Montana

A mining state owned for decades by one copper company, in a landscape large enough to hide it. Montana was gold camp country in the 1860s, but the wealth was at Butte, whose copper hill supplied a large share of the world's demand exactly as electrification created it. The war of the copper kings between Marcus Daly, William Clark and Augustus Heinze ended with the Anaconda Company controlling the mines, most of the state's newspapers and much of its politics into the 1950s - Clark's purchase of a Senate seat helped bring about the direct election of senators. The Lakota, Cheyenne and Crow held the eastern plains, and Custer's command was destroyed at the Little Bighorn in June 1876; the Nez Perce were caught forty miles from the Canadian border in 1877 after a fighting retreat of over a thousand miles. Statehood came in 1889. Jeannette Rankin of Montana became the first woman elected to Congress in 1916, four years before national women's suffrage, and voted against entering both world wars. Butte's Berkeley Pit is now a toxic lake. Helena is the capital. The state is fourth largest and among the least densely populated. The state's name comes from the Spanish for mountain, though most of it is plains. Glacier national park adjoins Canada's Waterton as an international peace park. Montana has more cattle than people. It had no daytime speed limit on rural interstates for several years in the 1990s. The Continental Divide runs through it. Sapphires and Yogo gemstones are mined in the west of the state.

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