MTMontana Famous People

The first woman elected to the United States Congress came from Montana, and she arrived before most American women could vote for anyone. Jeannette Rankin, born on a ranch outside Missoula in 1880, won a Montana House seat in 1916. Montana women were already voters: the state had granted suffrage in 1914, and Rankin had organised the campaign that won it. She took her seat in April 1917 and voted against entering the First World War. Voters sent her back to the House in 1940, and that December she cast the only vote in either chamber against declaring war on Japan.

No Montanan has reached the White House

No president was born in Montana, and none grew up here. With four electoral votes and roughly a million residents, the state has never been a launching pad for a national ticket. Two men came closest. Burton K. Wheeler, a senator out of Butte, ran for vice president in 1924 on Robert La Follette's Progressive ticket, which carried only Wisconsin but took about a sixth of the national popular vote.

The other was Mike Mansfield, majority leader of the Senate from 1961 to 1977, longer than anyone before or since. Born in Brooklyn and sent to relatives in Great Falls after his mother died, he talked his way into the Navy at fourteen, served afterwards in the Army and the Marines, then spent eight years mining copper in Butte. He earned a degree at the University of Montana without ever finishing high school, taught history there, and closed his career as ambassador to Japan from 1977 to 1988.

Butte, copper, and a Senate seat that was bought

William A. Clark, one of the three Copper Kings, spent enough on the Montana legislature in 1899 to be sent to the US Senate, and a Senate committee concluded the election had been procured by bribery. He resigned in 1900 rather than face expulsion, and the case became a standing argument for electing senators directly, which the Seventeenth Amendment settled in 1913. His rival Marcus Daly, an Irish immigrant who came over with no schooling, built the Anaconda Copper Mining Company and the company town named after it. F. Augustus Heinze, the third of them, fought both in court by buying small claims and arguing that the ore veins under them ran wherever he said they ran.

Butte kept turning out outsized people after the copper thinned. Evel Knievel was born there in 1938 and worked underground before he started jumping motorcycles over things. Martha Raye, the comic singer who spent much of the Vietnam War performing close to the fighting, was born in Butte in 1916 while her vaudeville parents were passing through.

Faces the movies took out of Montana

Gary Cooper was born Frank James Cooper in Helena in 1901, son of a Montana Supreme Court justice, and won Best Actor for Sergeant York in 1941 and High Noon in 1952. Myrna Loy, born in Radersburg in 1905 to a rancher who served in the legislature, played Nora Charles across six Thin Man pictures. David Lynch was born in Missoula in January 1946, where his father worked as a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture, though the family moved on within months. Dana Carvey was born in Missoula in 1955 and Michelle Williams in Kalispell in 1980.

Writers, a painter, and the man who read the news

Charles M. Russell came from St. Louis in 1880 at sixteen, herded sheep badly, and spent eleven years as a night wrangler before paint made him a living. Waiting for a Chinook, a postcard-sized watercolour of a starving steer that he sent to a ranch owner during the killing winter of 1886, is the image most Montanans still recognise. Norman Maclean grew up in Missoula, taught for decades at the University of Chicago, and published A River Runs Through It in 1976, when he was in his seventies. Ivan Doig, born in White Sulphur Springs in 1939, wrote This House of Sky about the sheep country his father worked. Dorothy M. Johnson, raised in Whitefish, wrote the short stories behind The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and A Man Called Horse. Chet Huntley, born in Cardwell in 1911, anchored NBC's Huntley-Brinkley Report from 1956 to 1970 and came home to help build the Big Sky resort.

Plenty Coups and the Crow Nation

Plenty Coups, born in 1848 in the Crow country of south central Montana, was the last principal chief of the Crow. A boyhood vision had convinced him the buffalo would vanish and the newcomers would stay, so he pushed his people towards farming and schools and argued the case for fifty years. In 1921 he was chosen to represent all American Indians at the dedication of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington, where he laid down his war bonnet and coup stick. He left his house and land near Pryor to the public, and they are a state park today.

Sport, and the man who named a dinosaur

Phil Jackson was born in Deer Lodge in 1945 and won eleven NBA titles as a head coach, more than anyone else has managed. Dave McNally, born in Billings in 1942, won twenty games in four straight seasons for the Baltimore Orioles, then refused to sign for 1975 and joined Andy Messersmith in the grievance that broke baseball's reserve clause and produced free agency. Jack Horner, born in Shelby in 1946, excavated the nest sites near Choteau that showed dinosaurs cared for their young, named Maiasaura in 1979, and advised the Jurassic Park films.

Questions people ask about famous Montanans

Famous people from neighbouring states

More about Montana