Montana's Character: Wide Open and Independent

Montana has roughly one million people spread across ninety-four million acres. That works out to approximately eight people per square mile as a state average, but the average is misleading because almost all of those people live in a handful of cities: Billings, Missoula, Great Falls, Bozeman, Butte, Helena. The rest of the state, the eastern plains, the Hi-Line, the river valleys, runs at population densities closer to one person per square mile, or less.

That sparsity is not accidental. The homestead era tried to fill Montana with people and failed. The mines brought people to Butte and Anaconda and they came in enormous numbers, but the mines shut down and many of those people left. What remained was a population that had self-selected for the specific conditions of this landscape: the distances, the weather, the economic uncertainty, the self-sufficiency required to live far from services.

Montana has no sales tax. It has no mandatory motorcycle helmet law, a law that the legislature has repeatedly debated and declined to pass, on the grounds that requiring Montanans to protect themselves from their own decisions is not the proper function of the state. These positions are consistent with a political culture that spans party lines and goes back further than contemporary American politics. The libertarian streak in Montana is not new.

In nineteen seventy-two, Montana rewrote its state constitution. The new document included the right to a clean and healthful environment as a constitutionally protected right, one of only a handful of state constitutions in the country that includes such language. The state that voted against requiring motorcycle helmets also wrote environmental protection into its foundational law. Both positions make sense in the same place.

Montana produces more wheat per acre of farmland than almost any state in the country. It is also one of the largest producers of coal, copper, and silver. It ranks among the top states for public land acreage. It holds some of the last intact wild ecosystems in the lower forty-eight. The contradictions are the place.