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By Root 2026 0

Intermontane West also limit Montana’s suitability for growing crops and raising livestock. They are: Montana’s relatively low rainfall, resulting in low rates of plant growth; its high latitude and high altitude, both resulting in a short growing season and limiting crops to one a year rather than the two a year possible in areas with a longer summer; and its distance from markets in the more densely populated areas of the U.S. that might buy its products. What those disadvantages mean is that anything grown in Montana can be grown more cheaply and with higher productivity, and transported faster and more cheaply to population centers, elsewhere in North America. Hence Montana’s history consists of attempts to answer the fundamental question of how to make a living in this beautiful, but agriculturally non-competitive land.

Human occupation of Montana falls into several economic phases. The first phase was of Native Americans, who arrived at least 13,000 years ago. In contrast to the agricultural societies that they developed in eastern and southern North America, Montana’s Native Americans before European arrival remained hunter-gatherers, even in areas where agriculture and herding are practiced today. One reason is that Montana lacked native wild plant and animal species lending themselves to domestication, so there were no independent origins of agriculture in Montana, in contrast to the situation in eastern North America and Mexico. Another reason is that Montana lay far from those two Native American centers of independent agricultural origins, so that crops originating there had not spread to Montana by the time of European arrival. Today, about three-quarters of Montana’s remaining Native Americans live on seven reservations, most of which are poor in natural resources except for pasture.

The first recorded Europeans to visit Montana were the members of the transcontinental Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-1806, which spent more time in what was later to become Montana than in any other state. They were followed by Montana’s second economic phase involving the “mountain men,” fur trappers and traders coming down from Canada and also from the U.S. The next phase began in the 1860s and was based on three foundations of Montana’s economy that have continued (albeit with diminishing importance) until the present: mining, especially of copper and gold; logging; and food production, involving raising cattle and sheep and growing grains, fruits, and vegetables. The influx of miners to Montana’s big copper mine at Butte stimulated other sectors of the economy to meet the needs of that internal market within the state. In particular, much timber was taken out of the nearby Bitterroot Valley to provide power for the mines, to construct miners’ houses, and to shore up the mine shafts; and much food for the miners was grown in the valley, whose southerly location and mild climate (by Montana standards) give it the nickname of “Montana’s Banana Belt.” Although the valley’s rainfall is low (13 inches per year) and the natural vegetation is sagebrush, the first European settlers in the 1860s already began overcoming that disadvantage by building small irrigation ditches fed by streams draining the Bitterroot Mountains on the valley’s west side; and later, by engineering two sets of large-scale and expensive irrigation systems, one (the so-called Big Ditch) built in 1908-1910 to take water from Lake Como on the west side of the valley, and the other consisting of several large irrigation canals drawing water from the Bitterroot River itself. Among other things, irrigation permitted a boom in apple orchards that began in the Bitterroot Valley in the 1880s and peaked in the early decades of the 20th century, but today few of those orchards remain in commercial operation.

Of those former bases of Montana’s economy, hunting and fishing have shifted from a subsistence activity to a recreation; the fur trade is extinct; and mines, logging, and agriculture are declining in importance, because of economic and environmental factors