- Largest city we cover
- Billings
- Cities we cover
- 2
- Median age
- 41.3 years
- State income tax
- Up to 5.7%
Louisiana Purchase land and the Little Bighorn
The United States took most of the area from France in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the rest by an 1846 treaty with Great Britain. The territory drawn in 1864 already had roughly the borders the state keeps today.
On June 25 and 26, 1876, Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors fought the 7th Cavalry under Lt. Col. George Custer at the Little Bighorn. An Indian Memorial dedicated at the battlefield in 2003 honors all the tribes that took part.
Copper under Butte, smelters at Anaconda
Butte began as a mining camp after silver was found in 1872, but copper made its name. In the early 1900s the Butte and Anaconda district supplied nearly one third of the world's copper. Anaconda itself was laid out in 1883 as a company-owned town beside a smelter. The Anaconda Mining Company was sold to ARCO in 1977, and ARCO closed the Butte mines and the Anaconda smelter in the 1980s. The district is now a National Historic Landmark.
At Deer Lodge, the Grant-Kohrs Ranch was once headquarters of a cattle empire of 10 million acres; fur trader Johnny Grant built the front of its house in 1862.
Eighty glaciers in 1850, twenty-six in 2015
Around 1850, at the close of the Little Ice Age, about 80 glaciers lay in what became Glacier National Park. Aerial imagery from 2015 counted 26 named glaciers still large enough to qualify. Yellowstone, which became the first national park on March 1, 1872, reaches into Montana from Wyoming.
Light precipitation, heavy Great Falls snow
Between 1991 and 2020, Helena, Missoula, Billings and Great Falls each recorded only about 11 to 15 inches of precipitation a year. Annual snowfall averaged 66.1 inches at Great Falls, 57.4 at Billings, 43.0 at Missoula and 37.2 at Helena.
Sources: US Census Bureau; National Park Service; NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information.