The President and the Magic City:

William Howard Taft’s 1911 Visit to Billings, Montana

Introduction: A President on the Move

In the autumn of 1911, William Howard Taft undertook one of the most ambitious presidential tours of the early twentieth century. Beginning in September and extending into November, Taft traveled extensively across the United States, making hundreds of speeches in dozens of states. The western leg of the journey carried him through Montana in October, and among the stops he made in the state, his visit to Billings stands as a revealing moment in the history of both the presidency and the city then known as the Magic City. What Taft found there, and what Billings made of him, illuminates a particular intersection of federal ambition, regional aspiration, and the practical politics of a presidency under strain.

Taft’s 1911 tour was not a campaign in the conventional sense. The presidential election was still more than a year away, and Taft publicly insisted the tour was something other than political theater. In practice, however, it was hard to draw a clean line. By that autumn, Taft had negotiated major arbitration treaties with Great Britain and France, signed in August 1911, and he was pressing the Senate to ratify them without the crippling amendments that the Foreign Relations Committee had already proposed. According to the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, Taft toured the western states specifically to build public support for his arbitration treaties with England and France, though his speeches on the road merged that diplomatic cause with broader themes of western development and federal reclamation policy. The Senate would eventually approve the treaties in modified form, but the modifications were ones Taft could not accept, and the agreements ultimately died. His western tour thus represented a characteristic Taft gambit: appealing over the heads of Congress to the people, hoping that popular enthusiasm would discipline a resistant Senate.

The Political Backdrop

By 1911, Taft occupied a presidency beset by internal Republican tensions that were rapidly becoming a factional rupture. Theodore Roosevelt, who had hand-selected Taft as his successor in 1908, had by 1910 begun publicly attacking his former protege’s administration. Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, in August 1910 staked out a progressive position well to the left of Taft’s more legalistic conservatism. Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin had formally announced a progressive Republican candidacy for the 1912 nomination, and Roosevelt was maneuvering in the background. The Canadian reciprocity agreement Taft had championed collapsed when Canadians voted out the Laurier government in September 1911, and the controversy over the Ballinger-Pinchot conservation affair had cost Taft politically across the West, where conservation was not an abstraction but a matter of immediate economic consequence.

Taft’s relationship with western progressives was accordingly complicated. His administration had initiated more antitrust suits than Roosevelt’s, a fact Taft pointed to with some pride, but his handling of public lands and forest reserves had alienated many in the Mountain West who had revered Gifford Pinchot, the forestry chief Taft had dismissed. When he arrived in Montana, he was therefore entering territory that was sympathetic in some respects and skeptical in others. Montana’s economy was tightly bound to the federal government through reclamation projects, railroad land grants, and federal land administration, which made any presidential visit more than ceremonial. The president arrived not merely as a dignitary but as the controlling officer of administrative programs that materially shaped how Montanans lived and worked.

Billings in 1911: The Magic City at Its Peak

The Billings that received Taft in October 1911 was a city in the midst of its most consequential decade of growth. Platted in 1882 and named for Frederick H. Billings, the president of the Northern Pacific Railroad, the city had been built from the ground up as a railroad town on the alkali flats of Clark’s Fork Bottom. It had earned the nickname “Magic City” for the speed with which it materialized, going from empty ground to a small metropolis within a remarkably compressed period. The 1910 census recorded a population of just over ten thousand, a figure that would have seemed improbable to the handful of settlers who had watched the Northern Pacific lay its tracks through the Yellowstone Valley less than three decades earlier.

By 1911, as the Montana State Historic Preservation Office’s documentation of the Billings Townsite Historic District records, the city had a splendid new depot, electric street lights, cement sidewalks, and brick-paved streets. The depot itself, completed in 1909 and built to Northern Pacific’s characteristic standards of civic assertion, was a statement about Billings’ ambitions as a regional hub. Between 1900 and 1920, more than a dozen hotels crowded into the area near the tracks, and local hotels supported a daily transient population of at least a thousand visitors, many of them homesteaders passing through to file claims at the Billings land office. Indeed, the scale of the homesteading surge around Billings at that moment was remarkable: nearly ten thousand homesteaders filed claims at the Billings land office between 1909 and 1914 alone. The city was positioning itself not merely as a railroad junction but as the commercial and financial capital of what boosters called the “Midland Empire,” the vast territory stretching across southeastern Montana and into northern Wyoming.

The economic engine driving so much of this expansion was federal reclamation. The Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902 had transformed the relationship between the federal government and the arid West, authorizing the United States Reclamation Service to construct irrigation works and sell the resulting farm units to settlers. The Huntley Project, located just miles downstream from Billings along the Yellowstone River, was among the earliest projects authorized under the act, approved in April 1905 and bringing water to formerly arid Crow tribal lands ceded to the government. Initially over five thousand people filed for land on the project. The Lower Yellowstone Project, authorized in May 1904 under the same legislation, extended the reach of federal irrigation eastward down the Yellowstone valley into Dawson and Richland counties. These were not marginal programs. They were reshaping the physical landscape within sight of Billings and bringing thousands of new agricultural settlers into the territory the city served as a commercial center. The Montana Reclamation Service’s regional office was headquartered in Billings itself.

Taft’s Arrival and Reception

When Taft’s train arrived at the Billings depot in October 1911, the city turned out with the enthusiasm that Montana towns characteristically reserved for presidential visitors, regardless of party complications. The context mattered. This was a man who held the keys to the federal programs that were capitalized into the price of every irrigated farm acre in Yellowstone County. He was also, simply, the President of the United States, and in a frontier-generation city still conscious of its distance from the established centers of national life, such a visit carried weight beyond its immediate political content.

Taft delivered remarks that cut directly to what Billings’ civic leaders most wanted to hear. He pronounced the city, in terms that the Historic Montana documentation records and that were widely reported in contemporary accounts, “the center of the development of the arid west.” The phrase was not accidental. Taft was a careful lawyer who chose his language, and the characterization of Billings as the center of arid-land development was precisely the kind of presidential endorsement that boosters had sought, combining a geographical compliment with an implicit acknowledgment of the city’s role in the federal reclamation enterprise. The Billings land office, the reclamation projects to the east, the sugar beet industry taking shape in the valley, the railroads converging on Montana Avenue—all of it was, in Taft’s framing, not merely local success but a national story in which Billings played a central part.

The 1911 visit was not Taft’s first contact with Montana. He had traveled through the state in September 1909, stopping in Helena, Anaconda, and Butte on his first major western tour. That earlier visit had included a remarkable descent into the Leonard Mine shaft in Butte, where Taft and a thirty-man entourage went down to the twelve-hundred-foot level. The 1909 stop in Butte had drawn crowds estimated by competing newspapers at between ten and twelve thousand schoolchildren lining the parade route. By 1911, Montana communities had some experience calibrating their expectations against the president’s characteristic style—enthusiastic, broadly thematic, not deeply detailed—and Billings was not likely to have expected more than it received.

Taft’s Montana circuit in 1911 included both Butte and Billings, along with other stops. In Butte, the 1911 visit was sponsored by the local newswriters’ union and included a breakfast at the Silver Bow Club attended by nearly three hundred guests drawn from across the state’s economic and political leadership—Senator William A. Clark, Paris Gibson of Great Falls, Nelson Story of Bozeman, and a roster of Butte businessmen. The president’s time in Butte ran to three hours and twenty-eight minutes, and he spoke from a stand on Montana Street near the newly completed courthouse. The gift from Butte in 1911 was a Charles M. Russell painting, “Roping a Grizzly,” which Russell had painted in 1903 and which had hung in the Montana pavilion at the St. Louis World’s Fair. Insured for a thousand dollars when shipped to Washington, it eventually made its way to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, where it resides today.

What the Visit Meant

The political significance of Taft’s 1911 Montana appearances extended beyond the immediate reception. His broader western tour was, at bottom, an attempt to use popular enthusiasm in the regions most directly dependent on federal programs to embarrass a Senate that was frustrating his agenda. The arbitration treaties were the headline issue, but in Montana the reclamation dimension was at least equally present. Federal irrigation policy was not an abstraction in the Yellowstone Valley. It was the difference between viable farmland and alkali waste, between a population that could sustain Billings’ commercial ambitions and a much thinner settlement pattern that would have left the city a modest railroad stop rather than a regional capital.

Although his predecessor Theodore Roosevelt had signed the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 into law just weeks before leaving office, it was Taft’s administration that oversaw its explosive operational impact. By expanding the permissible homestead claim on non-irrigable land from 160 to 320 acres, the legislation contributed directly to the unprecedented rush of settlers filing at the Billings land office in the years surrounding Taft's visit. The connection was not lost on Billings audiences. The president who stood at the new depot and called their city the center of arid-land development headed the very administrative apparatus that processed the paperwork and opened the tracts for the thousands of settlers arriving daily.

What Taft could not have known—and what Montana boosters at that moment actively refused to know—was that the homesteading surge was in many respects fragile. The semi-arid plains east of the Rockies that were being filed on under the Enlarged Homestead Act were suited to cattle ranching and limited grain farming, not to the intensive agricultural development that the reclamation rhetoric promised. The collapse of the homesteading boom in the drought years after 1917 would devastate thousands of families and drain the population of eastern Montana for a generation. In 1911, with the rains holding and prices adequate, that catastrophe was not visible. What was visible was growth, and Billings was its most articulate local expression.

Legacy and Reflection

Taft lost the 1912 election badly, receiving only eight electoral votes as Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose candidacy split the Republican Party and handed the presidency to Woodrow Wilson. He left office in March 1913 and did not return to elective politics, eventually finding his true vocation as Chief Justice of the United States, to which Warren Harding appointed him in 1921. His presidency is often treated as an interlude between the two more vivid Roosevelt administrations, and the western tours of 1909 and 1911 have received correspondingly modest historical attention.

Yet the Billings stop of October 1911 repays examination for what it reveals about the relationship between federal power and western development in the Progressive Era. When Taft called Billings the center of the arid west’s development, he was not merely flattering a crowd. He was describing, however imprecisely, a genuine economic geography. Billings sat at the nexus of the railroad networks that moved agricultural products to market, the federal reclamation system that was converting the Yellowstone Valley’s potential into cultivated land, the land office system that processed the homesteading claims of settlers drawn by the promise of the Enlarged Homestead Act, and the commercial institutions—banks, wholesale houses, hotels—that served a trading region extending hundreds of miles in every direction. The president who spoke those words from the new depot was not wrong about what he saw. He was simply unable to see what lay beneath it.

Works Cited

Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. “Billings, Montana.” Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, www.achp.gov/preserve-america/community/billings-montana. Accessed 23 June 2026.

Bureau of Reclamation, U.S. Department of the Interior. “Huntley Project.” Bureau of Reclamation, www.usbr.gov/projects/index.php?id=518. Accessed 23 June 2026.

Gibson, Dick. “Butte, America’s Story Episode 102 — President Taft Visits.” The Verdigris Project, Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives and KBMF 102.5FM, 9 Dec. 2025, www.verdigrisproject.org/butte-americas-story-blog/butte-americas-story-episode-102-president-taft-visits. Accessed 23 June 2026.

Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia. “William Taft: Key Events.” Miller Center, millercenter.org/president/william-taft/key-events. Accessed 23 June 2026.

Montana State Historic Preservation Office. “Billings Townsite Historic District.” Historic Montana, historicmt.org/items/show/2148. Accessed 23 June 2026.

Montana History Portal, Montana Historical Society. “The Huntley Project.” Montana History Portal, www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/102221. Accessed 23 June 2026.

Van West, Carol. Capitalism on the Frontier: Billings and the Yellowstone Valley in the Nineteenth Century. University of Nebraska Press, 1993.

West, Carol Van, and Montana’s Historic Landscapes Project. “U.S. Reclamation Service.” Montana’s Historic Landscapes, montanahistoriclandscape.com/tag/u-s-reclamation-service/. Accessed 23 June 2026.