover poem, if you will) by Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, La Tray’s own heritage adding a striking regional relevance to Toha’s “My Grandfather Was a Terrorist.”

There’s a communion in places like this, and the proximity of bodies warms the room and protects from the cold outside — in more ways than one.

The two lightbulbs (one less if someone wants to make tea) cast atmospheric shadows around the room. The effect meant that La Tray, who talks with his hands, pointing, waving and gesticulating, was projected against the wall, larger than life.

“I like these small places,” he said. “I like when you’ve got 15 or 20 people and it feels like a couple hundred because its packed in an intimate. There’s no microphone necessary.”