Founding
city in and county seat of Yellowstone County, Montana, United States
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Billings is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Montana, and the 253rd most populous city in the United States. The population was 117,116 at the 2020 census, while the Billings metropolitan area has an estimated 193,000 people. Located in the south-central portion of the state, it is the county seat of Yellowstone County. Billings is the trade and distribution center for much of Montana east of the Continental Divide and has one of the largest trade areas in the United States. It is also the largest retail destination for much of the same area. The Billings Chamber of Commerce claims the area of commerce covers more than 125,000 square miles (320,000 km2).
Billings was nicknamed the "Magic City" because of its rapid growth from its founding as a railroad town in March 1882. The nearby Crow and Cheyenne peoples call the city Ammalapáshkuua and É'êxováhtóva respectively, meaning 'where they cut wood', named as such because of a sawmill built in the area by early white settlers. The city has experienced rapid growth and maintains a strong economy. From 1969 to 2021, the Billings area population growth was 89%, compared to Montana's overall increase of 59%. With more hotel accommodations than any area within a five-state region, the city hosts a variety of conventions, concerts, sporting events, and other rallies. It provides services to the Bakken oil development 250 to 350 miles to the east, as well as the Heath Shale oil discovery north of Billings.
Attractions in and around Billings include ZooMontana, the Yellowstone Art Museum, Pompey's Pillar, Pictograph Cave, Chief Plenty Coups State Park, Little Bighorn Battlefield, Bighorn Canyon, Red Lodge Mountain, and the Beartooth Highway. The northeast entrance to Yellowstone National Park is a little over 100 miles (160 km) from Billings.
The city is named for Frederick H. Billings, a former president of the Northern Pacific Railroad from Woodstock, Vermont. An earlier name for the area was Clark's Fork Bottom.
The Crow people from the nearby Crow Indian Reservation call the city Ammalapáshkuua. It means 'where they cut wood', and is named as such because of a sawmill built in the area by early white settlers. The Cheyenne from the nearby Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation refer to the city as É'êxováhtóva, 'sawing place' and the Gros Ventre from the nearby Fort Belknap Indian Reservation refer to it as ʔóhuutébiθɔnɔ́ɔ́nh (lit. 'where they saw lumber'), both also named for the sawmill, or translations of the Crow name.
The downtown core and much of the rest of Billings is in the Yellowstone Valley, a canyon carved out by the Yellowstone River. Around 80 million years ago, the Billings area was on the shore of the Western Interior Seaway. The sea deposited sediment and sand around the shoreline. As the sea retreated, it left a deep layer of sand. Over millions of years, this sand was compressed into stone known as Eagle Sandstone. Over the last million years the river has carved its way down through this stone to form the canyon walls known as the Billings Rimrocks or the Rims.
The Pictograph Caves are about five miles south of downtown. These caves contain over 100 pictographs (rock paintings), the oldest of which is over 2,000 years old. Approximately 30,000 artifacts (including stone tools and weapons) have been excavated from the site. These excavations have proven the area has been occupied since at least 2600 BC until after AD 1800.
The Crow Indians have called the Billings area home since about 1700. The present-day Crow Nation is just south of Billings.
In July 1806, William Clark (of the Lewis and Clark Expedition) passed through the Billings area. On July 25 he arrived at what is now known as Pompey's Pillar and wrote in his journal, "... at 4 P M arrived at a remarkable rock, I ascended this rock and from its top had a most extensive view in every direction." Clark carved his name and the date into the rock, leaving the only remaining physical evidence of their expedition. He named the place Pompey's Tower, naming it after the son of his Shoshone interpreter and guide Sacajawea. In 1965, Pompey's Pillar was designated as a national historic landmark, and was proclaimed a national monument in January 2001. An interpretive center has been built next to the monument.
The area where Billings is today was known as Clark's Fork Bottom. Clark's Fork Bottom was to be the hub for hauling freight to Judith and Musselshell Basins. At the time these were some of the most productive areas of the Montana Territory. The plan was to run freight up Alkali Creek, now part of Billings Heights, to the basins and Fort Benton on the Hi-Line.
In 1877, settlers from the Gallatin Valley area of the Montana Territory formed Coulson, the first town of the Yellowstone Valley. The town was started when John Alderson built a sawmill and P. W. McAdow opened a general store and trading post on land Alderson owned on the bank of the Yellowstone River. Other buildings and tents were built as the town began to grow. At this time, before the coming of the railroad, most goods coming to and going from the Montana Territory were carried on paddle riverboats. The town was named Coulson in an attempt to attract the Coulson Packet Company that ran riverboats between St. Louis and many points in the Montana Territory. However, riverboats would only rarely run so far upriver.
Coulson was a rough town of dance halls and saloons and not a single church. Needing a sheriff, Coulson recruited John "Liver-Eating" Johnson. Many disagreements were settled by gunfire, and a graveyard was soon needed. The result was Boothill Cemetery, so named because most of those interred were said to have died with their boots on. One notable burial in Coulson's Boothill Cemetery is H.M. "Muggins" Taylor, the scout who carried the news of Custer's Last Stand at the Battle of Little Bighorn to the world. Today, Boothill Cemetery is the only remaining physical evidence of Coulson's existence.
When the railroad came to the area, Coulson residents were sure the town would become the railroads hub and Coulson would soon be the territory's largest city. The railroad only had claim to odd sections and it had two sections side-by-side about two miles west of Coulson. Being able to make far more profit by creating a new town on these two sections, the railroad decided to create the new town of Billings. For a short time, the two towns existed side by side with a horse-drawn trolley running between them. However, most of Coulson's residents gradually moved to the new booming town of Billings. The last remains of Coulson disappearing in the 1930s. Today, Coulson Park—along the Yellowstone River—marks the site of the former town.
Named after the Northern Pacific Railway president Frederick H. Billings, the city was founded in 1882. The Railroad formed the city as a western railhead for its further westward expansion. At first the new town had only three buildings, but within just a few months, it had grown to over 2,000. This spurred Billings's nickname of the Magic City because, like magic, it seemed to appear overnight.
Billings's original townsite flanked the Northern Pacific Railroad line. The street layout was based on Bismarck and Jamestown, North Dakota. Uniquely, Billings was designed with two main commercial streets along each side of the railroad: Montana Avenue on the north, and Minnesota Avenue to the south. The streets were named after the Minnesota & Montana Land Improvement Company, which plotted the townsite. The original railroad depot, on Montana Avenue at 28th St. (Broadway), spurred early business development along with north side of the tracks.
During the fledgling town's first year of existence, the institutions required to support a permanent settlement were quickly established. Billings became home to two newspapers: the Post (formerly published in Coulson) and the Herald. The Congregational church began holding services in early spring, and soon after, built a temporary building on land donated by the townsite company. A post office was established in Billings in July, and school classes began in September. After Yellowstone County was divided from Custer County that winter—with Billings named the county seat—the newly formed School District 2 was formalized in June 1883. Frederick and Julia Billings donated much of the funding for a permanent school building. They also provided funding for a brick edifice for the Congregational church.
Despite the markers of organized society, Billings retained some of the colorful character of a frontier town. On July 13, 1891, a mob hung an unidentified man who had been arrested for the murder of well-liked barkeeper Joseph Clancy, who owned a bar on Minnesota Avenue. This was the only lynching in the city's history. A few years later, Minnesota Avenue earned a reputation as Billings's red-light district, with prostitutes operating out of high-end "parlor houses." Other prostitutes operated out of lower-end "cribs" or engaged in streetwalking. Olive Warren, who moved to Billings in 1897 after working in the Denver red-light district, opened the Lucky Diamond—the finest brothel in Montana—in 1902. Minnesota Avenue also anchored a small Chinese district. This included the L and L Building, owned by entrepreneur Yee Sam Lee and occupied for a short time by Calamity Jane.
In the early 1900s, business activity on the north side of the track was booming. The Billings Depot was rebuilt four blocks east of the original depot site in 1909, prompting the construction of new hotels, eateries, and saloons along Montana Avenue to serve railroad passengers. Downtown was expanding to the north as well, along North Broadway, with buildings such as the old City Hall and the Babcock Theatre. The lots adjoining the railroad were largely occupied by wholesale warehouses, making Billings an important regional distribution hub. These included two entire South Side blocks occupied by the Yegen Brothers' wholesale grocery business.
A sugar beet factory was established in Billings in 1906. Immigrants from countries including Japan, Mexico, and Germany were employed as laborers and lived with their families near the factory on Billings's South Side. The local Mexican community was celebrating an annual fiesta as early as the 1930s. Some of the German families later relocated east of Billings to farm land irrigated by the Huntley Project.
By the 1910 census, Billings's population had risen to 10,031, ranking it the sixth fastest-growing community in the nation. Billings became an energy center in the early years of the twentieth century with the discovery of oil fields in Montana and Wyoming. Then, the discovery of large natural gas and coal reserves secured the city's rank as first in energy. Billings developed into the regional trading center and energy hub for eastern Montana and northern Wyoming, an area then known as the Midland Empire.
After World War II, Billings became the region's major financial, medical and cultural center. Largely because of the energy sector, the city's growth remained robust. After oil was discovered in the Williston Basin in 1951, Billings became a hub for related economic activity, with several companies building regional division offices in the city. Though the boom ended by the end of the decade, Billings had grown by 66 percent. Later, the 1973 oil embargo by OPEC spurred an oil boom in eastern Montana, northern Wyoming and western North Dakota. With this increase in oil production, Billings became the headquarters for energy sector companies. Then, between 1975 and 1986, Billings benefited from four new coal-fire generation plants at Colstrip.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Billings saw major growth in its downtown core; the first high-rise buildings to be built in Montana were erected. In 1980, the 22-floor Sheraton Hotel was completed. Upon its completion, it was declared "the tallest load-bearing brick masonry building in the world" by the Brick Institute of America. During the 1970s and 1980s, other major buildings were constructed in the downtown core; the Norwest Building (now Wells Fargo), Granite Tower, Sage Tower, the MetraPark Arena, the TransWestern Center, many new city-owned parking garages, and the First Interstate Center, the tallest building in Montana.
With the completion of large sections of the interstate system in Montana in the 1970s, Billings became a shopping destination for an ever-larger area. Rimrock Mall opened in 1975, on what was then the city's west end. Cross Roads Food Center, the largest supermarket in Montana, opened in 1976 in the Billings Heights and gradually expanded into Crossroads Mall. West Park Plaza opened in Midtown. Several new business parks were also developed on the city's west end during this period.
Billings was affected by the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in May; the city received about 1-inch (25 mm) of ash on the ground. The Yellowstone fires of 1988 blanketed Billings in smoke for weeks.
In the 1990s, the service sector in the city increased with the development of new shopping centers built around big box stores which built multiple outlets in the Billings area. With the addition of more interchange exits along I-90, additional hotel chains and service industry outlets are being built in Billings. Development of business parks and large residential developments on the city's west end, South Hills area, Lockwood, and the Billings Heights were all part of the 1990s. Billings received the All-America City Award in 1992.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Billings, Montana”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.