MONTANA is Big Sky country. The nickname
is no empty cliché: the entire state is blessed with a
huge blue roof that both dwarfs the beautiful countryside and
complements it perfectly. A magnificent northernmost cap for
the US Rockies, this is a region of snowcapped summits, turbulent
rivers, spectacular glacial valleys, heavily wooded forests and
sparkling 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.
Preconceptions of a desolate
land populated by cowpokes are soon shattered: each of Montana's
small cities has its own proud identity. 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 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 US.
The fur trappers and
gold miners who were the first whites to brave this inhospitable
terrain 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 1870s the buffalo were almost gone, and most of Montana
had been cleared for settlement.
The speckled cow and
festive cowboy were not in for an easy time. The horrendous winter
of 1886 wiped out many herds, and the "sodbusters"
who planted wheat in the wake of bankrupt ranchers often fared
little better. Plagues of grasshoppers, droughts, falling wheat
prices and erosion of the topsoil caused farms to fail everywhere
in the 1920s, during which time Montana was the only state to
record a population decline.
Wheat has since made
a revival, and now, with lumbering and coal mining, forms the
base of Montana's economy. Tourism is currently the state's second
biggest earner, though, apart from skiing, the harsh climate
generally restricts the season to the months between June and
September
THE UNITED STATES OF
AMERICA