History of Montana

This is a broad outline of the history of Montana in the United States.

For thousands of years indigenous peoples inhabited what would be Montana. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 included this land and it was explored during the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The first permanent settlement by Euro-Americans was St. Mary's, established in 1841 near present-day Stevensville. The Montana Territory was established in 1864 and Montana officially became a state on November 8, 1889.

Lake Missoula was a prehistoric proglacial lake in western Montana that existed periodically at the end of the last ice age between 15,000 and 13,000 years ago.

Archeological evidence has shown Paleo-Indians lived in the area for more than 12,000 years. The oldest dated human burial site in North America was located in 1968 near Wilsall, Montana at what is now known as the Anzick site (named for the discoverers). The human remains of a male infant, found at the Anzick site along with Clovis culture artifacts, establish the earliest known human habitation in what is now Montana. In 2014 a group of scientists released the results of a major project in which they successfully reconstructed the genome of the Anzick boy, providing the first genetic evidence that the Clovis people were descended from Asians. Most indigenous people of the region were nomadic, following the buffalo herds and other game and living by seasonal cycles. Several major tribal groups made their home in and around the land that later became Montana.

The Crow, a Siouan-language people, also known as the Apsáalooke, were the first of the native nations currently living in Montana to arrive in the region. Around 1700 AD they moved from Alberta to south-central Montana and northern Wyoming. In the 19th century, Crow warriors were allies and scouts for the United States Army The modern Crow Indian Reservation is Montana's largest reservation, located in southeastern Montana along the Big Horn River, in the vicinity of Hardin, Montana.

The Cheyenne have a reservation in the southeastern portion of the state, east and adjacent to the Crow. The Cheyenne language is part of the larger Algonquian language group, but it is one of the few Plains Algonquian languages to have developed tonal characteristics. The closest linguistic relatives of the Cheyenne language are Arapaho and Ojibwa. Little is known about the Cheyenne people before the 16th century when they were first recorded in European explorers' and traders' accounts.

The Blackfeet reservation today is located in northern Montana adjacent to Glacier National Park. Prior to the reservation era, the Blackfoot were fiercely independent and highly successful warriors whose territory stretched from the North Saskatchewan River along what is now Edmonton, Alberta in Canada, to the Yellowstone River of Montana, and from the Rocky Mountains east to the Saskatchewan River. Their nation consisted of three main branches, the Piegan, the Blood, and the Siksika. In the summer, they lived a nomadic, hunting lifestyle, and in the winter, the Blackfeet people lived in various winter camps dispersed perhaps a day's march apart along a wooded river valley. They did not move camp in winter unless food for the people and horses or firewood became depleted.

The Assiniboine also known by the Ojibwe exonym Asiniibwaan ("Stone Sioux"), today live on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in Northeastern Montana shared with a branch of the Sioux nation. Intermarriage has led to some of the people now identifying as "Assiniboine Sioux". Prior to the reservation era, they inhabited the Northern Great Plains area of North America, specifically present-day Montana and parts of Saskatchewan, Alberta and southwestern Manitoba around the US/Canada border. They were well known throughout much of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Images of Assiniboine people were painted by such 19th-century artists as Karl Bodmer and George Catlin. The Assiniboine have many similarities to the Lakota Sioux in lifestyle, language, and cultural habits. They are considered a band of the Nakoda, or middle division of the Sioux nation. Pooling their research, historians, linguists and anthropologists have concluded the Assiniboine broke away from the Lakota and Dakota Sioux bands in the 17th century.