Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Custer's infamous “last stand” at the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, where the 7th Cav-
alry fought several thousand Lakota and Cheyenne warriors and suffered heavy losses.
In 1877, the Nez Perce fled Oregon hoping to settle in Canada. Under the leadership
of Chief Joseph, the tribe traveled across Idaho and into Montana, where they engaged
with U.S. soldiers near the Big Hole River, a battle that left nearly 90 Indians dead. The
Nez Perce continued to flee, passing through Yellowstone National Park and north toward
Canada, only to be captured near Chinook just 40 miles from the Canadian border. Even
though they were originally from the Pacific Northwest, they were sent to reservations in
Oklahoma.
As gold and other minerals were being plundered, the railroad came to Montana when
the Union Pacific built a line from Utah to Butte in 1881. The Northern Pacific linked Ch-
icago with Portland by 1883, opening up Montana's fortunes to the rest of the world. The
Great Northern linked Minneapolis to Seattle in 1893, while the Milwaukee Road route
across the center part of the state was completed in 1909.
Mining, Agriculture, and the Montana Economy
Fueled by investors from all over the country, the large deposits of gold, copper, and other
minerals quickly created vast wealth in Montana. Butte became known as the “richest hill
on earth,” and its three copper kings—Marcus Daly, William Clark, and Augustus Hein-
ze—were among the richest men in the world. The competition between these men to con-
trol Butte's copper mines is worth a book on its own—several have been written—and
sounds like something out of a Hollywood movie. Each tried to buy courts, newspapers,
politicians, banks, law enforcement, and anything and anyone that could help them or dam-
age their opponents. In 1899, Daly teamed up with Standard Oil to create a behemoth min-
ing company, which soon bought out Heinze's and Clark's interests and became the An-
aconda Copper Mining Company. Named after the smelter town to the northwest, the com-
pany would dominate Butte for most of the 20th century.
Copper production in Butte peaked in 1917 and then started to decline, leaving the city
in shambles as Anaconda began to shift jobs to places with cheaper labor like Asia and
South America. The riches of Butte, once the envy of the West, were leaving town just as
fast as the mine workers. Anaconda stopped mining the massive Berkeley pit in 1982, and
it has since become one of the largest contaminated waste sites in the country.
As the mining industry gained and then lost ground, cattle and sheep ranches continued
to take advantage of Montana's abundant grasslands. The passage of the Enlarged
Homestead Act in 1909 brought thousands of homesteaders into the state looking for inex-
