Billings and the Rimrocks: Montana's Largest City

Billings sits below the Rimrocks, a band of sandstone cliffs that runs along the north side of the Yellowstone River valley, forming a natural wall above the city that makes the skyline unlike any other city on the northern plains. The cliffs are Cretaceous sandstone, roughly seventy to eighty million years old, deposited at the bottom of an ancient shallow sea and now exposed by the Yellowstone River's slow carving. Pictograph Cave State Park, five miles south of Interstate Ninety, contains rock paintings made by people who used this cave system for thousands of years.

The oldest pictographs date to around two thousand years ago. There are over one hundred paintings, in red ochre and other pigments, depicting humans, animals, and geometric shapes. The cave was used intermittently from the most ancient hunters of the post-glacial period through historic Plains tribes.

The Crow people, whose reservation covers a large swath of south-central Montana east of Billings, have lived in this Yellowstone country for centuries. Before the Crow, the region was Shoshone territory. The sequence of occupation, the way different cultures used and modified the same landscape, is visible in the cave's stratigraphy and in the layers of the pictographs themselves.

Billings was founded in eighteen eighty-two as a railroad town and named for the president of the Northern Pacific Railway. It is now the largest city in Montana and the regional medical and commercial hub for a large portion of the northern Rockies and the high plains. The livestock auction in Billings is among the largest in the state.