What Montana Is: The Scale of It

Montana is the fourth-largest state in the country. It covers about ninety-three million acres of land. If you put it on the east coast of the United States, it would stretch from Boston down past Washington, D.C., and reach back inland as far as Pittsburgh. People who grew up here routinely drive three hours to reach the next town they consider nearby.

The landscape does not behave like a single thing. The western third of the state is mountain country, the Rocky Mountain Front, where the Great Plains run directly and dramatically into the continental divide with almost no foothills to soften the approach. The eastern two-thirds are high plains and river breaks, the Missouri Plateau, where the weather comes in without obstacles from Canada or from Wyoming and there is nothing to stop it.

The Missouri River rises in the southwestern mountains and crosses the entire state northeast, draining a basin roughly one sixth the size of the continental United States before it reaches the Mississippi. The Yellowstone River, the longest undammed river in the lower forty-eight states, runs parallel to the south. Between them and their tributaries, the river systems of Montana shaped every migration route, every trade network, every military campaign, and every railroad line that ever moved through this country.

Montana was admitted to the Union on November eighth, eighteen eighty-nine, the forty-first state, though the people who had lived here for ten thousand years before that date were not consulted on the timing. The state seal shows mountains, a plow, a pick, and a shovel. The motto, in Latin, translates as: gold and silver. That tells you what the territorial politicians thought they were here for. The land had other ideas, and it usually won.