Big Timber: Wool Capital of the West

Big Timber, Montana, sits at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Boulder Rivers beneath the Crazy Mountains, and it got its name from the enormous cottonwood trees that once lined both banks, trees tall enough to give a settler's wagon train something to navigate by in the open grassland.

The first permanent settlement here, called Dornix, clustered around a sawmill in the eighteen seventies. When the Northern Pacific Railroad came through in eighteen eighty-three, a station went in, and the little community moved to higher ground and rechristened itself Big Timber. The railroad changed everything. Suddenly the Yellowstone Valley had an outlet to eastern markets, and ranchers who had been running cattle and sheep across the Sweet Grass Hills had a reason to drive their animals to a shipping point instead of a remote outpost.

The sheep changed Big Timber's identity. In eighteen eighty-one, Irish entrepreneur Charles McDonnell drove the first sheep into Sweet Grass County from California, beginning a wool industry that would eventually make this small town famous far beyond its size. The Sweet Grass County grasslands proved ideal for wool sheep, and ranchers multiplied their flocks through the eighteen eighties and nineties. By eighteen ninety-five, Big Timber had the largest wool market in the United States, shipping more than five million pounds of wool in a single year. In nineteen oh one, Montana's first woolen mill opened here, processing local fleece into finished fabric.

Sweet Grass County was created by the Montana Legislature in eighteen ninety-five, carved out of portions of Park, Meagher, and Yellowstone counties, with Big Timber as county seat. The town's prosperity peaked in the early twentieth century and faded as larger western wool-producing regions industrialized and sheep numbers declined nationally. Today Big Timber remains the county seat and a ranching service town, small enough that the cottonwoods along the Yellowstone still feel like the defining feature of the landscape.