Railroads

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Pamphlet about homesteading opportunities in Montana produced by the Great Northern Railway, 1913. Courtesy of the University of Montana - Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library via Big Sky Country Digital Network.

Early settlers and industrialists realized that the Montana Territory would need to be connected to the rest of the nation in order to grow. Railroads would make remote places accessible to new residents, while shipping the area’s plentiful natural resources to markets across the country.

By 1869, the Union Pacific Railroad’s route through Corinne, Utah, would bring the Transcontinental Railroad within 500 miles of Montana. The Union Pacific started laying track for the Utah and Northern Railway that would connect its system with Butte’s mines. After eight years of arduous construction, the first train arrived in Butte, Montana, in 1881. This symbolic starting point still left most of Montana without railroad access.

As the planning began on massive railroad lines across the southern and northern parts of the territory, railroad companies realized that they would need control of more Indian lands. They pressured the government to negotiate reductions of Indian reservation land through new agreements. Through these corrupt dealings, in 1882, the Crow would lose 1.5 million acres to the Northern Pacific Railroad, while in 1887, northern tribes would sell 17 million acres of land—including the sacred Sweetgrass Hills region—to the Great Northern Railway for 1.5 millions dollars that was never paid in full.

The Northern Pacific and the Great Northern Railway, along with the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Pacific Railroad, which arrived in 1907, employed Asian immigrants in low-paying, back-breaking jobs laying their track and African Americans who worked as porters and waiters on the trains. Their rail lines soon crisscrossed Montana, connecting towns, facilitating industrial boom years, and marking the transition to statehood.