MTMontana Fun Facts

Rain that falls on Triple Divide Peak in Glacier National Park can end up in the Pacific Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico or Hudson Bay, depending on which side of the ridge it lands. No other point in North America splits water three ways like that, and it sits in a state whose name promises mountains while roughly two thirds of its ground is flat plains.

Facts most people get wrong

• Montana is not all mountains. The Rockies cover about the western third. East of the front range the state is Great Plains: wheat, cattle, badlands and coal. The Spanish word behind the name describes a minority of the terrain.
• Yellowstone is not entirely in Wyoming. Roughly three percent of the park lies in Montana, and three of its five entrances sit on the Montana side, at Gardiner, West Yellowstone and Cooke City. Gardiner's North Entrance is the only one open to cars year round.
• Big Sky Country is not the official nickname. Treasure State is. Big Sky Country came from a state highway department promotion in 1961 that borrowed the title of A.B. Guthrie Jr.'s 1947 novel.
• Glacier National Park was not named for the ice still there. The valleys were carved by ice age glaciers. The park held roughly 150 glaciers in 1850 and now has 26 large enough to meet the 25 acre threshold the USGS uses.
• Custer's Last Stand did not happen in the Dakotas. The Little Bighorn battlefield is in southeastern Montana, and the fighting took place on June 25 and 26, 1876.
• Cattle do not outnumber people three to one. The ratio is closer to two to one: about 1.1 million residents against a cattle inventory of just over 2 million.

Records and firsts

• First woman elected to Congress. Jeannette Rankin of Missoula won a US House seat in 1916, four years before the 19th Amendment. She voted against entry into both world wars, and in 1941 she was the only member of either chamber to vote no.
• The first Tyrannosaurus rex ever identified came out of the Hell Creek Formation near Jordan in 1902, excavated by Barnum Brown.
• Coldest reading in the lower 48. Rogers Pass recorded minus 70 degrees Fahrenheit on January 20, 1954, still the record low for the contiguous United States.
• Fort Peck Dam, completed in 1940, is the largest hydraulically filled earth dam in the country. A photograph of its spillway ran on the first cover of Life magazine on November 23, 1936.
• Last state high point climbed. Granite Peak, about 12,800 feet, held out until 1923, later than any of the other 49 summits.
• Shortest river argument. The Roe River near Great Falls, 201 feet long, held a Guinness listing against Oregon's D River until the category was retired.

Geography that surprises

• Triple Divide Peak, 8,020 feet, is the hydrological apex of the continent. Its three watersheds drain to three different bodies of water, one of them the Arctic drainage through Hudson Bay.
• Beaverhead County covers about 5,570 square miles, more ground than the entire state of Connecticut. Montana is fourth in area and 44th in population, roughly seven people per square mile.
• The Canadian border runs about 545 miles, longer than any other state's except Alaska's, and it touches three provinces: British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan.
• Only one edge of the state is ragged. The western border follows the crest of the Bitterroot Range and the Continental Divide, while the north, east and south edges are surveyor's straight lines.
• The state spans about 630 miles east to west and sits entirely in Mountain time, so the sun rises across it more than half an hour apart end to end.

Where the name comes from

Montana is Spanish for mountain, from montaña and ultimately the Latin montanea. Ohio congressman James M. Ashley pushed the name for the new territory carved out of Idaho Territory in 1864, and it stuck even though the eastern majority of the land is plains. Statehood followed on November 8, 1889, making Montana the 41st state. The motto adopted for the territorial seal in 1865, Oro y plata, is Spanish for gold and silver, and it remains the only state motto in Spanish. Gold camps at Bannack and Virginia City had drawn the first rush, and silver and copper at Butte paid for the decades after.

Bordering states

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