This Montana trivia quiz has 50 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 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital of Montana?
Helena
It has been the capital since 1875, after two earlier mining towns.
Q 02Which is Montana's most populous city?
Billings
It is the only Montana city with more than 100,000 people; Missoula, Great Falls and Bozeman top 50,000.
Q 03Montana is the fourth-largest state by area, after Alaska, Texas and which other?
California
It is slightly bigger than Japan or Germany, and the largest landlocked state.
Q 04Montana's official state motto is in Spanish. What is it?
Oro y Plata
It means gold and silver, a nod to the mining boom that built the state.
Q 05Which of these is NOT one of Montana's nicknames?
The Silver State
Montana has no official nickname; The Silver State belongs to Nevada.
Q 06Montana became a state on November 8 of which year?
1889
Grover Cleveland signed an omnibus bill admitting Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Washington together.
Q 07Which three Canadian provinces border Montana?
Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan
Its US neighbours are Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming.
Q 08Montana's state animal is which creature, of which the state has the largest population in the lower 48?
The grizzly bear
Montana counts 117 mammal species in all, and five federally endangered ones including the black-footed ferret.
Q 09What is Montana's state flower?
Bitterroot
The Bitterroot Mountains, one of the longest continuous ranges in the Rockies, share the name and divide Montana from Idaho.
Q 10Montana's state bird is which songbird?
Western meadowlark
The state also has an official butterfly, the mourning cloak, and an official grass, bluebunch wheatgrass.
Q 11Montana is one of the few states with an official state fossil. What is it?
A duck-billed dinosaur, Maiasaura
The Hell Creek Formation in the northeast is a major dinosaur source, made famous by palaeontologist Jack Horner of the Museum of the Rockies.
Q 12Which two gemstones are official symbols of Montana?
Sapphire and moss agate
Montana's official soil, if you were wondering, is called Scobey.
Q 13Montana's state fish is which trout?
Westslope cutthroat
The state has drawn fly fishers since the 1930s and is home to the Federation of Fly Fishers.
Q 21Glacier National Park is paired with which Canadian park as the first International Peace Park?
Waterton Lakes
Together they became a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 1976 and a World Heritage Site in 1995.
Q 22Which railway built Glacier National Park's Swiss-style hotels and chalets in the 1910s?
The Great Northern
Louis Hill's company wanted to sell the park as America's Switzerland; its transcontinental line is known as the Hi-Line.
Q 23Glacier National Park is known by what nickname?
The Crown of the Continent
The park has more than 130 named lakes and over 1,000 plant species.
Q 14Montana's state tree is which pine?
Ponderosa
Forests cover about a quarter of the state.
Q 15Montana's highest point, Granite Peak, lies in which mountain range?
The Beartooth Mountains
The Beartooths, in the south-central part of the state, are technically part of the Central Rockies.
Q 16Water flowing off Triple Divide Peak in Glacier National Park can reach how many oceans?
Three
Its rivers feed the Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico and Hudson Bay, which counts if you treat Hudson Bay as part of the Arctic.
Q 17Which body of water in Montana is the largest natural freshwater one in the western United States?
Flathead
Fort Peck is the state's largest reservoir, held back by the second-largest earthen dam in the country.
Q 18The Missouri River is formed at Three Forks by the Jefferson, the Madison and which third river?
The Gallatin
From there it flows north to Great Falls before turning east across the plains to Fort Peck.
Q 19What distinction does the Yellowstone River, which crosses Montana, hold in the lower 48?
Longest undammed river
It rises in Wyoming, enters Montana at Gardiner and joins the Missouri just over the North Dakota line.
Q 20All Montana rivers west of the Continental Divide drain into which great river?
The Columbia
The Clark Fork rises near Butte and picks up the Blackfoot, Bitterroot and Flathead on its way to Idaho.
Q 24How many of Yellowstone National Park's five entrances are in Montana?
Three
The park itself lies mainly in Wyoming, with slivers in Montana and Idaho.
Q 25Which president signed the act creating Yellowstone, the world's first national park, in 1872?
Ulysses S. Grant
Yellowstone Lake sits on top of the largest supervolcano caldera on the continent.
Q 26Custer's Last Stand at the Little Bighorn was fought in Montana in which year?
1876
The Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho, inspired by Sitting Bull's visions and led by Crazy Horse and Gall, wiped out five companies of the 7th Cavalry.
Q 27The Lakota and other Plains peoples know the Little Bighorn fight by what name?
The Greasy Grass
US losses were 268 dead; Custer died along with two brothers, a nephew and a brother-in-law.
Q 28Jeannette Rankin, the first woman in Congress, did what in both 1917 and 1941?
Voted against declaring war
In 1941 hers was the only vote against war with Japan, and she needed police protection afterwards.
Q 29Butte earned what nickname during its early-20th-century copper boom?
The Richest Hill on Earth
In 1910 alone it was North America's biggest copper producer; its labour militancy also earned it the title Gibraltar of Unionism.
Q 30What were the industrialists who fought over Butte's mineral wealth, like William Clark and Marcus Daly, known as?
Copper Kings
Daly's Anaconda Copper Mining Company went on to dominate Montana politics for decades.