Glendive, Montana

Glendive stands at the point where the Northern Pacific Railroad first touched the Yellowstone River, making it the oldest and most important rail hub in eastern Montana. The first locomotive steamed into this valley on July fifth, eighteen eighty-one. The name traces back to an Irish aristocrat named Sir George Gore, who hunted in this country in eighteen fifty-five on a famously lavish hunting expedition.

Gore named the nearby creek Glendive, possibly a corruption of Glendale. Lewis Merrill later applied that name to the railroad station. Because Glendive was designated headquarters of the Yellowstone Division of the Northern Pacific, the company built depots, repair shops, and worker housing here almost immediately, giving the town an economic anchor that other eastern Montana settlements lacked.

Those first freight cars that rolled back east were loaded with buffalo hides and bones, the last remnants of the enormous herds that had covered the plains just a decade before. Today Glendive is the gateway to Makoshika State Park, Montana's largest state park, where badlands ravines expose dinosaur fossils including triceratops and tyrannosaurus.