Great Falls is the third most populous city in the U.S. state of Montana and the county seat of Cascade County. The population was 60,442 according to the 2020 census. The city covers an area of

A cultural, commercial and financial center in the central part of the state, Great Falls is located just east of the Rocky Mountains and is bisected by the Missouri River. It is from the eastern entrance to Glacier National Park in northern Montana, and from Yellowstone National Park in southern Montana and northern Wyoming. Interstate 15, which runs north-south, services the city.

Great Falls is named for a series of five waterfalls located on the Missouri River north and east of the city. The Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1805–1806 was forced to portage around a stretch of the river in order to bypass the falls; the company spent 31 days in the area, performing arduous labor to make the portage. Three of the waterfalls, known as Black Eagle, Rainbow and the Great Falls (or the Big Falls), are among the sites of five hydroelectric dams in the area, giving the city its moniker, "The Electric City". The federally recognized Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians of Montana are located in Great Falls.

Great Falls is a popular tourist destination in Montana, with one million overnight visitors annually, who spend an estimated $185 million while visiting, according to the Great Falls Montana Tourism group. Among Montana cities, Great Falls boasts the greatest number of museums, with 10, including the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center near Giant Springs and the C. M. Russell Museum and Original Log Cabin Studio on the city's north side. Great Falls was the largest city in Montana from 1951 to 1970, when it was eclipsed by Billings in the 1970 census; Missoula assumed second place in 2000.

History

For much of prehistory, no permanent settlements existed at or near Great Falls, though Salish Indians seasonally hunted bison in the region. Around 1600, Piegan Blackfeet Indians, migrating west, entered the area, pushing the Salish back into the Rocky Mountains and claiming the area now occupied by Great Falls.

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led the Lewis and Clark Expedition into the newly purchased territory from 1804 to 1806. The expedition came upon the "Great Falls of the Missouri River" on June 13, 1805.

thumb|right|1891 bird's-eye illustration of Great Falls

Politically, the future site of Great Falls passed through numerous hands in the 19th century. It was part of the unincorporated frontier until May 30, 1854, when Congress established the Nebraska Territory. On March 2, 1861, the site became part of the Dakota Territory. The Great Falls area was incorporated into the Idaho Territory on March 4, 1863, and then into the Montana Territory on May 28, 1864. He returned in 1883 with friend Robert Vaughn and some surveyors and platted a permanent settlement on the south side of the river. A planing mill, lumber yard, bank, school, and newspaper were established in 1885. In 1894, naturalist Vernon Bailey passed through and described Great Falls as "a very good town, appears prosperous and booming & I should judge contains 15000 inhabitants". By the early 1900s, Great Falls was en route to becoming one of Montana's largest cities. The rustic studio of famed Western artist Charles Marion Russell was a popular attraction, as were the famed Great Falls of the Missouri.

Among structures built in the early years were the sandstone Central High School (completed in 1896), now the Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art; the ornate copper-domed Cascade County Courthouse (1903); and railroad passenger depots of the Great Northern Railway (1909) and the Milwaukee Road (1915), both overlooking the Missouri River.

Railroad and hydroelectric expansion

James Jerome Hill, president and primary stockholder of the Great Northern Railway, established a subsidiary, the Montana Central Railway, on January 25, 1886. The mines in Butte were eager to get their metals to market. Gold and silver had been discovered near Helena, and coal companies in Canada sought to transport their fuel to Montana's smelters. Hill's close friend and business associate, Paris Gibson, promoted Great Falls as a site for the development of cheap hydroelectricity and heavy industry. As Hill was building the Great Northern across the northern tier of Montana, it made sense to also build a north–south railroad through central Montana to connect Great Falls with Helena and Butte. Surveyors and engineers had begun grading a route between Helena and Great Falls in the winter of 1885–1886, and by the end of 1886 had surveyed a route from Helena to Butte.

Construction on the Great Northern's line westward began in late 1886, and on October 16, 1887, the link between Devils Lake, North Dakota, Fort Assinniboine (near the present-day city of Havre, Montana), and Great Falls was complete. Service to Helena began in November 1887, and Butte followed on November 10, 1888.

Hill organized the Great Falls Water Power & Townsite Company in 1887, with the goal of developing the town of Great Falls; providing it with power, sewage, and water; and attracting commerce and industry to the city. To attract industry to the new city, he offered low rates on the Montana Central Railway. On September 12, 1889, the Boston and Montana ("B & M") signed an agreement with Great Falls Water Power & Townsite Company in which the power company agreed to build a dam that would supply the mining firm with at least 1,000 horsepower (or 0.75 MW) of power by September 1, 1890, and 5,000 horsepower (or 3.73 MW) of power by January 1, 1891. In exchange, B & M agreed to build a $300,000 copper smelter near the dam. Black Eagle Dam began generating electricity in December 1890. Water was permitted to flow over the crest of the dam on January 6, 1891, and the dam was considered complete on March 15, 1891. By 1912, Rainbow Dam and Volta Dam (now Ryan Dam) were all operating.

1930–present

During the first two decades of the 20th century, Great Falls prospered from a homesteading boom, strong agricultural markets and favorable weather. It also became a financial center and regional shopping hub. In the late 1930s, the federal government's New Deal programs provided Great Falls with a new Civic Center building, and the city's business sector expanded with the arrival of military installations during World War II, helping Great Falls become the state's largest city from 1950 to 1970. During World War II, the Northwest Staging Route passed through Great Falls, along which planes were delivered to the USSR according to the Lend-Lease program. Great Falls prospered further with the opening of a nearby military base in the 1940s, but as rail transportation and freight slowed in the later part of the century, outlying farming areas lost population, and with the closure of the smelter and cutbacks at Malmstrom Air Force Base in the 1980s, its population growth slowed.

Great Falls was the location of the Mariana UFO incident in 1950, one of the earliest widely publicized UFO incidents.

On February 11, 2013, the residents of Great Falls were met with a false Emergency Alert System message during an afternoon broadcast of The Steve Wilkos Show on CBS affiliate television station KRTV, which simply stated that "the bodies of the dead are rising from their graves and attacking the living. Do not attempt to approach these bodies, as they are considered extremely dangerous." It was revealed that a default password for the networks was being used, and a few minutes later, the station sent an official on-screen message apologizing for any confusion.

In recent years, the economy of Great Falls has suffered from the decline of heartland industry, much like other cities in the Great Plains and Midwest.

Geography

thumb|upright=1.3|Map of Montana showing Glacial Lake Great Falls

Great Falls is located near several waterfalls on the Missouri River. It lies near the center of Montana on the northern Great Plains. It lies next to the Rocky Mountain Front and is approximately south of the Canada–US border. According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of , of which is land and is water.

Geology

The city of Great Falls lies atop the Great Falls Tectonic Zone, an intracontinental shear zone between two geologic provinces of basement rock of the Archean period which form part of the North American continent. The city lies at the southern reach of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, a vast glacial sheet of ice which covered much of North America during the last glacial period. Approximately 1.5 million years ago, the Missouri River flowed northward into a terminal lake. The Laurentide Ice Sheet pushed the river southward. Between 15,000 BCE and 11,000 BCE, the Laurentide Ice Sheet blocked the Missouri River and created Glacial Lake Great Falls. About 13,000 BCE, as the glacier retreated, Glacial Lake Great Falls emptied catastrophically in a glacial lake outburst flood. The Missouri River flowed eastward around the glacial mass, settling into its present course.

Climate

Great Falls has a cold semi-arid climate (Köppen: BSk), with a notable amount of summer precipitation occurring in the form of thunderstorms. Winters are very cold, long and often snowy, though periods of chinook winds do cause warm spells and raise the maximum temperature above on an average of fifteen afternoons during the three-month winter period. In the absence of such winds, shallow cold snaps are common; there is an average of 20.8 nights with a low of or colder and 44 days failing to top freezing. The wettest part of the year is the spring. Summers are hot and dry, with highs reaching on nineteen days per year, though the diurnal temperature variation is large and easily exceeds . Freak early and late summer snowfalls such as a two-day total of in August 1992 can occur, although the median snowfall from June to September is zero and on average the window for accumulating () snowfall is October 2–May 13.

|source 2 = NOAA

Suburbs

Census-designated places contiguous to the City of Great Falls include:

  • Black Eagle
  • Malmstrom AFB

Nearby communities

The entirety of Cascade County forms the Great Falls Metropolitan statistical area. Great Falls is an economic hub for a substantially larger region that includes most of north-central Montana. Small towns and census-designated places in Cascade County near Great Falls include:

  • Belt
  • Cascade
  • Fort Shaw
  • Gibson Flats
  • Monarch
  • Neihart
  • Sand Coulee
  • Simms
  • Sun Prairie
  • Sun River
  • Ulm
  • Vaughn

Demographics