Conrad, Montana

Conrad sits on the Montana High Line, the broad shelf of shortgrass prairie between the Rocky Mountain Front and the Canadian border. The town incorporated in nineteen oh eight as homesteaders flooded the region after the Great Northern Railway made northern Montana accessible. Pondera County, which Conrad seats, takes its name from a corruption of Pend d'Oreille, the name of a people of the region.

Every June the town holds Whoop-Up Days, a parade and rodeo whose name recalls the old Whoop-Up Trail, a wagon road that once ran north from Fort Benton through this country into what is now Alberta, where American traders sold whiskey to the Blackfeet before Canadian Mounties shut the trade down in the eighteen seventies. Conrad is an hour from the Rocky Mountain Front and two hours from Glacier National Park, with a population of around twenty-three hundred serving a wide stretch of wheat and cattle country.