Montana: Early Inhabitants, Fur Trading, and Gold

Native Americans known to have inhabited Montana at the time Europeans first explored it included the Blackfoot, the Sioux, the Shoshone, the Arapaho, the Kootenai, the Cheyenne, the Salish, and others. Exploration of the region began in earnest after most of Montana had passed to the United States under the Louisiana Purchase (1803). The Lewis and Clark expedition traveled westward across Montana in 1805, and François Antoine Laroque, along with his North West Company of Canada, explored the Yellowstone River after 1805.

The area's rivers were important avenues of travel for the native inhabitants as well as the early explorers of the country; the first trading post in Montana was established at the mouth of the Bighorn in 1807 by a trading expedition that Manuel Lisa led up the Missouri from St. Louis. For some years thereafter both Canadian and American fur traders continued to open up the territory. David Thompson of the North West Company built several trading posts in NW Montana between 1807 and 1812, and beaver in the mountain streams and lakes attracted adventurous trappers, the so-called mountain men. The American Fur Company, with its posts on the Missouri and the Yellowstone, dominated the later years of the region's fur trade, which diminished in the 1840s.

The U.S. claim to NW Montana, the area between the Rockies and the N Idaho border, was validated in the Oregon Treaty of 1846 with the British. Montana was then still a wilderness of forest and grass, with a few trading posts and some missions. Montana's first period of growth was the rapid, boisterous, and unstable expansion brought on by a gold rush. The discovery of gold, made initially in 1852, brought many people to mushrooming mining camps such as those at Bannack (1862) and Virginia City (1864). Crude shantytowns were built, complete with saloons and dance halls—ephemeral settlements as colorful as the earlier gold-rush camps in California and perhaps even more lawless.

Sections in this article:

• Introduction
• Economic Diversification
• The Expansion of Agriculture
• The Importance of Mining
• Territorial Status, Sioux Resistance, and Statehood
• Early Inhabitants, Fur Trading, and Gold
• Government and Higher Education
• Economy
• Geography
• Facts and Figures

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