MTMontana State Symbols

The bitterroot named a river, a valley and a mountain range in western Montana before the legislature ever made it the state flower in 1895. Lewisia rediviva is a low pink bloom that opens on dry, stony slopes in early summer, and its starchy root was a staple food and trade good for the Salish and Kootenai long before Meriwether Lewis collected a specimen in 1806. Choosing it recognised a plant Montanans had already organised their geography around.

Official state symbols

What is on the Montana state flag

Montana flies a deep blue field with the state seal in the centre and the word MONTANA in gold block capitals above it. The design started as a military banner. The 1st Montana Infantry carried a blue regimental flag bearing the state seal during service in the Philippines in 1898, and in 1905 the legislature adopted that banner, minus the regimental lettering, as the state flag. The state name was not part of it for another seventy-six years. Legislators added MONTANA in gold in 1981 because the seal alone was unreadable at a distance, and in 1985 they went further and wrote the typeface, Helvetica Bold, into the statute.

The seal, and why the motto is in Spanish

The seal predates statehood. Montana's first territorial legislature approved it in 1865, and the 1889 state constitution kept it unchanged. In the foreground sit a plow and a crossed miner's pick and shovel. Behind them the Great Falls of the Missouri River drop between cliffs and mountains, and a ribbon along the bottom carries the motto Oro y plata, Spanish for gold and silver.

The pick and shovel are literal. The seal was drawn three years after the 1862 gold strike at Grasshopper Creek near Bannack and two years after the far richer Alder Gulch rush that built Virginia City. The plow is the hedge: placer gold was already thinning, and the territory wanted a second economy on the record. Montana is one of very few states with a motto in Spanish, and the phrasing has never been officially explained, which is part of why it sticks.

Symbols that surprise people

• The state fossil is a dinosaur that raised its young. Maiasaura peeblesorum, adopted in 1985, is known from nest sites at Egg Mountain near Choteau, where fossilised nests, eggshell and juveniles gave the first strong evidence that dinosaurs cared for hatchlings.
• Two official gemstones. Montana named both the sapphire and the Montana agate in 1969. The sapphires from Yogo Gulch in Judith Basin County are cornflower blue without heat treatment, which is rare enough to be a jewellery-trade category of its own.
• An official grass. Bluebunch wheatgrass took the title in 1973. Very few states designate one.
• A state song and a separate state ballad. "Montana" has been the state song since 1945; "Montana Melody" was added as the state ballad in 1983.
• A threatened state animal. The grizzly bear became the state animal in 1983, eight years after the species was listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act.

Nearby state symbols

More about Montana