Troy, Montana: Mining Town on the Kootenai

Troy sits in a narrow canyon where the Kootenai River cuts through the Cabinet Mountains, about twelve miles from the Idaho border. It is Montana's westernmost incorporated city. Prospectors arrived in the eighteen eighties chasing silver and lead in the surrounding ranges, and when James J. Hill's Great Northern Railway drove its transcontinental line through in eighteen ninety-two, the railroad platted a townsite here to serve as a freight and engine stop.

Logging and mining defined Troy for most of the twentieth century. The Troy Mine, a massive underground copper and silver operation, ran from nineteen eighty-one to nineteen ninety-three before closing when metal prices collapsed. The Kootenai Falls, a few miles east of town, are among the most powerful undammed waterfalls in the American West and served as a location in the film The River Wild. Troy today has fewer than eight hundred residents and remains a gateway for backcountry hunting, fishing, and the Kootenai National Forest.