MTMontana History

The sandstone rim south of Ulm, where hunters drove bison herds off a cliff for something like a thousand years, sits about 200 miles from the Butte hill that later supplied a large share of the copper wire strung across the United States. Montana's recorded history runs between those two places, and the eighty years that separate them were violent, fast, and mostly decided by people who never lived here.

Buffalo country before Lewis and Clark

The northern plains were held by nations who still hold reservations in the state. The Amskapi Pikuni, the southern branch of the Niitsitapi or Blackfeet, controlled the Rocky Mountain Front and the Marias country. The Apsaalooke, called Crow by outsiders, held the Yellowstone and Bighorn valleys. The Nakoda, known as Assiniboine, and the Aaniiih, called Gros Ventre, shared the Milk River. West of the Continental Divide the Bitterroot Salish, the Pend d'Oreille and the Ksanka, or Kootenai, farmed camas and crossed the mountains each autumn to hunt bison, a trip the Blackfeet contested every year. The site now called First Peoples Buffalo Jump preserves one of the largest cliff kill sites on the continent, with drive lines still traceable on the prairie above it.

The Corps of Discovery arrived in 1805 and spent nearly a month portaging around the Great Falls of the Missouri. Sacagawea recognized the Beaverhead country as her Lemhi Shoshone homeland, from which Hidatsa raiders had carried her off near Three Forks years earlier. The only killings of the whole expedition happened here as well, on the Two Medicine River in July 1806, when a scuffle over horses and guns with a Piegan party left two young men dead.

Two separate acquisitions made one state

Everything east of the Continental Divide came to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Everything west of it belonged to the Oregon Country, occupied jointly with Britain until the Oregon Treaty of 1846 fixed the boundary at the 49th parallel. Montana is one of the few states stitched together from both, which is why its western valleys were reached by Jesuit missionaries working up from the Columbia while its eastern plains were reached by fur traders working up the Missouri. Father Pierre-Jean De Smet founded St. Mary's Mission in the Bitterroot in 1841 after Salish delegations travelled to St. Louis asking for priests. The post that became Fort Benton was planted in 1846 at the head of steamboat navigation, roughly 2,300 river miles above St. Louis, and for forty years it was the practical front door to the region.

Gold camps and a territory born mid-war

Gold turned up on Grasshopper Creek in July 1862 and made Bannack. Alder Gulch followed in May 1863 and made Virginia City, which held around 10,000 people within a year. Last Chance Gulch in July 1864 made Helena. Congress carved Montana Territory out of Idaho on 26 May 1864, while the Civil War was still being fought a continent away.

The camps were thick with southern sympathizers, many of them Missourians who had left home to avoid conscription. The founders of Alder Gulch wanted to call their town Varina, after Jefferson Davis's wife. The Unionist judge asked to record the plat wrote Virginia instead, and the name stuck. No Civil War battle was fought in Montana, but the argument over who ran the camps was settled with rope. The Vigilance Committee hanged more than twenty men in 1863 and 1864, including Bannack's elected sheriff Henry Plummer on 10 January 1864. Their coded warning, 3-7-77, is still worn on the shoulder patch of the Montana Highway Patrol. The capital chased the money, moving to Virginia City in 1865 and to Helena in 1875, a choice confirmed by a savage 1894 referendum in which Helena beat Anaconda by fewer than 2,000 votes.

Little Bighorn, the Big Hole and Bear Paw

Treaty promises made in 1855 and 1868 fell apart as soon as miners wanted the ground. On 23 January 1870 cavalry under Major Eugene Baker attacked a Piegan camp on the Marias River, hitting the wrong band and killing roughly 173 people, most of them women, children and the sick. Six years later, on 25 and 26 June 1876, Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors camped along the Little Bighorn destroyed five companies of the Seventh Cavalry and killed George Armstrong Custer, the worst defeat the army suffered in the plains wars.

The following summer the Nez Perce, running from Idaho with the army behind them, were attacked before dawn in the Big Hole valley on 9 August 1877 and lost most of their remaining elders and children. They were cornered in the Bear Paw Mountains about forty miles short of the Canadian line, where Chief Joseph surrendered on 5 October. The northern bison herd was hunted out within six years, and by 1884 the animal that had fed the plains economy was commercially extinct.

Copper kings and the company that owned the papers

Butte began as a placer camp, turned to silver, and then found itself sitting on the largest known body of copper ore just as the world started wiring itself for electricity. Marcus Daly bought the Anaconda mine in 1881 expecting silver and hit copper instead. His feud with William A. Clark, and later with F. Augustus Heinze, dominated territorial and state politics for two decades. Clark's purchase of a United States Senate seat in 1899 was blatant enough that the Senate refused to seat him, and the scandal became a standard exhibit in the case for the Seventeenth Amendment and the direct election of senators.

Statehood arrived in the middle of the fight. Grover Cleveland signed the enabling act on 22 February 1889, and Montana entered as the 41st state on 8 November 1889, one of four admitted that autumn alongside North Dakota, South Dakota and Washington. The Anaconda Copper Mining Company went on to own most of the state's daily newspapers, a grip it did not release until it sold them in 1959.

Homestead bust, Fort Peck and the 1972 rewrite

The Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 doubled a claim to 320 acres, and railroad advertising filled the eastern plains with dryland farmers during a stretch of unusually wet years. Drought beginning in 1917 and collapsing wheat prices emptied them out again, and roughly half of those homesteaders were gone by 1925. Jeannette Rankin of Missoula, elected in 1916 before women could vote nationally, became the first woman seated in Congress and voted against entering both world wars, standing alone in 1941.

Fort Peck Dam, begun in 1933 on the Missouri, put more than 10,000 people to work and produced the photograph Margaret Bourke-White made for the cover of the first issue of Life on 23 November 1936. Minuteman missiles went on alert at Malmstrom Air Force Base in October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Berkeley Pit, an open cut that ate Butte neighbourhoods block by block after 1955, shut down in 1982 and filled with acidic water, and the Clark Fork cleanup below it is among the largest Superfund complexes in the country. In 1972 voters narrowly approved a new constitution written by 100 delegates, none of whom were sitting legislators. It guarantees a right to a clean and healthful environment and requires public schools to teach the history of the state's tribal nations. The Little Shell Chippewa, landless for more than a century, became Montana's eighth federally recognized tribe in December 2019.

Common questions about Montana history

History of the states that border Montana

More about Montana