The Falls and the City:

A History of Great Falls, Montana

There are places the land remembers — places where water and stone keep a ledger older than any ledger man has written. Great Falls, Montana, sits in one of those places. It is a city braided tightly with a river that falls and falls again, a string of cataracts that made explorers stop and take stock, and later made entrepreneurs and engineers believe that energy and industry might be coerced from the bedrock itself. From Meriwether Lewis’s astonishment in 1805 to the quiet hum of turbine rooms and the distant rumble of jet tarmacs, the story of Great Falls is a story of water, of people, and of the slow shaping of American ambition.

The River’s First Witnesses

When Lewis came upon this reach of the Missouri in June of 1805, he wrote in his journal of not one “great fall” but a series — five falls in all — that together dropped the river more than five hundred feet in a short distance. For the Blackfeet and other Indigenous nations whose lives had long been woven with these waters, the falls were already a known landscape of camps, fishing, and memory. For the members of the Corps of Discovery, the falls were a moment of vertigo and calculation: portage routes had to be found, canoes unloaded and hauled, maps redrawn in the mind. Those first detailed European words about the place remain a foundation for the city’s origin story.

Giant Springs — a first-magnitude artesian outflow that still pours cold water into the Missouri through a tiny, swift river — was recorded by Lewis and Clark and later became a natural anchor for the new town’s parks and identity. It is small, almost intimate, but its presence is elemental: a headwater that insists on being noticed. Today Giant Springs State Park is a place of trout, of children leaning over low railings to watch the Roe River — reputed to be one of the shortest rivers in the world — and of remembrance.

A City Laid Out on Rapids and Rails

It wasn’t until the late 19th century that human ambition began to arrange itself at the foot of those falls. Great Falls the city was founded in 1883, in large part because the river’s energy seemed a natural resource to be mined. The arrival of the railroads and of investors — a common pattern across the West — transformed the falls from geographic wonder into economic promise. Brickworks, stonecutters, and later power companies saw in the Missouri’s tumbling waters a reliable fuel for industry. By the early 1900s the town that had grown around the headwaters and the first dams began to imagine itself as more than a waystation: it aspired to regional leadership.

The engineers who built early dams and hydro plants around Black Eagle, Rainbow, and Ryan learned how to translate a river’s slope into torque and light. Hydropower made Great Falls an island of electrified possibility in an otherwise vast and often dark landscape. Yet the harnessing of the river was not merely technical; it was also cultural — shaping work schedules, city lights, the hum of mills, and the architecture of neighborhoods that clustered around factories and rail yards.

Boom, Bust, and the Hard Lessons of Growth

Like many Western cities built in a few feverish decades, Great Falls’s growth was dramatic and not always even. Population spikes in the early 20th century — and again after World War II — spoke to the pull of industry and the military, while economic contractions and the Dust Bowl era reminded residents of the fragility beneath prosperity. The city’s roster of banks, hospitals, and commercial institutions in the 1910s signaled civic maturity; yet the Great Depression would test that maturity, closing doors that had seemed permanent.

One of the pivotal mid-century chapters was the arrival and expansion of an air base that would become Malmstrom Air Force Base. Begun as Great Falls Army Air Base during World War II, and later renamed for Colonel Einar Malmstrom, the facility tied the city to national defense in ways that reshaped its economy and identity. The base brought personnel, federal dollars, and a new set of anxieties and responsibilities into the community — from Cold War missile fields to contemporary debates about environmental and safety concerns at military sites. Malmstrom’s presence is a reminder that Great Falls is both a river town and a strategic town — a place where local rhythms are often synchronized with global tensions.

Culture, Art, and the Rocky-Bedded Heart

Great Falls is more than turbines and tarmacs. It has been a regional banking hub, a healthcare center, an agricultural market, and a crucible for artists and storytellers who found in Montana’s light a clarity that encouraged landscape and portraiture alike. The city’s proximity to open country attracted painters like Charles M. Russell and created institutions of small but sturdy cultural life: museums, community theaters, and the local newspaper that chronicled the daily and extraordinary. The river and the land produced a civic aesthetic — a preference for big skies, clear prose, and a certain austere humor.

Giant Springs and the five falls have remained central to the city’s identity — places where the public can touch water that is practically ancient and listen to the same rush that set Lewis and Clark’s hair on edge. Those natural sites became parks, tourist draws, and symbols for a community that has tried, across generations, to welcome visitors while keeping a certain downtown, riverbank intimacy intact.

People Who Stayed: Stories of Labor and Community

The history of Great Falls is also a history of people who chose to stay: immigrant families who worked in brick and stone yards, miners who went to regional deposits, technicians who kept turbines turning, and teachers who educated the next generation. The city’s ethnic and cultural composition shifted through waves — each wave leaving behind institutions, churches, and business names that read like a ledger of migration. Civic institutions such as hospitals and banks anchored the town socially as well as economically. These are the slow, human eras of history that don’t make headlines but sustain a city.

The City Today: Memory, Renewal, and the River

In the modern era Great Falls faces the same challenges that face many mid-sized American cities: how to balance economic diversification with the legacies of a resource-based economy; how to honor Indigenous history and reckon with the environmental impact of industry and military installations; how to preserve downtown character even as retail patterns shift to malls and online markets. Yet the river remains the city’s master narrative. Developers and conservationists alike return, again and again, to the riverfront, arguing in different vocabularies for a future that respects the falls and the springs.

Malmstrom remains active and consequential; Giant Springs remains a place of leisure and natural wonder; and the five falls remain — in map, in tourism literature, and in local memory — the syllables around which the city’s name is formed. Great Falls is not a story of one thing but of many forces — nature’s persistent geometry rubbing up against human intent.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

Great Falls asks us to listen to water. The city’s past is audible in the low hum of hydroelectric plants and the creak of old wooden bridges, in the laughter of children near Giant Springs, and in the ceremonial flyovers that mark holidays and funerals. Its future will be negotiated at planning meetings, at kitchen tables, in classrooms, and in federal briefings about the nation’s defense posture. All of that will happen in the same landscape that astonished a Corps of Discovery more than two centuries ago.

Great Falls is a place that keeps combining its elements — water, rock, railroad, and runway — into new economies and new civic meanings. It teaches a modest lesson: that cities are not made in a single act but accrued, like river silt, layer by patient layer. It teaches a humbler one, too: that when you stand on the riverbank and hear the falls, you are standing in a conversation between time and terrain, and between the people who arrived early and those who are arriving now.

Sources and Further Reading

City of Great Falls — History. Great Falls, MT official community history page.

“The Great Falls According to Lewis.” U.S. National Park Service, article on Lewis & Clark’s encounter with the falls.

Giant Springs — National Park Service place overview; and Giant Springs State Park (Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks).

Malmstrom Air Force Base — official history page.

“Great Falls, Montana” — Wikipedia entry (overview of economic and demographic changes).

Intermountain Histories — archival materials and essays on the Great Falls of the Missouri.