Montana: A Bicentennial History

At three times the size of Pennsylvania, with a county bigger than the whole state of Connecticut, Montana is a large place, once described as "bounded on the west by the Japan current, on the north by the Aurora Borealis, on the south by Price's Army, and on the east by the Day of Judgement." Montana is also a rich place, in which different people have sought both great fortune and modest prosperity. How well they succeeded is part of the story told in this engaging history.

Scouting the Louisiana Purchase for Thomas Jefferson, explorers Lewis and Clark left here a wealth of place names, - Milk River, Judith Basin, Pompey's Pillar - and they brought back reports of a vast natural empire. The trappers stayed longer, serching for wealth in fur, something that did not last; but in its place, other frontiers beckoned.

Montana's cache of metal - gold, silver, and copper - proved to be among the stat'es greatest resources and one that would have the most turbulent history, as the war of the Copper Kings demonstrated. Where there were no metals or minerals, there frequently was grass, key to the range cattle industry that developed in the late nineteenth centry.

Bringing another era to Montana, waves of plowmen who left the prairie sod "wrong side up" homesteaded in the endless open spaces east of the Rockies and, with their families, slowly mastered the high plains for agriculture. Through it all, the Indians watched sadly, themselves destined to lose much and to learn that change for them usually meant problems - and promises unkept. 

Today, other Montanans too have begun to wonder about their old role as producers of raw materials for the rest of America. Reluctant to see the state become "a boiler room for the nation," they are seeking new answers to the urgent questions of how best to make Montana yield prosperity for all its citizens and how to preserve for future Montanas the natural grandeur their ancestors could take for granted. 

By Clark C. Spence. Softcover, 240 pages.