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Deal of the Week
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
state capital Helena still harks back
to its prosperous gold mining years.
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. Another
significant money-earner is tourism, though
apart from skiing the harsh climate
restricts the season to the months between
June and September.
Click here to go to Montana State
web site. |
