Montana Travel and Tourism Guide. Find Hotels, Destinations and Maps.

Montana Travel and Tourism Guide. Find Hotels, Destinations, Maps and Plan the Perfect Trip to Montana.

The State of MONTANA is Big Sky country. The nickname is no empty cliche: the entire State is blessed with a vast blue roof that both dwarfs the beautiful countryside and complements it perfectly. A magnificent northernmost cap for the U.S. Rockies, this is a region of snowcapped mountains, tumultuous rivers, spectacular glacial valleys, heavily wooded forests and dazzling blue lakes, at their most dramatic in Glacier National Park . By contrast, the Eastern two thirds is high prairie: sun-parched in summer and wracked by icy blizzards each winter.

The Preconception of a desolate land populated by cowpokes are soon shattered: each of the small cities in Montana offers its own proud personality. The university and sawmill community of Missoula, for example, possesses a high culture feel absent from the heavily Irish, copper mining town and union stronghold of Butte, while the elegant State Capital Helena still harks back to its prosperous gold mining years and Bozeman, just to the south, is one of the hippest mountain towns in the U.S.A.

The fur trappers and gold miners who were the first whites to brave this uninviting landscape soon moved on, but as white settlers invaded Native American hunting grounds, conflict was inevitable. A key plank of army strategy was to starve the Native Americans into submission: For the sake of a lasting peace let them professional hunters kill, skin and sell until the buffalo are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered by the speckled cow and the festive cowboy," declared General Philip Sheridan. By the late 1870's almost all of the Buffalos were gone, and most of Montana had been cleared for settlements.

The speckled cow and festive cowboy were not in for an easy time. The horrific winter of 1886 wiped out many herds, and the "sodbusters" who planted wheat in the wake of bankrupt farmers often fared little better. Plagues of grasshoppers, droughts, diminishing wheat prices and erosion of the topsoil caused farms to fail everywhere in the 1920's, during which time the State of Montana was the only one to record a population decline.

Wheat has since made a resurgence, and now with lumbering and coal mining, forms the base of the State of Montana's economy. Tourism is currently the second biggest earner in Montana, though, apart from skiing, the unforgiving climate generally restricts the season to the months between June and September.

Eastern Montana
Before ranchers and farmers settled the flat prairie of Eastern Montana, it was prime Buffalo territory: one early traveler waited four nights while a huge herd crossed his path. Indians fought hard to hold onto their land; the overwhelming defeats they inflicted on the U.S. Army include the legendary victory at Little Bighorn .

The plains of Eastern Montana are intermittently broken by mountains, of which the most impressive are the icy Beartooth Range, crammed between the town of Red Lodge and Yellowstone. Dont expect much from the regions towns: most are lazy farm-supply centers, and Billings Montana is the largest city with a population of over 91,000, doesn't have much to offer.

Western Montana
The western third of Montana sees the state at its best from Big Timber westwards, I 90 squeezes between incredibly dramatic mountain ranges, making an exhilarating approach to Yellowstone country, replete with outdoor opportunities and lively communities. The few mining camps that grew into substantial permanent settlements were state capital Helena and craggy Butte, which made most of it's money from copper and zinc. Between the two cities, they conjure up more of a feel for the rambunctious times, the lust for gain and the post bust hardships of the era than all the hyped up ghost towns in the Rockies combined.

Montana Tourism and Hotels Guide
Montana Tourism