99 Fun Facts About Montana

What is the capital of Montana?

Helena has been Montana's capital since 1875; the city grew from the Last Chance Gulch gold strike and kept the role at statehood.

Which is Montana's most populous city?

Billings counted about 117,000 residents at the 2020 census. It took its name in 1882 from Frederick Billings, a president of the Northern Pacific Railway, whose arrival spurred the town's growth.

Montana is the fourth-largest state by area, after Alaska, Texas and which other?

California ranks third; Montana's roughly 147,000 square miles make it fourth, yet only Alaska and Wyoming are more thinly populated.

What is Montana's official state motto, written in Spanish?

Oro y Plata, Spanish for gold and silver, honours the gold and silver mining boom that built the state and appears on the state seal.

Which nickname does Montana carry for its mineral wealth?

The Treasure State is Montana's best-known nickname, earned by the fortunes in minerals dug from its mountains; the Silver State is Nevada and the Gem State is Idaho.

Which Pacific coast state joined the Union three days after Montana in 1889?

Washington was admitted on November 11, 1889, three days after Montana; the same Enabling Act had already brought in North Dakota and South Dakota on November 2.

Which three Canadian provinces border Montana?

Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan all meet Montana along the 49th parallel; the state is wide enough that Alberta's entire border with the United States is with Montana alone.

Montana's state animal is which creature, of which the state has the largest population in the lower 48?

The grizzly bear became Montana's state animal in 1983 after a vote by schoolchildren; the Northern Continental Divide and Yellowstone ecosystems hold the most grizzlies in the lower 48.

What is Montana's state flower?

Bitterroot, a low pink-flowered plant Meriwether Lewis collected in 1806, became Montana's state flower in 1895; the Bitterroot Mountains and valley take its name.

Montana's state bird is which songbird?

The Western meadowlark, a yellow-breasted songbird with a black V on its chest, was chosen as Montana's state bird in 1931 by a vote of schoolchildren.

Montana's state fossil, Maiasaura, was named 'good mother lizard' after what discovery?

Nests of eggs and hatchlings found near Choteau in 1978 gave the first strong evidence that dinosaurs fed and raised their young rather than abandoning their eggs; Montana made Maiasaura its state fossil in 1985.

Which two gemstones are official symbols of Montana?

Sapphire and moss agate became Montana's state gemstones in 1969. Gold-rush miners at first ignored the blue pebbles in their pans, and years passed before anyone recognised them as sapphires.

Montana's state fish is which trout?

Cutthroat trout take their name from the red streaks beneath the lower jaw. Montana's 1977 law chose the native blackspotted cutthroat, the group that includes the westslope cutthroat of its mountain streams.

Montana's state tree is which pine?

Ponderosa pine won a 1908 poll of Montana schoolchildren, yet lawmakers did not make it the official state tree until 1949.

Montana's highest point, Granite Peak, lies in which mountain range?

The Beartooth Mountains, straddling the Wyoming line in south-central Montana, hold Granite Peak, which at 12,807 feet is the state's highest point.

Which lake is the largest natural freshwater lake in Montana?

Flathead Lake, left behind by Ice Age glaciers, covers up to about 197 square miles; Fort Peck Lake spreads wider, but it is a reservoir behind a dam rather than a natural lake.

The Missouri River is formed at Three Forks by the Jefferson, the Madison and which third river?

The Gallatin, named by Lewis and Clark for Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, joins the Jefferson and Madison to form the Missouri, which flows north to Great Falls before turning east.

What distinction does the Yellowstone River, which crosses Montana, hold in the lower 48?

The Yellowstone is the longest undammed river in the lower 48: nearly 700 miles from Wyoming across Montana with no storage dam on its main stem, only a few low irrigation weirs.

All Montana rivers west of the Continental Divide drain into which great river?

The Columbia receives them all; the Clark Fork, rising near Butte, crosses into Idaho and reaches the Columbia through Lake Pend Oreille.

Glacier National Park is paired with which Canadian park as the first International Peace Park?

Waterton Lakes joined Glacier in 1932 as the world's first International Peace Park, after Rotary clubs in Alberta and Montana passed a joint resolution urging both governments to link the two parks.

Which railway built Glacier National Park's Swiss-style hotels and chalets in the 1910s?

The Great Northern, whose main line skirts the park's southern edge, built the lodges on the Swiss chalet model to draw tourists onto its trains; most could be reached only on foot or horseback.

Glacier National Park is known by what nickname?

The Crown of the Continent was the phrase conservationist George Bird Grinnell used for these mountains in 1901; he then spent years lobbying until President Taft signed the park into being in 1910.

What is Montana's only telephone area code?

406 reaches every phone in Montana, so the number has become a badge of the state: Montanans mark April 6 as 406 Day, and businesses across the state carry it in their names.

Which president signed the act creating Yellowstone, the world's first national park, in 1872?

Ulysses S. Grant signed the Yellowstone Act on March 1, 1872; no park service existed to guard the place, so the US Army ran Yellowstone from 1886 until 1918.

Which nation joined the Lakota and Arapaho against Custer at the Little Bighorn?

The Cheyenne fought beside the Lakota and Arapaho, while Crow scouts rode with Custer. He split the 7th Cavalry into three battalions, and all five companies under his own command were wiped out.

The Lakota and other Plains peoples know the Little Bighorn fight by what name?

The Greasy Grass is the Lakota name for the Little Bighorn River, so the peoples who won there remember the 1876 fight as the Battle of the Greasy Grass.

Jeannette Rankin, the first woman in Congress, did what in both 1917 and 1941?

Rankin voted against declaring war both times: she was one of 50 House members opposing war with Germany in 1917, and in 1941 hers was the only vote against war with Japan, which passed 388 to 1.

Butte earned what nickname during its early-20th-century mining boom?

The Richest Hill on Earth paid a price for its riches: a 1917 underground fire at Butte killed 168 miners, the deadliest disaster in American hard-rock mining.

What were the industrialists who fought over Butte's mineral wealth, like William Clark and Marcus Daly, known as?

The Copper Kings were William A. Clark, Marcus Daly and F. Augustus Heinze; Daly's Anaconda company went on to dominate Montana politics for decades.

The upper Clark Fork River, rising at Butte, holds what unwanted national distinction?

Largest Superfund site in the US: a century of copper mining at Butte and smelting at Anaconda washed toxic metals down the upper Clark Fork.

Montana's first territorial capital, in 1864, was which gold camp?

Bannack, founded after the 1862 Grasshopper Creek gold strike, served as the first territorial capital for only a few months before the seat moved to a richer camp in 1865.

Which town sprang up beside the 1863 gold strike at Alder Gulch?

Virginia City was founded by Confederate sympathisers who first named it for Varina Davis, wife of the Confederate president; it served as Montana's territorial capital from 1865 to 1875.

Montana is one of only five states with no statewide what?

Sales tax is missing at state level in Montana, Alaska, Delaware, New Hampshire and Oregon; Montana instead lets small resort communities add a local resort tax on tourist spending.

Which 1855 agreement set the boundaries for the Salish, Pend d'Oreille and Kootenai in western Montana?

The Hellgate Treaty is named for its treaty ground at Hell Gate, the old name for the Missoula area, where Isaac Stevens met the three tribes in July 1855; the Senate took until 1859 to ratify it.

Which new weapon went on alert at Malmstrom Air Force Base near Great Falls in 1962?

The Minuteman I missile was first deployed in 1962, and Malmstrom's wing was the first to field it; solid fuel let it wait ready in its silo, where older liquid-fuelled rockets had to be fuelled before launch.

The University of Montana and Montana State University play in which athletic league?

The Big Sky Conference, formed in 1963, has both schools; their football rivalry dates to 1897, and the winner holds the Great Divide Trophy, so named because the Continental Divide runs between the two campuses.

Which nation's reservation borders Glacier National Park?

The Blackfeet reservation meets Glacier's eastern edge, and the park's eastern mountains were Blackfeet land until the nation, under pressure, ceded them to the federal government in the 1890s.

Most of Montana came under American control through which deal?

The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 covered Montana east of the Continental Divide; the western third came with the Oregon Country, settled by treaty with Britain in 1846.

Going-to-the-Sun Road crosses the Continental Divide in Glacier National Park at which pass?

Logan Pass is the summit of the 50-mile Going-to-the-Sun Road, where snow lies so deep that plough crews usually cannot open the alpine stretch until early summer.

Which 1992 Robert Redford film follows two fly-fishing brothers growing up in Missoula?

A River Runs Through It is set on the Blackfoot River near Missoula, yet Redford shot it around Livingston in south-central Montana, with other trout rivers standing in for the real one.

The Hell Creek Formation in northeast Montana is famous for what?

Dinosaur fossils: in 1902 Barnum Brown dug from Hell Creek the skeleton that Tyrannosaurus rex was named from; the bones left Montana and now stand in Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum.

Which Montana senator was the longest-serving Senate majority leader in US history?

Mike Mansfield led the Senate Democrats as majority leader from 1961 to 1977, a record 16 years, before serving as ambassador to Japan under Carter and Reagan.

Which painter, nicknamed 'the cowboy artist', has a museum complex devoted to him in Great Falls?

Charles Marion Russell left school at sixteen for Montana and worked the range as a cowboy before he sold paintings; the Great Falls museum preserves the log cabin studio he built in 1903.

Bozeman's arts festival, revived in 1977 from a carnival of the early 1900s, is named for which plant?

Sweet pea blossoms were the emblem of the carnival of 1906 to 1916, though the valley's real business was edible peas grown for canning and seed; the name returned in 1977 with today's arts festival.

A photograph of Montana's Fort Peck Dam filled the first cover of which magazine in 1936?

Life launched on November 23, 1936, with Margaret Bourke-White's photograph of Fort Peck Dam on its cover; her story inside also showed the raw boomtowns that sprang up to house the dam's workers.

Which motorcycle daredevil grew up in Butte, Montana?

Evel Knievel once popped a wheelie in an earthmover, hit Butte's main power line and blacked out the city; in 1974 he tried and failed to rocket across Idaho's Snake River Canyon.

Which airport became Montana's busiest in 2013?

Bozeman Yellowstone International sits in the neighbouring town of Belgrade; it added the park to its name in 2011 and two years later passed the airport of the state's largest city in passengers.

Which leader surrendered in Montana's Bear Paw Mountains in 1877, forty miles short of safety in Canada?

Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce had fought their way across Idaho and Montana toward Canada before the Army trapped them at Bear Paw; the surrender speech credited to him ends 'I will fight no more forever'.

From Triple Divide Peak in Glacier National Park, water flows to the Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico and which third destination?

Hudson Bay takes the water that runs north off the peak and across the Canadian prairies, so rain falling on one Montana summit can end up in three different seas.

Rogers Pass on Montana's Continental Divide set which lasting record for the lower 48 states in January 1954?

Lowest temperature for the contiguous states: −70 °F, a reading beaten elsewhere only in Alaska and a few places abroad, such as Greenland, Russia and Antarctica.

Fort Keogh in Montana claims a Guinness World Record from January 1887 for a 15-inch-wide example of what?

Snowflake clusters normally top out at three or four inches across, which is why the 15-inch monsters reported near Miles City have never been matched.

For a few years in the late 1990s, Montana's rural highways famously had no numeric daytime limit on what?

Vehicle speed merely had to be reasonable and prudent until December 1998, when the Montana Supreme Court ruled that standard too vague; a 75 mph limit followed in 1999.

A giant statue of which animal, perched on an iceberg, welcomes drivers to the town of Cut Bank, Montana?

Penguin statues come no bigger, by the town's own boast, and the iceberg is earned: Arctic air masses often make Cut Bank the chilliest place in the lower 48.

The Sip 'n Dip Lounge, a tiki bar in Great Falls, Montana, is famous for swimmers dressed as what?

Mermaids have swum past a window behind the bar since New Year's Eve 1995, and Splash star Daryl Hannah once pulled on a tail and joined them.

Which fugitive bomber did FBI agents arrest in April 1996 at a remote cabin outside Lincoln, Montana?

Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, had lived there without electricity or running water since 1971, and was caught after his own brother recognised his prose style.

Which coach, winner of eleven NBA titles with the Bulls and Lakers, was born in Deer Lodge, Montana?

Phil Jackson was the son of two Assemblies of God ministers and went to high school across the state line in Williston, North Dakota, where he won a state title.

The opening aerial shots of which 1980 horror film follow a car through Montana's Glacier National Park?

The Shining opens over Saint Mary Lake and its lone island, the camera trailing a Volkswagen Beetle up Going-to-the-Sun Road.

Shep, the Montana herding dog honored with a bronze statue in Fort Benton, became famous in the 1930s for what?

Meeting every arriving train was Shep's way of waiting for his dead master, whose casket he had watched leave by rail; the vigil lasted five and a half years.

Montana's 201-foot Roe River was listed by Guinness in 1989 as the world's shortest after a campaign by whom?

A fifth-grade class in Great Falls did it, first petitioning to give the unnamed stream an official name, then seeing off Oregon's D River, the previous record holder.

Which star of High Noon, a two-time Best Actor Oscar winner, was born in Montana's capital city in 1901?

Gary Cooper's father bought the Seven-Bar-Nine cattle ranch in 1906, yet his mother wanted him schooled in her homeland and enrolled him at a grammar school in Dunstable, England.

Pompeys Pillar, a rock outcrop on Montana's Yellowstone River, was named in 1806 for the young son of whom?

Sacagawea carried her son Jean Baptiste, nicknamed Pompey, on the expedition; the captain's signature carved into the rock is the only physical trace left along its route.

Which hand-held meat pie did immigrant miners turn into a signature food of Butte, Montana?

Pasty recipes came with Cornish miners, who needed a lunch that was easy to eat underground; Butte also kept the Slavic nut bread povitica.

Quake Lake on Montana's Madison River formed in 1959 when an earthquake sent what crashing into the canyon?

A landslide of some 80 million tons dammed the river after the strongest earthquake in Montana's recorded history, which killed 28 people.

In 1908 Congress first bought land purely to protect wildlife, creating a western Montana refuge for which animal?

Bison numbering just thirty-four made up the first herd, bought by the American Bison Society in 1909; the range went back to tribal management in 2022.

Which warm wind, nicknamed the snow eater, lifted Loma, Montana, from −54 °F to 49 °F within a day in 1972?

Chinook winds warm and dry out as they sink down the eastern side of the Rockies; Loma's 103-degree jump is the greatest 24-hour swing on record anywhere.

Which director of Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive was born in Missoula, Montana, in 1946?

David Lynch left at two months old because the USDA kept reassigning his research-scientist father, yet he liked to describe himself as an Eagle Scout from Missoula.

Yellowstone National Park spills into Montana and Idaho, but about 96 percent of it lies in which state?

Wyoming has nearly all of the park; Montana's share is about three percent and Idaho's one, although the park was at first served mainly through its north entrance.

Which airborne wildfire crews, who first dropped onto a blaze in 1940, have long had a base in Missoula, Montana?

Smokejumpers made those first fire jumps into Idaho's Nez Perce National Forest; their Ninemile camp operation later moved to Missoula and became the base there.

Which novelist professed his love for Montana while crossing America with his poodle in a camper truck in 1960?

John Steinbeck named the truck Rocinante, after Don Quixote's horse, and wrote that Montana seemed free of the country's frantic bustle.

Which president laid the cornerstone of the stone arch at Yellowstone's north entrance in Gardiner, Montana, in 1903?

Theodore Roosevelt happened to be visiting the park during construction, and the stone he set covers a time capsule holding a Bible, his portrait and local newspapers.

In the film Star Trek: First Contact, humans first encounter which alien species at a launch site in Montana?

Vulcans land after detecting Zefram Cochrane's first warp flight; the production built a village of fourteen huts to stand in for mid-21st-century Montana.

A garden near Arlee, Montana, arranges one thousand statues of which figure along the eight spokes of a giant wheel?

Buddha statues, 125 to a spoke, stand for the thousand enlightened beings of Buddhist texts; a Tibetan master of the Nyingma school founded the garden.

A glacier in the mountains of southern Montana is named for millions of which insects entombed in its ice?

Grasshoppers by the tens of millions lie in the ice, among them Rocky Mountain locusts, a species that once swarmed in the trillions and is extinct.

Visitors to old mines around Boulder, Montana, sit underground for hours breathing which gas as an arthritis remedy?

Radon exposure there is sold on the strength of testimonials alone; similar inhalation therapy is offered at spas in Austria, Poland and Romania.

Which white-coated climber of cliffs and ledges is the official symbol of Montana's Glacier National Park?

Mountain goat is a misleading name, since the animal is not a true goat at all but a relative of the chamois and other goat-antelopes.

Which Saturday Night Live comedian, who played Garth in Wayne's World, was born in Missoula, Montana?

Dana Carvey loosely based Garth on his own brother Brad, and was the fourth of five children of two schoolteachers.

The yearly football game between the University of Montana and Montana State has been billed since 1997 as what?

Brawl of the Wild winners take home the Great Divide Trophy, so named because the two campuses sit on opposite sides of the Continental Divide.

In Frank Zappa's 1973 song Montana, the narrator plans to move to the state and get rich farming what?

Dental floss is the crop he means to harvest on horseback, and the track's backing vocals came from Tina Turner and the Ikettes.

Which actor played rancher John Dutton, owner of Montana's biggest cattle ranch, in the TV drama Yellowstone?

Kevin Costner's log mansion on screen is the main house of a real guest ranch just south of Darby, Montana, where filming began in 2017.

About a quarter of residents in Butte, Montana, claim ancestry from which country, the homeland of many early miners?

Ireland supplied so many miners that about a quarter of residents claim Irish descent, a higher share than Boston's, and one old neighbourhood was called Corktown.

Makoshika, the largest of Montana's state parks, protects which kind of landscape on the edge of Glendive?

Badlands is what the name itself means, from a Lakota phrase for bad land; Glendive's Chamber of Commerce pitched the site as a national park in 1938.

Which Ubisoft video game pits a rookie deputy against a doomsday cult in fictional Hope County, Montana?

Far Cry 5 casts Greg Bryk as a preacher who styles himself the Father and rules the county through three lieutenants called Heralds.

The 585-foot smelter stack at Anaconda, Montana, is the world's tallest surviving structure made of which material?

Brick, and plenty of it: about 2.46 million oversized blocks went into the 1918 chimney, which outlived its smelter and became a state park in 1986.

In November 2016, tens of thousands of which migrating birds landed on the toxic Berkeley Pit lake at Butte, Montana?

Snow geese by the tens of thousands were driven down by bad weather; propane cannons and wailing noise machines ring the flooded mine to keep birds from landing.

Boulders in a rock pile between Butte and Whitehall, Montana, are known for doing what when tapped with a hammer?

Ringing like bells is their trick, and the boulder pile sits above the deep vent of a volcano that erupted 76 million years ago.

Which country star worked at a Montana smelter and pitched for its semi-pro ball team before finding fame?

Charley Pride pitched for a team called the Smelterites; the lead smelter kept 18 jobs open for ballplayers and arranged shifts so they could play together.

Montana's first state park, named for Lewis and Clark though they never saw it, protects what kind of natural wonder?

Limestone caves in the park overlook more than 50 miles of the explorers' route along the Jefferson River, which earned the name; the state took over in 1938.

Miles City, Montana, draws rodeo contractors every May to a celebrated auction of which animals?

Bucking horses have been sold there officially since 1951, amid a parade and horse races; some lots are spoiled riding horses with a talent for throwing riders.

Which paleontologist raised in Shelby, Montana, served as technical adviser on the first five Jurassic Park films?

Jack Horner flunked out of the University of Montana seven times, hampered by dyslexia that went undiagnosed until 1976, and never completed a degree.

Which mountain man, captured and stripped naked near Montana's Three Forks, escaped by outrunning his pursuers?

John Colter ran for miles until his nose bled, hid from his pursuers, then walked for days to a trading fort; the ordeal inspired the 1965 film The Naked Prey.

Which cryptic number, a warning sign of Montana's frontier vigilantes, appears on Montana Highway Patrol patches?

3-7-77 has never been decoded for certain; one theory reads it as the dimensions of a grave, three feet by seven feet by 77 inches.

Which American-Canadian commando unit of World War II trained in the mountains outside Montana's capital from 1942?

Devil's Brigade recruits reached camp in rail cars with blacked-out windows, so secret was the unit, and were parachuting within 48 hours.

Drivers of the vintage red tour buses in Montana's Glacier National Park have long been known by which nickname?

Jammers got the name from the noise of unsynchronized gearboxes on steep park roads; the buses, in service since 1936, are painted to match ripe mountain ash berries.

Besides an official song and an official ballad, Montana law names which third kind of official tune?

Lullaby honours went to a song co-written by Wylie Gustafson, the Montana cowboy singer who created the yodel used in Yahoo! advertising.

Which 1949 Montana wildfire, which killed 13 firefighters, did Norman Maclean investigate in Young Men and Fire?

Mann Gulch foreman Wagner Dodge survived by lighting an escape fire and lying face down in its ashes while the main blaze swept around him.

The Chinese Wall, a 22-mile escarpment averaging 1,000 feet high, is the showpiece of which Montana wilderness?

The Bob Marshall honours a forester who co-founded The Wilderness Society and pushed in the 1930s to keep vast tracts of national forest roadless.

A 2018 newspaper analysis of Oxford University data named which Montana town the middle of nowhere for the lower 48?

Glasgow owes even its name to chance: a railroad worker spun a globe and his finger landed on the Scottish city.

Which scientist born on a farm near Miles City, Montana, developed more than 40 vaccines, including one for mumps?

Maurice Hilleman made the mumps vaccine from virus he collected from his own daughter Jeryl Lynn when she fell ill in 1963, and the strain named for her went into the MMR shot.

Which president proclaimed Montana the 41st state of the Union on 8 November 1889?

Benjamin Harrison oversaw more admissions than any other president; the pending statehood bills had been a plank of the convention that nominated him.