Montana's Big Sky: Where the Phrase Came From

Someone had to name it first. The sky has always been this wide in Montana, unobstructed from horizon to horizon in three directions at once, with the Rocky Mountain Front cutting the fourth edge. But the phrase that made the sky famous came from a specific person, in a specific year, in a novel that most Montanans have read but that most visitors have not.

Aurelius Bertrand Guthrie Jr., known as A.B. Guthrie, published a novel called The Big Sky in nineteen forty-seven. It was the story of fur trappers in the Northern Rockies in the early decades of the nineteenth century, when the mountains were largely unknown to American settlers and the Blackfeet and Crow still controlled the plains. The novel was not a romance of westward expansion; it was closer to an elegy for what expansion destroyed. Guthrie described the country with the precision of someone who had grown up near Choteau, Montana, watching the Rocky Mountain Front from childhood.

The Montana Highway Department adopted the phrase for state license plates in nineteen sixty-one, fourteen years after the novel that coined it. By the early nineteen seventies, Big Sky Country was the state's official brand, the slogan on the welcome signs, the shorthand for a state that was having trouble explaining itself to people from elsewhere.

What Guthrie was describing in nineteen forty-seven, and what the highway department put on plates in sixty-one, is the same sky you are looking at now. The Northern Rockies horizon extends in three directions without interruption, the way it does nowhere else in the continental United States at quite this scale and quite this consistency.