unintended side-effect. During production of the series, the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, and on the Pentagon in Washington D.C., occurred. The producers discussed whether they should tell the participants and decided it was appropriate to do so. Local newspapers from nearby towns were given to the participants to read so that they could learn about the attacks. The participants were permitted to read the newspapers for several days in a row to stay abreast of what happened. Nearly all the homesteaders expressed their satisfaction with the way the situation was handled, and appreciated being isolated again. Kristen Brooks was not happy at the time with this decision. She said she was convinced that the production should have shut down for a few days to permit the participants to learn more and to determine if any friends had died in the Twin Towers disasters. The site of the homesteads Filming of Frontier House occurred in an undisclosed valley on a ranch approximately south of Big Timber, Montana, owned by Ken Davenport. The Montana Film Office spent weeks trying to locate an appropriate site for the production. The site had to be isolated and only rarely overflown by aircraft, but also had to be accessible via automobile. The area had to be viable for agriculture as well. This turned out to be a problem, as many of the sites investigated had such poor topsoil that they could not be used. The Davenport ranch was a historic one. The Crow Nation had originally been given the area as a reservation, but they ceded it back to the United States in 1882 in favor of a larger parcel of land to the east. This historic fact would lead the series producers to hire Dale Old Horn, Crow tribal historian, as a consultant on the show (he would also appear on-camera) and to have Crow hunters arrive to help feed the participants. Each family was given an plot of land to farm, graze animals on, and build a home on. All three "homesteads" had easy access to a creek, and were within a 15-minute walk of one another. The country store run by the fictional Hop Sing Yim (played by local Montana historian Ying-Ming Lee) was away, and required hiking on foot over two mountain passes. The production crew numbered 15 individuals, broken into two units. The