1910 Rand McNally Montana Pocket Map

A 1910 Rand McNally pocket-style folding map of Montana. It presents geographic, administrative, and economic information in rich detail, combining utility and aesthetics.

A Closer Look

This map covers the state of Montana identifying counties, rivers, topography, and railroads, which are listed in red text at bottom-right. Cities and towns are listed at top-left according to their population and are given a coordinate corresponding to the numbered and lettered grid system in the margins. It includes several national parks, national forests, and Indian reservations. These systems were quite young and still evolving, with borders and names changing frequently. For example, both the Big Hole and Hell Gate National Forests southeast of Missoula were divvied up in 1908 and reapportioned to other nearby parks, so that Bitter Root (now stylized as Bitterroot) National Forest extended into southwestern Montana.

Historical Context

At this time, Montana was still in the early phase of statehood and becoming more integrated with the economy and infrastructure of surrounding states. The recent tumult of the Indian Wars and the rapid increase in white settlers (many seeking gold) in the late 19th century would have been fresh in people's minds. The railroads and the confinement of Native Americans to reservations led to a continual increase in white settlers, who then demanded more land, coming into conflict with native peoples and restoking tensions. Pitched battles had been fought as recently as 1887 (the Battle of Big Hole) and legal disputes continued, as additional land was sheaved off from reservations. For instance, in 1904 the U.S. Congress passed an act 'allotting' land in individual parcels to indigenous people on the Flathead Indian Reservation and then claiming the remaining communal land, roughly one-half of the reservation's land, to be 'surplus,' which was then doled out to white settlers.

Then in 1908, a skirmish (known as the Swan Valley Massacre) occurred between Pend d'Oreilles hunters and a Montana state game warden. The hunters resided on the Flathead Reservation but had treaty rights to hunt beyond its borders, a fact that irritated nearby white settlers. The game warden and an armed posse tried to chase off the Pend d'Oreilles several times, and eventually resorted to shooting, leaving four Native Americans and the warden dead.

In the early 20th century, provisions were made in adjustments to the Homestead Act to offer ever larger tracts of land to homesteaders, mostly from the Midwest, to settle in Montana. Large-scale irrigation projects also facilitated agriculture and attracted settlers. Meanwhile, mining moved beyond gold prospecting to coal, copper, and oil, and incorporated advanced technologies, while the vast forests of western Montana were the source for a timber boom that lasted several decades. The development of railroads both facilitated and intensified these processes.

Publication History and Census

This map was published by Rand, McNally, and Co. in 1910, based on their New Business Atlas map of Montana. Two copyrights are indicated here, suggesting that an existing 1909 map was updated in 1910, primarily to incorporate data from the 1910 census. Rand McNally maps of Montana in this format, as a separate issue with a title including 'Indexed County and Township Pocket Map and Shippers Guide,' date from the 1880s and to the mid-1910s, though they do not always include a dated copyright. Despite the wide date range, they are relatively scarce. We note three examples of the 1910 edition cataloged in OCLC: University of Texas at Arlington, Brigham Young University, and the University of Utah.