You know, when you hear the word Montana, there
is a very, like, specific, almost cinematic image
that usually pops into your head. Oh, absolutely.
Right. You picture these pristine, snow -capped
peaks of Yellowstone. Or maybe, I don't know,
a lone cowboy, riding through untouched wilderness,
casting this long shadow at sunset. It's really
treated as this beautiful, unchanging backdrop.
Just a quiet, scenic vacation spot where time
stands still. Exactly. The scenery certainly
encourages that view. I mean, it feels incredibly
peaceful today. But the moment you actually dig
into the historical soil of this place, that
perfectly framed postcard just goes up in flames.
Yeah, it really does. We're looking at a landscape
that is anything but static. Yeah. When you analyze
the sources we've gathered, you realize this
region is the absolute definition of a historical
pressure cooker. Which is why we're here. Welcome
to this custom tailored deep dive designed specifically
for you. Our mission today is to decode the true
history of Montana using a massive stack of source
material. We're going to take what might seem
like a simple timeline of dates and reveal it
for what it truly is. A sprawling, often violent
saga of the American West. Exactly. You're going
to hear a story of deep ancient roots, rapid
expansion, extreme resource exploitation, and
relentless reinvention. Okay, let's unpack this.
To really understand this land, we can't start
with statehood, right? No, definitely not. We
can't even start with the pioneers. We have to
look at the people who inhabited this space long
before the word Montana ever even existed. And
the sheer timeline of the archaeological evidence
here is staggering. We are talking about human
habitation stretching back more than 12 ,000
years. Wow. Yeah, and the absolute anchor point
for this, which is documented extensively in
the text, is the Anzic site. It was discovered
back in 1968 near Wilsall, Montana. Just by accident,
right? completely by accident. Construction workers
uncovered the remains of a male infant buried
over a hundred Clovis culture artifacts. I want
to pause on those artifacts for a second because
that term Clovis, it gets thrown around a lot
of archaeology. What does that actually mean
for the people who are living there? Good question.
So Clovis refers to a specific prehistoric culture
characterized by their really distinctive fluted
stone spear points. These were highly skilled
nomadic big game hunters. Finding those artifacts
buried with a child indicated a deeply established
complex culture. But the truly revolutionary
moment for the ANZIC site happened decades later,
jumping forward to 2014. This is the DNA part.
Yes. Scientists managed to actually extract and
sequence the ancient boys genome. Which is crazy
to me. How do you even sequence DMA from remains
that have been in the ground for 12 ,000 years?
The degradation must be absolute. Incredibly
difficult. Scientists had to extract tiny, heavily
degraded DNA fragments from the skeletal remains
and essentially piece them together using advanced
computational models. They had to filter out
thousands of years of environmental contamination.
That sounds impossible. It was a massive breakthrough.
But when they finally mapped it, they had this
genetic time capsule. That DNA provided the very
first definitive genetic proof that the Clovis
people descended from Asian populations and are
directly ancestral to many modern Native American
tribes. It's like unearthing a 12 ,000 year old
family tree from a genetic time capsule. fundamentally
rewrites our understanding of early human migration.
Completely. And from those ancient roots, you
see the development of incredibly diverse nomadic
societies, right? Their entire existence was
intricately tied to the seasonal cycles and those
massive buffalo herds. Yeah, the source has been
a lot of time detailing these tribes. I noticed
a heavy emphasis on the Blackfeet, for instance.
Were they the dominant force in the region? Absolutely.
The Blackfeet were fiercely independent, highly
successful warriors, and they were divided into
three main branches. You had the Pagan, the Blood,
and the Siksika. They operated with a deeply
structured nomadic life and controlled a massive
swath of territory. But the landscape was diverse.
You also had the Crow, who arrived around 1700.
They developed a really deep geographical knowledge
of the terrain. Which, the sources say, later
made them highly strategic scouts for the US
Army. Exactly. Then you have the Cheyenne, who
bring a totally different cultural layer. Their
language actually developed tonal characteristics.
Wait, which means the actual pitch of your voice
changes the meaning of the word, right? Much
like Mandarin Chinese. Precisely. It is incredibly
rare for their specific language group, the Algonquian
family. It shows just how rich and complex the
cultural evolution in this region was. But the
trajectory of all these sovereign nations is
completely altered by a piece of paper signed
in Paris in 1803. The Louisiana Purchase. Yep.
The United States essentially buys a massive
claim to the territory from France for $15 million.
That averages out to a staggering three cents
an acre. Now, at the time, this transaction This
action meant absolutely nothing to the indigenous
people actually living in Montana. It was just
an invisible line drawn by people an ocean away.
That invisible line, however, is what brings
the Lewis and Clark expedition from 1804 to 1806.
And they actually spent more time in present
-day Montana than anywhere else on their entire
journey. I didn't realize that. Yeah, they were
documenting the flora, the fauna, the navigable
rivers. You can actually still see physical proof
of this mapping process. William Clark carved
his name and the date into Pompey's pillar near
modern -day Billings. He named it after the infant
son of Sacagawea, their Shoshone guide. What's
wild is that Pompey's pillar is the only remaining
physical evidence of the entire route. What's
fascinating here is that the Lucas and Clark
expedition wasn't just, you know, a scientific
mapping trip. Right, it was a scouting mission.
Exactly, it was an inventory of resources. By
mapping the rivers and initiating formal contact,
they were acting as the catalyst that permanently
shifted the balance of power in the region. They
were laying the logistical groundwork for eventual
U .S. dominance. And the sources document that
this initial contact wasn't always peaceful either.
On the return trip, Merriweather Lewis's group
had a really tense skirmish with a party of Pig
and Blackfeet. Yeah, that was a critical moment.
The text details that the Blackfeet tried to
take the expedition's weapons. They were likely
trying to prevent American guns from making their
way into the hands of rival tribes. Makes sense
strategically. Right. But a struggle broke out.
Two native men were killed, and Lewis and his
men ended up fleeing over 100 miles in a single
day on horseback just to escape retaliation.
That skirmish is a dark foreshadowing, really,
because that shift in power soon brought a massive
influx of settlers, prospectors, and of course
the U .S. military. The government started aggressively
carving up the land. That brings us to the formal
drawing of borders. The Montana Territory is
officially established in 1864. And I love this
detail from the sources because it busts a very
popular myth. You always hear this legend that
the incredibly jagged border between Idaho and
Montana was the result of a drunken surveyor.
Oh, right, the drunken surveyor story. Yeah.
that he accidentally wandered west into the Bitterroot
Range and just drew lines wherever he stumbled.
It makes for a fun local story, but the historical
record proves it entirely false. The U .S. Congress
knew exactly what they were doing. They drew
the boundary precisely where they intended, running
it along the 44 degrees, 30 minutes parallel,
and then having it follow the crest of the Rocky
Mountains and the Bitterroot Mountains. So it
was intentional? Highly intentional. It was a
calculated political division designed to corral
the region's mining resources into specific jurisdictions.
But drawing lines on a map in Washington, D .C.
means enforcing those lines on the ground. And
that enforcement ignited fierce, heartbreaking
resistance from the indigenous peoples. The source
material spent significant time on the Indian
Wars, particularly the Battle of the Little Bjorn
in 1876. Right. George Armstrong Custer and his
seventh cavalry attacked a massive combined encampment
of Lakota, northern Cheyenne and Arapaho. Custer
completely miscalculated the situation. I mean,
He split his forces without knowing the actual
size of the encampment. And the native forces,
who were fiercely defending their families, just
outmaneuvered him completely. They were vastly
outnumbered, weren't they? The cavalry was, yeah.
The native forces outnumbered the cavalry by
at least three to one. And in some fragmented
parts of the battlefield, the ratio was closer
to five to one. Wow. The annihilation of Custer's
battalion was so absolute that only two men linked
to the cavalry survived to even describe the
battlefield. There was a Crow Scout named Curly,
who observed from a distance, and a trooper who
had been separated from the main force before
the fighting even began. The U .S. military's
response to that defeat was total relentless
retaliation. And this leads to one of the most
harrowing accounts in the entire source stack,
which is the Northern Cheyenne Exodus of 1878.
Yeah, it's a tough read. Following Little Bighorn,
the government forces 972 Northern Cheyenne down
to a reservation in Oklahoma. The conditions
described there are horrific. Malaria is rampant.
The food rations provided by the government are
essentially garbage, totally unfit for human
consumption. So the tribal leaders, Chiefs Little
Wolf and Dullknife, make a desperate decision.
After pressing the federal agents for release
and just being repeatedly denied, they decide
to lead a group of 353 of their people on a march
back north to their homeland in Montana. OK,
wait, I need to push back on the logistics of
this. The sources say the U .S. government mobilized
13 ,000 troops and volunteers. Yep, 13 ,000.
Just to stop, roughly 350 starving sick people,
including women and children, from walking back
to their own ancestral homeland. How did the
military or the public possibly justify that?
level of completely disproportionate force at
the time. It is a stunning display of federal
power, and it was justified internally by the
absolute need to enforce the reservation system.
They were scared of losing control. Exactly.
If one group successfully defied the relocation
orders, the military feared a total collapse
of their control over all the Western tribes.
It wasn't about the physical threat those 350
people posed. It was about making an example
of them. That's brutal. It gets worse. Dull Knife's
band was eventually captured and locked in unheated
barracks at Fort Robinson in Nebraska. It was
the dead of winter. The military withheld all
food, water and fuel to force their compliance.
And rather than submit to freezing to death in
a cage, they broke out in January 1879. They
fought their way into the snow and the military
literally gunned them down. Only about 50 people
survived that breakout. It is a profound tragedy.
Yet the sheer undeniable persistence of the Northern
Cheyenne ultimately forced the hand of the U
.S. government. Really? Yeah. The military eventually
gave up trying to relocate the survivors, which
actually resulted in the creation of the Northern
Cheyenne Reservation in Montana. They fought
an empire for their home, and against all odds,
a remnant of them kept it. You see that same
tragic tactical brilliance in the flight of the
Nez Perce in 1877, too. Chief Joseph leading
800 people on a 1700 mile retreat. How does a
civilian camp of 800 people outrun a mobilized
army for three months? By utilizing highly sophisticated
military tactics. They used rear guards. meaning
a small group of warriors would stay behind to
engage and delay the pursuing 2000 U .S. soldiers
while the main body of families moved ahead.
Oh, wow. Yeah, they dug field fortifications,
literally creating rifle pits in the earth to
defend their positions. They outmaneuvered the
army across four states and straight through
the newly formed Yellowstone Park. But they were
finally intercepted in freezing weather and forced
to surrender a devastating 40 miles from the
Canadian border where they would have been safe.
Just 40 miles. That's heartbreaking. So with
the Made of populations largely confined to reservations,
the landscape of Montana was violently opened
up for a new era. An era defined by aggressive
industrial abstraction and an orchestrated influx
of homesteaders, driven almost entirely by corporate
ambition. That's a good way to put it. And here's
where it gets really interesting. Because the
engine of this new era wasn't just the romantic
pioneer spirit. It was the railroad companies
acting as real estate developers. And the contrast
in how these railroads operated is stark. The
Northern Pacific Railroad was heavily subsidized.
They were given huge federal land grants to build
their system, which they promptly turned around
and sold to wealthy land speculators for quick
cash. Right. But the Great Northern Railroad
took a completely different, much more aggressive
approach. They bought their land directly and
then set up marketing agencies across Europe,
specifically in Germany and Scandinavia, to recruit
immigrant families to come settle the land. To
get those European immigrants to Montana, the
Great Northern basically ran a massive PR campaign.
They set up demonstration farms along the northern
tier of the state, an area known as the High
Line. Yeah, the High Line. They used these farms
to show off incredible crop yields. But the text
shows those yields were totally anomalous. based
on unusually rainy years. They leveraged the
newly expanded Homestead Act, which now offered
320 acres instead of 160, to lure in these inexperienced
newcomers. The locals actually call them honeyockers.
Honeyockers. The sources mentioned they were
pushed to do dryland wheat farming. What does
that actually entail for someone who has never
done it? Dryland farming is a technique used
in semi -arid regions where you don't use irrigation.
Instead you rely entirely on conserving the natural
moisture stored in the soil from the sparse rainfall.
It requires highly specific techniques, like
leaving fields fallow for an entire year just
to build up water reserves. So let me get this
straight. The railroad recruits immigrants who
only understand European rainfall patterns, drops
them onto 320 acres of semi -aired desert, and
tells them to start planting. Pretty much. It's
like selling someone a luxury sport car but neglecting
to tell them they'll only be driving it on unpaved
mud roads. It sounds exactly like a modern -day
deceptive real estate hustle. Show them the glossy
brochure. sell them the dream and leave them
holding the bag. And the environment simply wouldn't
support the corporate promise. When the inevitable
droughts and hot winds returned after 1918, these
honey occurs were decimated. Their crops failed.
The soil literally blew away and thousands were
financially ruined and forced to abandon their
claims. While the surface of Montana was an absolute
struggle for these farmers, the underground was
exploding with wealth. We're talking about the
Copper Kings. Oh, yeah. Marcus Daly and W .A.
Clark. Right. Marcus Daly, this Irish immigrant
who built the massive Anaconda copper mining
company, and his archrival W .A. Clark. They
turned the city of Bute into the richest hill
on earth. The extraction of copper wire to electrify
America caused Bute to balloon into a notoriously
rowdy, toxic metropolis of 60 ,000 people by
1920. This industrial boom brought a totally
different kind of frontier town. The text highlights
places like Taft, which was a temporary railroad
construction camp near the Idaho border. Just
a pop up town. Literally. It was built purely
for the laborers laying tracks. It was famously
violent, packed with saloons and gambling halls.
And the moment the tracks were laid, the entire
town was just abandoned to rot. In places like
Butte and Anaconda, however, the corporate presence
was permanent and overwhelming. The Anaconda
company controlled three quarters of Montana's
wage earners by 1900. They didn't just own the
mines, they dominated local politics and completely
controlled the press. The sources note they bought
up nearly every major newspaper. in the state
to ensure public opinion always leaned in their
favor. If we connect this to the bigger picture,
you can see how absolute corporate monopolies
inevitably birth fierce radical labor movements.
Pushback was inevitable. Right. The workers were
living in the shadow of toxic smokestacks, facing
terrible underground health hazards and dealing
with an employer who controlled their wages,
their rent and their news. So they organized.
And they pushed back hard. In 1903, the city
of Anaconda actually elected a socialist mayor,
a treasurer, a police judge, and three councilmen.
It was the first victory for the Socialist Party
west of the Mississippi. A huge deal at the time.
But how does a massive corporation like Anaconda
react to a socialist taking over their company
town? By systematically crushing the local movement
using their economic weight, the Anaconda Company
pressured city workers to refuse to cooperate
with the new mayor, functionally paralyzing the
local government. Then they just started firing
workers who were known socialists. They used
the threat of mass unemployment to suffocate
the political rebellion and ensure it never happened
again. The Anaconda Company clearly had an absolute
choke hold on the men in the mines. But surviving
in Montana required an entirely different kind
of resilience back at the homestead, which forged
a deep I was honestly skeptical of the whole
solitary male pioneer taming the West myth, and
the source material proves it wrong. Single men
rarely succeeded at farming in Montana. The text
makes it very clear that women were absolutely
essential on the frontier. They were doing everything.
They were handling grueling physical chores,
managing the precarious household finances, and
enduring the massive risks of frontier childbirth
in extreme isolation. They heavily relied on
networks of local midwives well into the World
War II era because formal medical care was often
days away. That gritty daily independence translated
directly into political firsts. In 1916, Jeanette
Rankin, a Republican from Montana, became the
first woman ever elected to the U .S. Congress.
Right. And she was famously fiercely independent,
casting deeply controversial pacifist votes against
the United States entering both World War I and
World War II. Rankin represents a uniquely Montana
and political dichotomy that is heavily documented
in the text and honestly still exists today.
The split ticket voting. Yes. The state has a
long tradition of split ticket voting. As the
historical saying goes, Montana's like to send
liberals to Washington and conservatives to Helena.
You see that exact split with someone like James
E. Murray. He was an Irish Catholic who inherited
millions from his copper mining uncle. By all
accounts, he should have been a staunch corporate
conservative, but he went to the U .S. Senate
as a Democrat in the 1930s and fought aggressively
for liberal New Deal policies. He worked closely
with the very labor unions his family's industry
often fought. The modern era of Montana is where
all these historical threads, you know, the deep
connection to the land, the history of resource
extraction and that fiercely independent political
streak all violently collide. So what does this
all mean? When I look at the modern landscape
detailed in the text, I see an incredible, almost
impossible paradox. You have a state that built
its entire modern economy on ripping resources
out of the ground. Copper in Butte, massive coal
strip mining and coal strip, the intense Bakken
oil fracking boom. And yet in 1972, Montana wrote
a new state constitution that uniquely guarantees
an inalienable right to a clean and helpful environment.
How do a mandate for a pristine environment and
a reliance on strip mining legally and logically
exist in the same place? This raises an important
question, perhaps the defining question for modern
Montana. How does a society balance economic
survival with the preservation of its natural
soul? The sources document that this isn't a
settled issue. It is a daily constitutional tug
-of -war. And we should be clear, for you listening,
we are strictly looking at the debates as documented
in our sources today. We aren't taking any political
sides here. But the source material highlights
how intensely these two sides clash today. You
have environmental groups utilizing that exact
1972 constitutional right to fight fossil fuel
extraction. Right. They challenge things like
the routing of the Keystone Pipeline. back against
the massive water usage of fracking technology
in the Williston Basin. Meanwhile, industry advocates
argue that resource extraction remains the lifeblood
of the state's rural economy. You also see this
independent streak fighting federal and corporate
power in the courts. The text details the fierce
debate over corporate spending in elections.
Oh, the Citizens United stuff. Exactly. Following
the Federal Citizens United ruling, Montana tried
to uphold its own 1912 Corrupt Practices Act.
That was a law originally passed specifically
to stop the Copper Kings from buying elections.
They tried to uphold it in the case of Western
Tradition Partnership v. Montana. Correct. And
the push and pull extends to social issues too.
Look at the medical marijuana debate detailed
in the timeline. Voters approved it in 2004.
It boomed into a massive unregulated industry
by 2010, faced federal DEA raids, then a legislative
attempt to repeal it entirely. It was chaotic.
Very. That resulted in a veto compromise by Governor
Brian Schweitzer to keep it alive before the
state Supreme Court ultimately legalized it completely
in 2020. It is just constant, relentless reinvention.
It is the legacy of a state. that refuses to
be constrained by simple definitions, whether
those are geographical borders, corporate mandates,
or federal expectations. Let's wrap this up because
the sheer whiplash of the journey you just went
on is incredible. We started by looking at the
microscopic DNA sequencing of a 12 ,000 -year
-old boy at the ANZIC site. We walked through
the heartbreaking tactically brilliant 1700 mile
flight of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce. We
dug into the gritty, toxic, radically unionized
copper mines of Butte and traced that exact same
industrial pulse right up to the modern fracking
booms of the Bakken formation. Then that brings
up one final thought from the sources that we
really want to leave you with. Consider the town
of Comet, Montana. In its heyday in the early
20th century, it was a bustling, vital town that
extracted 13 million dollars in silver, zinc,
and copper ore. It was the center of its own
universe. And today? Today it is entirely abandoned.
It is a decaying ghost town of collapsing wood,
silent mills, and empty shafts. So as you look
at our current era of massive industrial booms,
whether that is the oil fields of the backend
formation or the massive energy hungry data centers
of modern tech infrastructure popping up across
the West, ask yourself this. When the resources
dry up in another hundred years, what will we
leave behind? Will it be another collapsing ghost
town or have we finally learned to build a lasting
foundation? Next time you see a pristine postcard
of the wilderness, remember all the complex,
violent and brilliant history buried just beneath
the surface. Keep digging, keep questioning,
and we'll catch you on the next deep dive.