Montana County Map: All 56 Counties

Western Montana counties—such as Flathead, Missoula, Gallatin, Ravalli, and Lewis and Clark—straddle the Continental Divide and Northern Rocky Mountains. These counties house Montana's booming technology, tourism, and university economies (University of Montana in Missoula and Montana State in Bozeman), alongside Glacier National Park and Yellowstone National Park gateway communities.

Eastern Montana counties—including Dawson, Richland, Custer, and Valley—stretch across the semi-arid northern Great Plains. Dominated by dryland winter wheat farming, open-range cattle grazing, and the Bakken oil shale basin, these counties maintain extremely low population densities, often below 2 persons per square mile.

Beaverhead County in southwestern Montana encompasses 5,542 square miles of public national forest, blue-ribbon trout streams (the Beaverhead and Big Hole rivers), and sprawling cattle ranches, making it larger than the entire state of Connecticut.

During the late nineteenth century, the "Copper Kings" of Butte (Marcus Daly, William A. Clark, and F. Augustus Heinze) mined immense deposits of copper in Silver Bow County, while ore was smelted at the Washoe Smelter in neighboring Deer Lodge County (Anaconda).

As the underground mines closed and open-pit mining automated in the mid-twentieth century, both communities faced shrinking tax bases and declining populations. Following the ratification of the 1972 Montana Constitution, which explicitly granted local government charter and consolidation authority, voters in both jurisdictions took historic action.

In 1977, Butte and Silver Bow County merged into Butte-Silver Bow, and Anaconda and Deer Lodge County merged into Anaconda-Deer Lodge. These consolidated city-counties eliminated duplicate police, road, and administrative departments, governed by unified Chief Executives and Councils of Commissioners.