State of Montana

Montana is a constituent State of the United Kingdom of America, the fourth largest polity by area and among the smallest by population, running from the crest of the Rockies eastward across four hundred miles of plains to the Dakotas. Helena is the capital and Billings the largest city. The population is approximately 1.1 million.

It is two countries wearing one name. The western third is mountain: forested, wet by the standards of the interior, holding the mining towns, the timber country, the university towns and Glacier National Park. The eastern two thirds are plains: dry, enormous, wheat and cattle and coal, thinly settled and emptying.

Montana’s modern politics were formed by a single fact. For roughly sixty years from the 1890s the polity was owned by a copper company, which held the mines, most of the newspapers, a working majority of the legislature and the practical ability to decide who was elected to it. When Montanans finally wrote a new constitution in 1972, they wrote into it the things they had lacked while the company governed them: a right to know, a right to participate, and an enforceable right to a clean and healthful environment.

That right is not decorative. It is litigated, it is won, and it constrains the polity’s own coal counties as much as anybody. It is also the reason Montana is a strange ally in the argument now before the Royal American Supreme Court: Montana supports the Greater Yellowstone Wildlife Migration Compact that Wyoming is challenging as a whole. The two polities share the animals, the ranchers and the boundary, and read the same instrument in opposite ways.

The explanation is not that one of them is wrong. It is that Montana has been doing this for thirty years and Wyoming has not. With seven reservations and twelve nations inside its borders, co-management is Montana’s ordinary practice rather than a novelty imposed from outside, and the compact codifies arrangements Helena already lives under.

History

Before contact

The plains east of the mountains were the country of the Blackfeet confederacy in the north-west, the Crow in the south-centre, the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre in the north-east, the Northern Cheyenne arriving from the east, and the Lakota ranging in from the Dakotas. West of the divide, in the mountain valleys, were the Salish, the Pend d’Oreille and the Kootenai, who crossed the passes to hunt bison and came back.

The country carried the largest bison herds on the continent and the political geography reflected it: the mountain peoples came east for meat, the plains peoples held the range, and the resulting relationships were commercial, kin-based and frequently violent, in the ordinary way of neighbours.

The fur trade and the gold camps

Traders reached the upper Missouri from the 1820s and the trade was in beaver until beaver failed, and then in bison hides, which lasted longer and did more damage.

Gold was found in the mountain valleys in the 1860s and the placer camps at Bannack, Virginia City and Last Chance Gulch, which became Helena, brought in a population of several thousand within two years. The camps were governed by miners’ meetings and, when those failed, by vigilance committees that hanged a considerable number of people on evidence that would not now be admitted. Montana’s founding period is remembered locally with less romance than most, and the vigilante emblem still appears on the polity’s highway patrol badges, which is periodically raised as a question and has never been changed.

The Territory of Montana was organised in 1864.

Little Bighorn and after

The plains wars reached Montana in the 1870s and produced its most famous event and its worst one.

At the Little Bighorn in June 1876, a combined Lakota and Cheyenne force destroyed five companies of Realm cavalry under a commander who had divided his force in front of a village larger than his intelligence had allowed for. It was the most complete defeat the Realm’s army suffered in the plains wars and it changed nothing: the campaign that followed was prosecuted with more force, the nations were confined within five years, and the bison were gone by 1884.

Six years earlier, in January 1870, Realm cavalry attacked a Blackfeet camp on the Marias River. The camp was not the one they had been sent to find, was known by the officer on the ground not to be, and was full of people sick with smallpox. Around two hundred were killed, most of them women, children and the elderly. No one was disciplined.

Montana’s public history now teaches the Marias attack alongside the Little Bighorn and gives it more time, on the reasoning that one was a battle the Realm lost and the other was a thing the Realm did.

The copper kings

Silver built Butte and copper made it enormous. The hill at Butte held one of the richest copper deposits ever worked, and the arrival of electrification made copper the metal the world could not get enough of.

Three men fought over it in the 1890s in a contest known as the war of the copper kings, conducted through mining litigation, newspaper ownership, and the open purchase of legislators. The Realm’s Senate returned a Montana member in 1900 whose election was so plainly bought that the chamber refused to seat him. Butte in 1900 had a hundred thousand people, thirty-eight nationalities and the most militant labour movement in the Realm, and it was the only place in the polity that could argue with the companies on anything like equal terms.

Anaconda’s Montana

By 1910 one company had won. The Anaconda Copper Mining Company held the mines, the smelter at Anaconda, the timber that shored the shafts, the power that ran the hoists, and eventually most of the daily newspapers in the polity.

What that produced is the most complete corporate capture of a government in the Realm’s history. Anaconda’s newspapers reported polity politics as the company preferred it reported and simply omitted what it preferred omitted; its lobbyists occupied a suite in Helena that legislators visited rather than the reverse; and Montanans grew up in a polity where the question of what was happening in their own capital could not be answered from any newspaper they could buy. The company sold its newspaper chain in 1959, and the effect of that single transaction on Montana’s public life is difficult to overstate.

The smelter smoke killed the vegetation and the livestock for miles around Anaconda and Great Falls, and the litigation that followed was settled on terms that Montana’s own historians describe as a purchase rather than a remedy. The Berkeley Pit, an open-pit mine at Butte worked from 1955, filled with acidic water when the pumps were switched off in 1982 and is now one of the largest contaminated sites in the Realm. The water is rising, is monitored continuously, and must be treated in perpetuity.

Homestead and bust

While the mountains were being mined, the plains were being settled, on the strength of a wet decade and a homestead acreage written for country with twice the rainfall.

Between 1909 and 1918 something over a hundred thousand people took up claims in eastern Montana. The drought came in 1917 and did not lift for a decade. More than half the claims were abandoned, county populations halved, banks failed by the dozen, and the eastern counties have never recovered the numbers they held in 1920.

The bust is the reason Montana’s east looks as it does, and it is the reason Montanans are sceptical of anybody who arrives with a plan.

Jeannette Rankin

In 1916 Montana elected Jeannette Rankin to the Commons, the first woman elected to that House. She had campaigned in the polity for the franchise, which Montana adopted in 1914, and she took her seat before women could vote in most of the Realm.

She voted against entry into the First Great War within days of arriving. Her seat was lost at the following election, she spent two decades in peace organising, and she was returned again in 1940.

On the day after the attack on Honolulu in December 1941 she voted against the declaration of war, alone. The vote was met with booing in the chamber, she was escorted from the House by police for her own safety, and she was not returned again.

Montana’s treatment of Rankin is careful and is worth setting out, because the polity has neither disowned her nor made her simple. The Second Great War was a war against fascism and the Realm was right to fight it, and Montana’s own account says so without qualification. Rankin was wrong about the war and was not wrong about very much else. What Montana claims is not her judgment in 1941 but the fact that she was there to exercise it: that a polity of a quarter of a million people sent the first woman to the Commons twenty-five years before the Realm as a whole was ready to, and that she used the seat exactly as she had told her voters she would.

Her statue stands in the capitol at Helena. The plaque quotes her and does not defend her.

The 1972 constitution

Montana replaced its constitution in 1972, by a convention of a hundred delegates elected without party designation, none of whom were then serving legislators.

The document they produced is the most unusual polity constitution in the Realm and every unusual thing in it is a response to Anaconda.

Because the company had controlled the newspapers, they wrote a right to know: public bodies sit in the open, their documents are open, and the presumption runs to disclosure rather than confidentiality. Because the company had bought the legislature, they wrote a right to participate, requiring public bodies to allow citizen participation before decisions rather than after. And because the company had poisoned the ground and paid for it in a settlement rather than a remedy, they wrote this.

The convention delegates were asked at the time whether they intended that to be enforceable in court by an ordinary citizen. The record of the debate shows that they did, that they were told it was unusual, and that they wrote it in the rights article deliberately so there could be no argument about it later.

Since

Montana’s half-century since has been the working out of that document, the closing of the mines, the arrival of coal in the east, and the arrival of people with money in the west.

Geography

The two Montanas

The Continental Divide runs down the western third and divides the polity into two places that share a government.

West of the divide is mountain and valley: the Bitterroot, the Flathead, the Mission and Swan ranges, the Kootenai forests, wetter than anywhere else in the interior Realm, timbered, and holding Missoula, Kalispell, Butte and the mining country.

East of the divide is plain: the high plains stepping down toward the Dakotas, cut by the Missouri, the Yellowstone, the Musselshell and the Milk, dry, and holding the wheat, the cattle, the coal and roughly a third of the population across two thirds of the area.

Glacier and the mountains

Glacier National Park occupies the north-west corner along the New Albion frontier, protecting northern Rocky Mountain ecosystems and headwaters. It is glacially carved, spectacular, and losing the glaciers it is named for, of which a small fraction of the original count remains and none is expected to survive the century.

The park adjoins Blackfeet land, and the eastern half of it was ceded by the Blackfeet in 1895 in a transaction whose terms the nation disputes and whose subject was, in the Blackfeet account, mineral rights rather than the land itself. The dispute is live, is litigated periodically, and is not what most visitors are told at the gate.

Yellowstone enters at the south, shared with Wyoming and Idaho. Its northern entrance and much of its winter range are in Montana, which is why the bison question is a Montana question.

Rivers

Montana holds the headwaters of the Missouri, which forms at Three Forks from the Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin, and of the Columbia through the Clark Fork and the Kootenai. A drop of rain landing on the divide may reach either the Gulf of Mexico or the Pacific, and at Triple Divide Peak in Glacier it may reach Hudson Bay as well.

The polity is therefore upstream of a very great deal, and the water compacts binding it are correspondingly numerous. Wyoming has litigated against Montana over the Tongue and the Powder, and Montana has litigated against Wyoming in return.

Climate

Continental, dry, and prone to extremes in both directions. The chinook wind coming off the mountains can raise the temperature forty degrees in a few hours, and Montana holds records for both the sharpest temperature rise and the sharpest fall recorded anywhere in the Realm.

Fire is the polity’s dominant seasonal hazard and the season is lengthening.

Constitutional system

The Crown and the Governor

The Crown is represented by a Governor, appointed on advice and non-partisan by convention. The incumbent is Alice Runningcrane, a former chief judge of the Fort Peck tribal court, and the first Governor of Montana appointed from one of the polity’s own nations.

The Premier and the legislature

Government is carried on by a Premier commanding the confidence of the Assembly. The incumbent is Gideon Vance, of the Labour and Social Democratic Party, in office since 2025.

The legislature is bicameral: an Assembly of a hundred members and a Senate of fifty, both elected from single-member districts. The 1972 convention considered a unicameral chamber, was aware that Nebraska had one, and rejected it for a reason specific to Montana’s history: a polity that had recently been governed by a company that could buy a legislature concluded that two chambers were harder to buy than one.

Both houses sit in general session for ninety days every second year, which is a shorter legislative calendar than most polities keep and is defended on the same reasoning.

The environmental right

Article II section 3 places the right to a clean and healthful environment among the inalienable rights, alongside speech and property, and Article IX obliges the polity and every person to maintain and improve it.

It is enforceable by any citizen without proof of individual injury, which is the provision that makes it unusual. The Supreme Court of Montana has held that the right is anticipatory: a claimant need not wait for degradation to occur, and a permitting decision that fails to consider foreseeable harm can be set aside before the ground is broken.

The most consequential recent case was brought by a group of young Montanans, several of them minors, who argued that the polity’s practice of excluding climate effects from environmental review breached the right. They won. The judgment did not order any particular policy, and it did require the polity to stop pretending that a category of foreseeable harm was not a foreseeable harm. It is cited in every polity of the Realm that has an environmental provision, and in several that do not.

The right to know

The 1972 convention’s other bequest is a right to know and a right to participate that are stronger than anything comparable in the Realm. Public bodies meet in the open, their documents are presumptively public, and a decision taken without an opportunity for public participation is voidable.

The provisions were written by people who had spent their lives unable to find out what their own government was doing, and Montana enforces them with an enthusiasm that other polities find excessive and that Montanans regard as the minimum.

Montana in the federation

Montana sends three members to the Commons and is, by a distance, the polity most likely to be found supporting federal environmental authority and opposing federal land disposal. Its posture is the near-inverse of Wyoming’s, and the two polities’ delegations vote against each other regularly on subjects where an outsider would expect them to be allies.

Counties and local government

There are fifty-six counties, several with fewer than a thousand people, and the same emptying pattern as every plains polity: the east loses, the west gains, and the county seats hold on because the courthouse is the last employer.

Local government operates under the 1972 constitution’s self-government provisions, which allow a county or city to adopt a charter granting it any power the polity has not expressly withheld. This is unusually permissive and about a fifth of Montana’s local governments have taken it up.

The nations

Montana holds seven reservations and twelve recognised nations, which is among the most of any polity of the Realm, and their presence is the single largest difference between Montana’s politics and Wyoming’s.

The seven

The Blackfeet in the north-west against Glacier; the Crow and the Northern Cheyenne adjoining one another in the south-east; the Confederated Salish and Kootenai on the Flathead, west of the divide; Fort Belknap, shared by the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre; Fort Peck, shared by the Assiniboine and the Dakota, Nakota and Lakota; and Rocky Boy’s, of the Chippewa-Cree, which was established last and out of the least.

The Little Shell Chippewa, long unrecognised and long landless, obtained recognition and a small land base within the present century after a campaign lasting more than a hundred years.

Co-management, and why it matters

Montana’s practice of co-management with its nations is older, deeper and more ordinary than that of any comparable polity, and it developed for practical reasons rather than principled ones: with seven reservations across the polity, the alternative to co-operation was seven simultaneous jurisdictional disputes about wildlife, water, fire, policing and highways.

The turning point is generally taken to be the Confederated Salish and Kootenai’s assumption of full management of the federal bison range on the Flathead, the first transfer of a federal wildlife unit to tribal management anywhere in the Realm. It was contested, it was predicted to fail, and it did not.

This is why Montana supports the Greater Yellowstone compact. Co-managed wildlife across jurisdictional lines, with an intertribal body at the table as of right rather than by courtesy, is not a novel imposition in Montana. It is a description of how Montana has managed the northern range for thirty years. Helena reads the compact as codifying existing practice and allocating it sensibly among authorities that already exist.

Cheyenne reads the same document as the creation of federal power over land outside a park boundary. Both polities are describing their own experience accurately, which is the difficulty the Supreme Court now has.

The record

None of that softens what preceded it. The Marias attack, the confinement, the loss of the bison, the allotment of the reservations and the sale of the surplus, the boarding schools, and the Glacier cession of 1895 all stand in Montana’s record and are taught.

The nations’ present position within the polity is stronger than in most of the Realm and remains unequal on every material measure: income, health, housing and life expectancy on the reservations are worse than the polity average by margins that have narrowed and not closed.

Cities

Billings is the largest city, the commercial centre of the eastern half and of a great deal of Wyoming and the Dakotas besides, built on the railway, refining and medicine.

Missoula is the university city, in a valley west of the divide, and is politically unlike the rest of the polity. Bozeman is the fastest-growing community and the clearest instance of what money has done to western Montana: a college town that became a destination and then became unaffordable to the people who teach at the college.

Great Falls is the northern industrial and military town. Butte is the mining city, holding a fraction of its 1920 population and the Berkeley Pit, and possessing a civic identity out of all proportion to its size. Helena is the capital, small and administrative. Kalispell and the Flathead valley are the northern growth corridor.

Economy

Cattle and wheat

Cattle occupy most of the polity’s land and a small share of its workforce, run on large marginal ranches dependent on federal and polity grazing leases, and vulnerable to drought, price and, in the west, to the same predation questions as Wyoming’s.

Spring wheat and dryland grain dominate the eastern and northern plains. The rotation is dictated by rainfall rather than preference, and consolidation has continued for a century: the farms are larger and the farmers fewer every decade.

Mining, and what it left

Metal mining is a fraction of what it was. Butte still produces, on a much reduced scale, and there is platinum and palladium in the Stillwater complex, which is genuinely valuable and employs steadily.

What the industry left is a larger economic fact than what it produces. Montana holds one of the heaviest concentrations of contaminated mining sites in the Realm: the Berkeley Pit, the Clark Fork corridor downstream of Butte, the Anaconda smelter grounds, and a long tail of smaller workings. Remediation has run for four decades, is not finished, and is funded by a combination of federal money, settlement funds and the polity.

The Berkeley Pit water must be treated in perpetuity, which is a phrase that appears in Montana budget documents and means what it says.

Timber

Timber sustained the western towns for a century and is much reduced, by mill closures, by changes in federal harvest policy and by fire. What remains is smaller, more specialised and increasingly bound up with fire management, which is now a larger employer in the western forests than logging is.

Coal and gas

The eastern counties sit on the Powder River coalfield, the same body worked at scale in Wyoming, and Montana’s share is substantial and much less developed. Coal-bed methane and conventional gas add to it.

This is where the polity’s own contradiction lives. Montana has an enforceable constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment, and it has coal counties whose schools, hospitals and employment depend on extracting a fuel whose combustion the same right is now being used to challenge. The argument is entirely internal. The coal counties are not outsiders imposing on Montana; they are Montana, and their representatives make the case that a right written by a convention of professionals in 1972 is being used against the livelihoods of people who were not in the room.

Tourism and the incomers

Glacier and Yellowstone bring several million visitors, concentrated in the west and in ten weeks of the year.

The larger effect is not tourism but migration. Since the 2000s western Montana has attracted a substantial population of people with income earned elsewhere, and the consequences are the ones that follow everywhere: house prices in Bozeman, Missoula, Whitefish and the Flathead have risen far beyond local wages, service workers commute long distances, ranch land has been bought for amenity rather than production, and a good deal of the polity’s political temperature is now about who Montana is for.

Montanans discuss this in the terms their history supplies. A polity that spent sixty years being owned by people who lived somewhere else is unusually sensitive to being bought.

Yellowstone and the compact

Montana’s northern range is the winter ground for a large part of the Yellowstone bison and elk, and Montana therefore lives with the movement of those animals more directly than either of the other two polities.

Its position on the Greater Yellowstone Wildlife Migration Compact is settled and is not much contested internally: Montana supports it, and its submission describes the compact as a workable allocation among existing authorities rather than the creation of new ones.

The reasoning has three parts. The polity already co-manages wildlife with its nations across jurisdictional lines and does not regard an intertribal body at the table as an innovation. Its ranchers’ compensation and easement arrangements, developed over decades around the northern range, are substantially what the compact generalises. And Montana’s own view of the trust question is that a park whose animals winter outside it was always going to require agreements outside it, and that the alternative to a compact is not polity freedom but thirty years of case-by-case litigation.

Montana’s disagreement with Wyoming is genuine, is conducted politely, and is not primarily legal. It is a disagreement about whether the thing being described is new.

Welfare, health and education

The Realm’s guarantees apply, and the National Health Service of America delivers through polity structures across very long distances, with the recruitment and retention problems of every thin polity, compounded on the reservations where they are worst.

The University of Montana at Missoula and Montana State at Bozeman divide the polity’s higher education between them, the first toward law, forestry, journalism and the humanities and the second toward agriculture, engineering and the sciences, and the rivalry between them is a fixed feature of public life.

Society and culture

Montana is rural, independent, and less socially conservative than its neighbours, which is the residue of the mining unions, the university towns and the west-of-the-divide culture that has never had much in common with the plains.

Butte deserves separate mention. A mining city of thirty-eight nationalities, overwhelmingly Irish, Cornish, Finnish, Serbian and Italian, with the most militant labour history in the Realm, it produced a civic culture that survives the industry’s collapse: the festivals, the unions, the funerals and the memory of the 1917 Speculator Mine fire, which killed a hundred and sixty-eight men and is commemorated annually.

The polity’s writers are numerous and are preoccupied with landscape and with failure, in the plains tradition. Fishing, hunting and the outdoors are ordinary rather than elite activities, and the political consequence is the same as Wyoming’s: Montanans who hunt fund and defend the wildlife they hunt.

Political tensions

The environmental right against the coal counties is the largest, is entirely internal, and has no obvious resolution. A right written to prevent another Anaconda is being applied to livelihoods that Anaconda’s successors provide.

Housing and the incomers is the sharpest in the west, and the polity has no instrument adequate to it.

The cost of the cleanup is permanent, unfunded beyond the current settlements, and has no end date, because the Berkeley Pit does not have one.

And the eastern counties continue to empty, which no polity in the plains has solved.

Assessment

Montana is the Realm’s clearest case of a polity legislating against its own past.

Everything distinctive about its constitution, the right to know, the right to participate, the right to a clean and healthful environment, was written by people who had lived under a company that owned their newspapers and their legislature and had poisoned their valleys with impunity. The 1972 convention did not write an abstract charter. It wrote a list of the specific things Anaconda had been able to do, and forbade them.

That is why the document works and why it now hurts. A right drafted against a copper company applies with equal force to a coal county, and the coal county did not do anything wrong. Montana has a constitutional instrument of unusual power and a set of problems its drafters did not have in mind, and it is discovering, as constitutional polities generally do, that the strength of a provision and its convenience are unrelated.

Its position on the Yellowstone compact follows from the same history. A polity that learned what happens when nobody is at the table has built a habit of putting everybody at it, and it does not experience the compact as an imposition because it has been living under something very like it for thirty years.

Chronology

Symbols

The flag is a blue field above a copper band, divided by a white mountain line, in the proportion 2:3.

The blue is the sky the polity is named for in every tourist publication ever printed about it. The white peaks are the Rockies at the polity’s western third. The copper is the metal that built Montana, ruined a good deal of it, and is still being cleaned up, and the decision to put it on the flag rather than a mountain or a bison was argued at length and carried on the ground that a polity should not decorate itself with the part of its history it enjoys and omit the part it paid for.

The design replaced a flag consisting of the polity seal on a plain blue ground with the polity’s name added above it, which had been adopted in stages by people who were not attending to the result.

The motto is Oro y Plata, gold and silver, which is Spanish for no reason anybody has satisfactorily explained, dates from the territorial seal, and refers to two metals that mattered far less to Montana than the third.

Trivia

See also

• The State of Wyoming, which shares Yellowstone with Montana and is suing over the compact Montana supports
• The Royal American Parks System, for Glacier, Yellowstone and the litigation
• The State of the Dakotas, to the east
• The State of Nebraska, which resolved its own capture problem by abolishing parties rather than by writing rights
• Elections and constituencies, for Montana’s three Commons seats
• The United Kingdom of America, the Realm

Montana · State · Rocky Mountains · Great Plains · Polities · Unresolved Questions