Archeological evidence suggests the humans have been around the lands of northern Montana since at least 10,000 years ago. The hunter-gatherer societies changed little from the earliest times to when the European settlers arrived to find several Indian tribes. The Blackfeet Indians were settled on the prairies east of the mountains, while the Salish and Kootenai Indians settled in the mountain valleys of the west, going over them to hunt buffalo in the Western plains. There was something majestic, unspoiled about the beauty of the land that made the settlers decide to preserve it, even after driving out the Indians.

On this day, May 11, 1910, President William Howard Taft signed into law a bill establishing Glacier as the country’s tenth National Park. Taft was persuaded in part by the lobbying of tycoon James J. Hill, who built the Great Northern Railroad that traveled through the southern tip of Glacier.

Today Glacier National park spreads out over a million acres with parts of two mountain ranges going through it. True to its name, Glacier holds over 130 named lakes, along with more than 1,000 different species of plants and hundreds of species of animals. It is the centerpiece of the “Crown of the Continent Ecosystem”, an immense stretch of mostly natural areas  about three times the size of Connecticut, stretching between Canada and the norther U.S.