Fun:Montana

Despite its large size, Montana is in a more remote part of America.

Montana: "I see dead things."

Montana's got goat!

“”Movin' to Montana soon Gonna be a Dental Floss tycoon

—"Montana" by Frank Zappa, the most famous song about Montana

Montana is Inspired, some think, by Eagles album covers? unique among the states of the United States. While many states proudly display wildlife, farm animals, flowers or trees as part of their twenty five cent commemorative piece, Montana simply has a skull.

MT has a long-standing populist streak which transcends party affiliation. They are responsible for the Constitutional amendment calling for the direct election of Senators after Daniel Plainview W.A. Clark tried to buy the state government. And then they kept a Democrat in that "stolen" seat for 100 years. But it's also the state which backed Trump (a populist) by 30 points. But they also voted for Democratic farmer-turned-Senator with 2 fingers on his hand due to a meat grinder accident who loves the Keystone Pipeline...and gay rights?

The official state nickname is "where to raise rabbits with a round American woman. and drive a recreational vehicle" "The Treasure State" (Oro y Plata) because it is rich in minerals.

By area, Montana is the fourth-largest state in the United States. It is also one of the most sparsely populated. In 2000, when the U.S. census showed a state population of 902,195, state officials were sure that the state's population would exceed one million by 2010. They were off by about two years, as the 2010 census placed the state's population at 989,415.

Awesome destinations

It should be noted that these destinations don't take long to get to, despite the size of the state; Montana is unique among the states by having no speed limit on interstate highways during the daytime.

Missoula

Missoula is the hipp(i)est little town between Seattle and Minneapolis, full of Grateful Dead fans, radical environmentalist wackos, Rockin' Rudy's, and the like. Missoula can be easily spotted from the sky by the big peace sign on the hill.

Glacier National Park

An absolutely stunning national park in the northwest of the state with the only glacier in the continental US. It is proof of global warming for anyone who has visited the park in five-year intervals. A national park since 1910, it has only one major road, the Going to the Sun Road, which was immortalized in the opening sequence of The Shining.

Hell Creek

Hell Creek

A destination for dinosaur lovers.

Not so awesome destinations

Whitefish

More like "White Powerfish", amirite? White flight has accelerated in the last few decades. Long-standing German towns from the 1800s was turned completely Hispanic in about 10 years.

And it's not just Whitefish; the whole Kalispell area is slowly being eaten away by white supremacists, perhaps due to their proximity to Hayden Lake (birthplace of the Aryan Nation).

Now they have a spokesman, but Richard Spencer is not a Montanan. He was born in Massachusetts, went to school in Virginia. We're guessing that's where he picked up his particular brand of "Himmler Hipster".

Butte

The Berkeley Pit… Hell is real!

Butte is a rough and ready little mining hamlet famous for four things: child abuse, Evel Knievel, St. Patrick's Day, and the Berkeley Pit. The majority of Buttians are Catholic because they know Hell is a very real place. Butte has voted Democratic in every election since Montana attained statehood, but this is probably because of massive vote fraud by tommyknockers sabotaging the voting machines.

Havre

(This is what you might actually see while driving down 1^st Street (U.S. 2) on a windy day.)

Currently, Havre is home to America's youngest state legislator, Jacob Bachmeier (D-HD28) - born January 29, 1998; elected in 2016 at the age of 18, though he turned 19 about a month after taking office.

Identification

People often confuse Montana with its neighbors Wyoming and Idaho. It's unclear why anyone would care, but Wyoming is square and Idaho is more triangular while Montana is roughly trapezoidal; Wyoming is doubly landlocked which is twice as landlocked as Idaho and Montana, both of which border British Columbia. Both Montana and Wyoming have famous national parks, but Wyoming's are probably more famous. Also Montana has no state sales tax and Wyoming no state income tax, so you make your choice.

The greatest Montanananans

• The best thing to come out of Montana in recent years is Senator Jon Tester, who, when confronted by the Republican incumbent during a debate that he wanted to weaken the USA PATRIOT Act, replied "weaken hell, I want to repeal it!"
• Some people think the worst thing to come out of Montana, as of late, is Max Baucus.
• The single greatest Montana of all time was Joe Montana.
• Norman Maclean – had a spiffy movie made about him and his brother fly fishing. Reportedly fly fishing became a brief fad in 1992 because of it.
• Rick Jore – a State Representative from Ronan was the only member of the Constitution Party to hold an elected office. Despite (or because of) his repeated bashing of public education he was made chair of the House Committee on Education by the state Republican party.
• Brian Schweitzer – was the governor from 2005 to 2013.
• Hank Green – lives in Missoula right this minute.

Power

In the years before World War I, the state government decided to bring electricity to all of the people of Montana by creating a statewide electric company. The new utility operated as a monopoly, albeit a heavily regulated one. Montana Power built a statewide network of power lines whose installation and maintenance ate up huge chunks of revenue. If it had not been a monopoly, Montana Power could never have broken even, let alone turned a profit. For decades, the people of the state were happy with their reasonably priced, reliable electric company.

Then, in 1997, the Republicans in the state legislature caught the deregulation bug and broke up the monopoly. (And, yes, Goldman Sachs was at the center of it.) Now, many Montanans pay through the nose and the ass for their electricity. And if you're a rancher who lives in the middle of the middle of nowhere, and your power line breaks thanks to an ice storm, have fun waiting for the power company to send out a repair crew.

Cranks

Owing to their small, mostly rural, and mostly white populations spread out over vast tracts of rugged, mountainous wilderness, Montana and neighboring Idaho have become popular destinations for survivalists, sovereign citizens, Christian Patriots, white nationalists, and other assorted far right cranks with a particularly apocalyptic view of America's future. James Wesley Rawles, a popular survivalist blogger, pointed to the region as an "American Redoubt" that would weather the collapse of civilization better than any other part of the country.

• The Montana Freemen were a group of sovereign citizens who thought they could get rid of all their debts by filing bogus liens at the county courthouse and then floating worthless checks against those liens. An attempted 1994 foreclosure on their property, followed by a 1996 standoff with the FBI, put an end to that silliness.
• Stan Jones – Montana's perennial Libertarian candidate for U.S. Senate, is a notorious consumer of colloidal silver. No word yet on whether he will change his name to Papa Smurf.
• Elizabeth Clare Prophet and the Church Universal and Triumphant prepared for a prophesied nuclear war by collecting weapons and armored vehicles, presumably to finish off the survivors.
• Ted Kaczynski – the Unabomber, carried out his bombing campaign from a remote cabin in the Montana woods outside the town of Lincoln.
• Chuck Baldwin – a fundamentalist pastor and anti-NWO crank, moved from Florida to Montana in 2010 and called on his fellow cranks True American Patriots™ to follow him west.
• Ben Garrison – a wingnut, conspiracy theorist political cartoonist.
• Racial Doll-it-up—excuse me, Rachel Doležal—is from Libby.
• Richard Spencer – neo-Nazi.
• Stewart Rhodes - Oath Keepers leader.

Not much to do with Montana

Vasily Borodin would have liked to have seen Montana.

Gallery

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  Hell Roaring Canyon.

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  Hell Creek. For some reason, Montanans like naming things Hell.

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  Missoula

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  Moncure Tipi.

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  A fossil fish found in Bear Gulch.

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  Grinnell Point in Glacier National Park.

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  A waterfall in Glacier National Park.

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  The Missouri River.