Glendive

Glendive was founded in the early 1880s, and its growth was promoted and sustained by the Northern Pacific Railroad. Legend holds that Sir George Gore, on a hunting expedition with famed mountain man Jim Bridger, named a creek in the area Glendale Creek after a similar one in his native County Donegal, Ireland. Over the years, the word Glendale somehow transformed into Glendive. Prior to the arrival of European Americans, indigenous peoples, including the Crow and the Lakota Sioux, called the area home. The arrival of the Northern Pacific in 1881, along with the passage of the Enlarged Homestead Act in 1909, lured people from America and abroad to this isolated region to pursue their version of the American dream."

Local historian and professor of history Dr. R. Michael Booker Jr. offers a visual account of the origins of this remote Montana town through photographs from the Frontier Gateway Museum, Glendive Ranger-Review, and other private collections. Booker delves into the history of this rugged town set in the surreal landscape of the Lower Yellowstone River Valley and Makoshika Badlands, thoroughly chronicling the stages of Glendive's development through the first half of the 20th century.