Glacier National Park extends through Montana and across the border into Canada. Glacier National Park extends through Montana and across the border into Canada. Photograph by Glenn Ross Images, Getty ImagesGet facts and photos about the 41st state.
The first people came to the area that’s now Montana at least 12,600 years ago. Thousands of years later Native American tribes, including Crow, Cheyenne, Blackfeet, and Kalispel lived on the land. This land remained largely unexplored by outsiders until Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, accompanied by Native American guide Sacagawea, passed through the region in 1805 on their famous expedition through the American West. More than 50 years later, settlers found gold, and people quickly came to Montana in search of their own fortune. With its newly expanding population and mining value, the land was made a U.S. territory in 1864. In 1889 it became a state. But the Native American tribes living on the land felt that the settlers were encroaching on their way of life. In 1876 the Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes banded together to take back their land, defeating the U.S. Army at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. Despite this victory, the Native Americans were ultimately defeated, and settlers continued to build on the land. However many Native American tribes still live in Montana, including the Blackfeet, Crow, and Cheyenne. Montana’s name comes from the Spanish word montaña, roughly meaning “mountainous.” That’s because the state has so many mountains—at least 300 peaks over 9,600 feet tall! Gold and silver deposits were mined from the Montana mountains as early as the 1800s, earning the state its nickname, the Treasure State. Right: Montana state icons Montana is bordered by Canada in the north, North Dakota and South Dakota in the east, Wyoming and Idaho in the south, and Idaho in the west. The state is known for having two very different geographic regions. The Rocky Mountain region covers the western two-fifths of the state. It’s home to Glacier National Park, which contains 7,000-year-old glaciers. The region is also where you’ll find Granite Peak, the state’s highest point. The Great Plains region spreads across the eastern three-fifths of Montana. This grassy terrain is dotted with hills, river valleys, and grain fields. Here, you can see the Great Plains Badlands, a mostly barren area that has colorful and oddly shaped rock formations. Montana’s wildlife is very diverse. Its mountains are home to grizzly and black bears, bighorn sheep, gray wolves, and bison. Animals that live on the plains include pronghorn, coyotes, and badgers. Bald eagles, golden eagles, red-winged blackbirds, and mountain bluebirds soar throughout Montana’s skies. Check the ground for reptiles such as alligator lizards, skinks, and venomous vipers. Amphibians like chorus frogs, giant salamanders, and newts also call Montana home. Plant life changes dramatically as you cross from the mountains to the plains. The Rockies have forests of spruce, firs, and pines. The state’s flowers include Woods’ rose, twin flower, and a yellow daisy-like bloom called arnica. In the plains the majority of plants are grasses and shrubs such as plains pricklypear and rubber rabbitbrush. Montana’s top natural resources were once copper, gold, silver, and sapphires. People still mine for precious rocks and metals here—but now, the one of the state’s most valuable resources is petroleum. The state is also the world’s leading producer of talc, a mineral used in cosmetics. —Montana has its own version of oatmeal: Cream of the West, a roasted wheat cereal that local families have been eating since 1914. —Famous Montanans include actor Gary Cooper, motorcycle stuntman Evel Knievel, and Jeannette Rankin, the first woman ever elected to U.S. Congress. —Step into the past in Virginia City, a gold mining town that still looks like it did in the 1800s. You can see 19th-century plays, take a stagecoach tour, and even check out stores with one-hundred-year-old items on display! —The original entrance to Yellowstone National Park—the world’s first national park—is in Gardiner, Montana, and was erected in 1903. —Montana is the only state with river systems that empty into the Hudson Bay, Pacific Ocean, and the Gulf of Mexico. Montana They call Montana Big Sky Country. So that means there's lots of room to fly! MC Lark the western meadowlark shows Barry the bald eagle around the state, from Helena to Billings. Home to Glacier National Park and Little Bighorn battlefield, Montana has lots of amazing scenery and history to explore.
Capital: Helena Population: (2020) 1,084,225 Governor: Greg Gianforte (Republican) Date Of Admission: November 8, 1889 U.S. Senators: Steve Daines (Republican) Jon Tester (Democrat) Montana, constituent state of the United States of America. Only three states—Alaska, Texas, and California—have an area larger than Montana’s, and only two states—Alaska and Wyoming—have a lower population density. Montana borders the Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan to the north and the U.S. states of North Dakota and South Dakota to the east, Wyoming to the south, and Idaho to the west. Although its name is derived from the Spanish montaña (“mountain” or “mountainous region”), Montana has an average elevation of only 3,400 feet (1,040 metres), the lowest among the Mountain states. The Rocky Mountains sweep down from British Columbia, trending northwest-southeast into western Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. The eastern portion of the state, however, is a gently rolling landscape, with millions of grazing cattle and sheep, and with only scattered evidence of human habitation. It forms a part of the northern Great Plains, shared with Alberta, Saskatchewan, North and South Dakota, and northeastern Wyoming. Helena is the capital. The residents of Montana are relatively far from markets for their products, as well as from the country’s manufacturing and supply centres. The state is strongly oriented toward the outdoors and toward activities such as summer and winter sports, hunting, and fishing. Long-distance trips are frequent occasions for socializing and entertainment or cures for prairie- or mountain-born restlessness. In spite of its northern location, Montana is very much a Western state. The main street of Helena is Last Chance Gulch, the city’s original name and a reminder of the prospectors who invaded the surrounding hills in the 1860s to pan for gold. By 1889, when Montana became the 41st state of the union, the cattle drive was an institution, and the state had begun to emerge as one of the country’s leading copper-mining centres. Montana is called the Treasure State because of its immense mineral wealth. Area 147,040 square miles (380,832 square km). Population (2020) 1,084,225. The western two-fifths of Montana falls within the Rocky Mountains, and the eastern three-fifths lies upon the Great Plains. Rocky Mountain Montana is a land of high mountains, deep valleys, green forests, and treeless crest lines, whereas Great Plains Montana is a vast horizontal sweep of yellow rangeland, golden grain fields, and brown fallow strips. This contrast between mountain and plain is among the most powerful geographic features of the state. In Rocky Mountain Montana the mountain ranges are aligned generally from north-northwest to south-southeast. They are made up of ancient hard rocks that were compressed, folded, faulted, and otherwise contorted by the mountain-building forces that created the Rockies, beginning about 100 million years ago. During the last ice age, some 11,500 years ago, glaciers carved the mountain crest lines and high valleys from rounded, convex terrain into sharp, rugged, concave topography and, when they melted, left the loose earth material that they had gouged out of the mountains as glacial deposits in the valley bottoms. The glaciers in Montana today are very small compared with the great tongues of ice of the past. The bottoms of the valleys between the mountain ranges consist mainly of alluvial floodplains and terraces; of benchlands and foothills carved on young, soft rocks; and of plains, terraces, and foothills made up of glacial deposits. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Subscribe Now Granite Peak There is a contrast within Rocky Mountain Montana between mountains with narrow valleys and those with broad valleys. In the narrow-valley regions, which are the most rugged and spectacular of the state, the valley floors are humid and forested. There are two narrow-valley regions. One is northwestern Montana, which includes Glacier National Park with most of Montana’s glaciers. The other lies in south-central Montana at the northern end of Yellowstone National Park; this area contains the highest point in Montana, Granite Peak, which has an elevation of 12,799 feet (3,901 metres). These two narrow-valley regions are separated by a broad-valley area in west-central and southwestern Montana. There the valley bottoms are wide, dry, and grassy, permitting sweeping panoramic views of the mountain ranges. Most of Great Plains Montana is rather rough land. The country south of the Yellowstone River is mainly scattered hills. Surrounding a long segment of the Missouri River in the north-central part of the state are the Missouri River Breaks, which make up a scenic area of rugged uplands that is part of Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument. Genuine plains are found in the “Golden Triangle” north of Great Falls and plateaus elsewhere. Some of the hills, breaks, and valley bluffs form rugged badlands such as those seen at Makoshika State Park, near Glendive. The valleys of the major rivers flowing from the Rocky Mountains across eastern Montana are deeply incised. Scattered upon the plains and plateau surfaces are eight small mountain masses called Rocky Mountain outliers, which are like islands of the Rockies set out upon the plains. The rocks underlying Great Plains Montana, except for the mountain outliers, are young, soft, and more or less horizontal. Roughly north of the Missouri River the plains rocks are covered by glacial deposits left by the continental ice cap, which occupied the area at the same time that alpine glaciers were sculpting the mountains to the west. The bottoms of the incised valleys are made up of alluvial floodplains, terraces, and soft-rock benchlands. Montana is the only state in the union from which waters flow to Hudson Bay, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific Ocean. The northwestern section of the state lies west of the Continental Divide and is drained to the Columbia River—and thus ultimately to the Pacific—by the Kootenai River and by the Clark Fork and its major tributary, the Flathead River. The Flathead flows into and then out of Flathead Lake, the largest natural lake in the state. The Kootenai flows out of Montana at the lowest elevation in the state, 1,820 feet (555 metres) above sea level. East of the Continental Divide, Montana is drained by the Missouri River and its principal tributary, the Yellowstone. Rising in southwest Montana, where it is formed by the confluence of the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin rivers, the Missouri is a tributary of the Mississippi River, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico and thus is part of the Atlantic Ocean drainage system. A small portion of Montana on the eastern slope of Glacier National Park drains ultimately to Hudson Bay. |
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