A Town Every Ten Miles: The Northern Pacific and the Making of Montana

By Editor

Montana Territory, 1881-1890

The Northern Pacific Railroad received a land grant from the United States Congress in 1864 that amounted to approximately 45 million acres, which is a great deal of land for a railroad that had not yet been built and would not be completed for another nineteen years. The terms of the grant were straightforward: the railroad would receive alternating sections of land on either side of its right-of-way, in a checkerboard pattern, for a distance of forty miles in the territories and twenty miles in the states. In exchange, the railroad would build a line from Lake Superior to Puget Sound, which it eventually did, and it would carry government freight and troops at reduced rates, which it also did, and it would transform the territories through which it passed from wilderness into productive agricultural land, which is where the story gets complicated.

The Northern Pacific's approach to town-building was systematic. The railroad's land department would identify a suitable location, survey a townsite, plat the lots, give the town a name, and then sell the lots to whoever would buy them. The names were chosen with care. Billings was named for Frederick Billings, a former president of the railroad. Livingston was named for Crawford Livingston, a director. Townsend was named for the family of the railroad president's wife. Miles City had been there before the railroad arrived, but the railroad improved it considerably by arriving. The towns that the railroad named and platted had one thing in common: they were located where the railroad needed them to be, which was to say at intervals of approximately ten miles, which was the distance a freight wagon could travel in a day, which was the distance that made a town economically viable as a supply point for the surrounding country.

This was not a coincidence. The Northern Pacific's land department understood that a town needed to be close enough to the farms and ranches it served to be useful, and far enough from the next town to have a monopoly on that service. Ten miles was the number they had arrived at, and ten miles was what they built. You can drive across Montana today on Interstate 90 and see the results: towns spaced at regular intervals along the old Northern Pacific right-of-way, some of them still functioning, some of them reduced to a grain elevator and a bar, some of them gone entirely, but all of them located where the railroad's land department decided they should be.

The Northern Pacific also understood that a town needed people, and people needed reasons to come. The railroad's immigration bureau published promotional literature in English, German, Swedish, Norwegian, and other languages, describing the agricultural potential of the Montana plains in terms that a man who had never seen Montana might find persuasive. The literature described the rainfall as adequate, the soil as fertile, and the winters as bracing rather than lethal. It described the land as available and the opportunity as unlimited. It did not describe the grasshoppers, the drought years, the blizzards that could kill a man between his house and his barn, or the fact that the railroad's land grant meant that every other section of land along the route was owned by the railroad and would need to be purchased at railroad prices.

The people came anyway. They came from the eastern states and from Europe, and they took up homestead claims and bought railroad land and built houses and planted crops and discovered, in many cases, that the promotional literature had been optimistic about the rainfall. The towns the railroad had platted served them for as long as they stayed, which in many cases was not long. The homestead boom that the Northern Pacific and the Great Northern had promoted so aggressively collapsed in the drought years of the 1910s and 1920s, and the people who had come to farm the Montana plains went back where they had come from, or went somewhere else, and the towns they had supported shrank or disappeared.

The railroad's land department had made a great deal of money selling lots in towns that no longer exist. The railroad itself went bankrupt in 1893, was reorganized, went bankrupt again in 1970, and was merged into the Burlington Northern. The towns that survived are the ones that had something besides the railroad: a county seat designation, a college, a hospital, a mine, a river crossing. The ones that had only the railroad are mostly gone.

The land grant checkerboard is still visible from the air. The sections the railroad sold to homesteaders and the sections it retained are still different colors in a dry year, because the land that was farmed is different from the land that was not. You can see the pattern from thirty thousand feet, if you know what you are looking at.

See also

• Northern Pacific Railway, history and land grant
• Billings, Montana, the railroad's largest Montana creation
• Livingston, Montana, the Northern Pacific division point at the Yellowstone gateway
• Montana homestead era, the boom and bust the railroads promoted