State of Montana USA
Destination Travel Guides & Hotel Reservations
MONTANA is Big Sky country. The nickname is no empty cliché: the entire state is
blessed with a huge blue roof that both dwarfs the beautiful countryside and complements
it perfectly. A magnificent northernmost cap for the US Rockies, this is a region of
snowcapped summits, turbulent rivers, spectacular glacial valleys, heavily wooded forests
and sparkling blue lakes, at their most dramatic in Glacier National Park . By
contrast, the eastern two-thirds is high prairie: sun-parched in summer and wracked
by icy blizzards each winter.
Preconceptions of a desolate land populated by cowpokes are soon shattered: each of
Montana's small cities has its own proud identity. The university and sawmill community of
Missoula , for example, possesses a high-culture feel absent from the heavily
Irish, copper-mining town and union stronghold of Butte , while elegant state
capital Helena still harks back to its prosperous gold mining years, and Bozeman
, just to the south, is one of the hippest mountain towns in the US.
The fur trappers and gold miners who were the first whites to brave this inhospitable
terrain soon moved on, but as white settlers invaded Native American hunting grounds,
conflict was inevitable. A key plank of army strategy was to starve the Native Americans
into submission: "For the sake of a lasting peace let them [professional hunters]
kill, skin and sell until the buffalo are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered
by the speckled cow and the festive cowboy," declared General Philip Sheridan. By the
late 1870s the buffalo were almost gone, and most of Montana had been cleared for
settlement.
The speckled cow and festive cowboy were not in for an easy time. The horrendous winter
of 1886 wiped out many herds, and the "sodbusters" who planted wheat in the wake
of bankrupt ranchers often fared little better. Plagues of grasshoppers, droughts, falling
wheat prices and erosion of the topsoil caused farms to fail everywhere in the 1920s,
during which time Montana was the only state to record a population decline.
Wheat has since made a revival, and now, with lumbering and coal mining, forms the base
of Montana's economy. Tourism is currently the state's second biggest earner, though,
apart from skiing, the harsh climate generally restricts the season to the months between
June and September
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