About Montana

Montana is the fourth-largest state in the United States and one of the least densely populated, a place where you can drive for hours without seeing another car, where the horizon stretches unobstructed in every direction, and where grizzly bears, wolves, and mountain lions still roam wild in numbers that would have been unimaginable in most of the lower 48. 'Big Sky Country' is not a marketing invention; it is a physical fact. The scale of the Montana landscape is simply different from what most Americans experience.

Montana's history is as layered as its landscape. It was a land of many Indigenous nations, Blackfeet, Crow, Assiniboine, Cheyenne, Salish, Kootenai, and others , before Lewis and Clark passed through in 1805. Gold miners arrived in 1862 and built boomtowns overnight. Copper turned Butte into one of the most industrial cities in the American West. The Battle of the Little Bighorn , Custer's Last Stand, happened on Montana soil. Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress, was from Missoula.

Montana today is undergoing the most rapid demographic and economic transformation in its history. The pandemic-era influx of remote workers and wealthy migrants, particularly from California, has driven housing costs to levels that are pricing out longtime residents, changing the character of communities that had been working-class ranch and mining towns for generations. The tension between the old Montana and the new is the defining story of the state in the 2020s.