Montana Trivia
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6correct to beat the crowd
This Montana trivia quiz has 99 free questions with answers and covers the whole state: the capital and biggest city, the Spanish motto and the state animal, flower, bird, fish, tree, fossil and gemstones; Glacier National Park and the Montana entrances to Yellowstone; Triple Divide Peak, Flathead Lake, the headwaters of the Missouri and the free-flowing Yellowstone; the gold camps at Bannack and Virginia City, the Copper Kings of Butte, Custer at the Little Bighorn, Jeannette Rankin's lonely votes against war, and the missiles at Malmstrom. Questions run from easy ones any Montanan should get to details for people who have driven the Hi-Line, so it works for a classroom, a bar in Missoula or a family that just visited Glacier. Difficulty is marked on every question. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on Montana, its symbols, its parks and its history, and each question shows its citation.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital of Montana?
Helena
Helena has been Montana's capital since 1875; the city grew from the Last Chance Gulch gold strike and kept the role at statehood.
Q 02Which is Montana's most populous city?
Billings
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.
Q 03Montana is the fourth-largest state by area, after Alaska, Texas and which other?
California
California ranks third; Montana's roughly 147,000 square miles make it fourth, yet only Alaska and Wyoming are more thinly populated.
Q 04What is Montana's official state motto, written in Spanish?
Oro y Plata
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.
Q 05Which nickname does Montana carry for its mineral wealth?
The Treasure State
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.
Q 06Which Pacific coast state joined the Union three days after Montana in 1889?
Washington
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.
Q 07Which three Canadian provinces border Montana?
Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan
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.
Q 08Montana's state animal is which creature, of which the state has the largest population in the lower 48?
The grizzly bear
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.
Q 09What is Montana's state flower?
Bitterroot
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.
Q 10Montana's state bird is which songbird?
Western meadowlark
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.
Q 11Montana's state fossil, Maiasaura, was named 'good mother lizard' after what discovery?
Nests of eggs and hatchlings
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.
Q 12Which two gemstones are official symbols of Montana?
Sapphire and moss agate
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.
Q 13Montana's state fish is which trout?
Q 21Which railway built Glacier National Park's Swiss-style hotels and chalets in the 1910s?
The Great Northern
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.
Q 22Glacier National Park is known by what nickname?
The Crown of the Continent
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.
Q 23What is Montana's only telephone area code?
406
Cutthroat 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.
Q 14Montana's state tree is which pine?
Ponderosa
Ponderosa pine won a 1908 poll of Montana schoolchildren, yet lawmakers did not make it the official state tree until 1949.
Q 15Montana's highest point, Granite Peak, lies in which mountain range?
The Beartooth Mountains
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.
Q 16Which lake is the largest natural freshwater lake in Montana?
Flathead
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.
Q 17The Missouri River is formed at Three Forks by the Jefferson, the Madison and which third river?
The Gallatin
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.
Q 18What distinction does the Yellowstone River, which crosses Montana, hold in the lower 48?
Longest undammed river
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.
Q 19All Montana rivers west of the Continental Divide drain into which great river?
The Columbia
The Columbia receives them all; the Clark Fork, rising near Butte, crosses into Idaho and reaches the Columbia through Lake Pend Oreille.
Q 20Glacier National Park is paired with which Canadian park as the first International Peace Park?
Waterton Lakes
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.
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.
Q 24Which president signed the act creating Yellowstone, the world's first national park, in 1872?
Ulysses S. Grant
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.
Q 25Which nation joined the Lakota and Arapaho against Custer at the Little Bighorn?
The Cheyenne
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.
Q 26The Lakota and other Plains peoples know the Little Bighorn fight by what name?
The Greasy Grass
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.
Q 27Jeannette Rankin, the first woman in Congress, did what in both 1917 and 1941?
Voted against declaring war
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.
Q 28Butte earned what nickname during its early-20th-century mining boom?
The Richest Hill on Earth
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.
Q 29What were the industrialists who fought over Butte's mineral wealth, like William Clark and Marcus Daly, known as?
Copper Kings
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.
Q 30The upper Clark Fork River, rising at Butte, holds what unwanted national distinction?
Largest Superfund site in the US
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.