How Plants Got Here: A Brief Botanical History of Early Montana Settlement

Apple tree growing along a historic skid road, Bitterroot Valley, Montana. Photo by author, 2017. Vegetation survey underway of this anthropogenic phenomena likely due to historic loggers disposed core during one of their lunches.

Stand in an old western Montana cemetery and look at what is actually growing there, a stand of common lilac gone leggy and wild, an iris blooming in dry ground where no iris would naturally arrive on its own, a gooseberry bush persisting decades after whatever fence line it once grew along has rotted away, so a reasonable question would be: how did any of this get here in the first place? The answer turns out to run considerably deeper than a settler with a seed packet, and tracing it means following several overlapping histories at once, each of which left its own signature on the plants still visible today.

The oldest of these histories predates Euro-American arrival by a wide margin. Indigenous communities across the region actively shaped local plant communities long before anyone thought to call the practice horticulture, through controlled burning, pruning, weeding, selective harvesting, replanting, and ceremonial tending (Deur and Turner 2005; Hart 1976; Lepofsky 2004). Some of this work involved moving plants deliberately across distance. The Crow cultivated Crow tobacco in sacred gardens, distinct from the native manyflower tobacco also gathered in the region (Lowie 1963:274), and groups across the broader area cultivated coyote tobacco as well (Tushingham et al. 2018). These were not casual arrangements. They were long-standing, intentional plant communities, anthropogenic in the fullest sense, and later settlers arrived into a landscape that had already been shaped by generations of careful tending, whether or not they recognized it as such.

The first sustained non-Indigenous cultivation came later, with French Canadian fur traders establishing small gardens near their posts beginning in the 1820s, mainly to supplement a diet that could not depend entirely on trade and hunting (Toole 1959; Warner 1885). Hudson's Bay Company posts brought wheat and barley into the region, and the Indigenous wives of many traders contributed camas, berries, and other gathered foods into the household and local exchange networks that kept these posts fed (Weisel 1955:76, 80, 112, 199). Fort Colville, Fort Nez Perce, Fort Walla Walla, The Dalles, Fort Hall, and Fort Connah all maintained gardens typical of company operations across the interior Northwest during this period (Weisel 1955:xxxiii-xxxvii), and livestock movement between these posts spread plant species further still, mostly without anyone intending it.

Mission agriculture opened a second pathway not long after. Jesuit missionaries at St. Mary's Mission planted wheat, potatoes, peas, and fruit trees before 1841, and Father De Smet is recorded transporting potatoes, wheat, and oats from Fort Colville while bringing additional garden stock from St. Louis around 1840, a single set of travels that tied Montana's earliest mission plantings into a much wider Columbia Plateau network (Weisel 1955:xvii, xix). St. Ignatius Mission, founded in 1854, carried the same pattern forward with its own gardens, orchards, and livestock herds, becoming a genuine center of local food production and, by extension, of plant dispersal into the surrounding region (Weisel 1955).

Military posts added a third vector, and a practical one. Transporting food to a remote post was expensive, so posts were expected to provision themselves wherever possible, through gardens, fields, and local hunting and fishing, while cavalry operations created their own steady demand for hay and alfalfa. Soldiers at Fort Ellis, near what is now Bozeman, cultivated wheat, rye, oats, barley, potatoes, turnips, and other vegetables along the Gallatin River bottoms (Warner 1885:205). Near Fort Keogh, Oglala Sioux and Cheyenne families grew potatoes, turnips, corn, and onions (Warner 1885:207). Fort Assiniboine kept its own post garden through the early 1880s (Warner 1885:208). Each of these became a small hub in a wider pattern of cultivated species moving across the northern plains.

One site in particular deserves its own mention. Fort Owen began as St. Mary's Mission in the 1840s before its conversion into a private trading post in 1850, and by most measures it became the region's first sustained agricultural settlement, producing wheat, rye, potatoes, cabbage, turnips, peas, oats, barley, hay, corn, and onions in real quantity (Weisel 1955:94-95, 101, 182, 187, 198). Its output did not stay put. It circulated outward through the surrounding posts and homesteads, reinforcing the same regional dispersal already underway through the fur trade and mission networks.

By the 1860s through the 1890s, a new and more deliberate layer arrived through orchard and nursery networks, and unlike the diffuse, cumulative story told so far, this one has names and dates attached to it. Thompson W. Harris of Three Mile, near present-day Stevensville, is thought to have planted the region's first apple trees in 1866, and around the same time Jas Meinsinger, W. N. Smith, and William McWhirk procured their own stock from Philip Ritz in Washington Territory. Bass Brothers began a profitable orchard in 1870, and by 1880 a small number of orchards had taken hold in Missoula and Ravalli counties (Montana State Board of Horticulture 1901). Dwight T. Goodell's ranch near Ten Mile Creek outside Helena, across the road from what would later become the state nursery and the Broadwater Hotel grounds, established its own nursery around 1880, and Goodell is credited with one of Montana's first orchards devoted to small fruit and, reportedly, with bringing the region's first bees (Bundy and Train 1880).

The Flathead area followed a few years later. In the spring of 1886, George M. Lakin is considered the first to bring fruit trees into Flathead County, carrying Red June and Red Astrachan apple stock and Pond's Seedling plums from Puyallup, Washington. The following year, several farmers around Kalispell, John M. Foy, Richard Greig, David Bigler, Asher Brothers, and D. J. Plume, along with Lakin and William Rains further into the Flathead, ordered orchard trees directly from a nursery in Geneva, New York, echoing the same transregional supply lines already established in the Bitterroot. Most imported fruit stock during this period still came from California, with Washington a close second (Montana State Board of Horticulture 1901).

Growth remained slow and, for a while, unconvincing. By 1890, Montana counted its fruit trees in the thousands, but orcharding was still not widely regarded as a legitimate or profitable vocation, and its early adopters were more often called cranks than farmers. The state's first fruit fair, held at Stevensville in 1893, did much to settle that doubt, its exhibit of apples, pears, plums, and grapes convincing enough that the fair soon expanded to Helena and Butte as well. Great Falls planted its first elm trees along city streets that same era, in 1887, part of the same period's broader appetite for cultivated greenery. The hard winter of 1898 and 1899 sharpened public attention considerably, narrowing enthusiasm down to the handful of varieties that could actually survive a Montana winter, and by 1900 fruit growing had become genuinely popular across western Montana, led by Ravalli County, followed by Missoula, Flathead, and Yellowstone counties in turn. Apples predominated throughout, followed by plums, pears, cherries, and peaches, alongside strong demand for strawberries, hackberries, raspberries, currants, and gooseberries (Montana State Board of Horticulture 1901).

One of the many gooseberries seen frequenting Western Montana historic sites. Photo by author, 2016.

Early settlers were proud of what this fertile, apparently disease-free ground could produce, and local newspapers ran fairs of their own showcasing the size and quality of produce coming out of Montana gardens. That pride carried its own risk, and it did not take long for growers to recognize the need to protect the state from plant diseases already troubling orchards elsewhere. That concern led directly to the creation of the Montana State Board of Horticulture, whose 1899-1900 biennial report laid out its purpose plainly, preventing the spread of contagious disease among fruit trees, circulating information on pest and disease treatment among growers and dealers, and establishing a system of inspection districts and funding to carry that work out (Montana State Board of Horticulture 1901). The board documented widespread experimentation during this same period with hardy cultivars suited to the state's difficult climate, a slow, trial-and-error process of finding out what would actually survive a Montana winter.

Ethnic horticultural tradition supplied the final layer, and it is the one most visible in a cemetery today. Greek, Slavic, German, and Scandinavian settlers each carried their own preferences for lilacs, roses, currants, gooseberries, and other ornamentals into the communities they formed (Papanikolas 1984; Yalom 2008), and many of these plants persist now as feral survivors or as the volunteer descendants of plantings nobody has tended in a century. Lilacs, irises, and roses in particular became durable, living grave markers in places where a family could not afford a headstone, a practice documented across a number of different regions and communities (McWilliams 2017; Samuels 1999:31). A plant that could survive on its own after the person who planted it was gone did the quiet work a stone marker would otherwise have done.

None of these five pathways worked in isolation. A lilac blooming beside a Montana grave today may carry echoes of a fur trade garden, a mission orchard, a military post's provisioning needs, a nursery shipment from New York, and a family's inherited horticultural taste, layered on top of ground that Indigenous communities had already been shaping for generations before any of the rest of it began. Reading that layered history is not a digression from studying the vegetation itself. It is what makes the vegetation legible in the first place, since knowing where a plant could plausibly have come from is the first step toward recognizing what its presence, in any particular spot, might actually be telling you.

Historic lilac planted as a grave marker in Spring Creek Cemetery, Kalispell, Montana. The shrub reflects a regional memorial tradition in which hardy perennials were used to mark burial sites. Photograph by author, 2016.

That question of what a plant's presence is actually telling you carries a practical dimension as well, one that matters directly in the field. Not every species carried into Montana during this period behaves the same way once the person who planted it is gone. Some die out within a season or two once cultivation stops. Others root, spread, and outlast the structures, and even the communities, that first brought them here, turning up decades or a century later as a quiet marker of where someone once lived, gardened, or gathered. The register below draws on the settlement history traced above to assess, species by species, how likely each of these introduced plants is to still be found persisting at a historical archaeological site in Montana today.

Therefore, it would help to compare this preliminary historical research gleanings on historically introduced species and weigh the likelihood of still encountering them today. Below in the table I provide such an assessment for those ranked high, moderate-high, and moderate. It's not an absolute and some might weight things a little differently. Each rating weighs the same handful of factors for every species, how well the plant's cold tolerance matches Montana's winter minimums, whether the local growing season runs long enough for it to complete a full life cycle, how readily it reproduces and spreads on its own, what dispersal vectors, birds, water, livestock, machinery, are actually available to move its seed or vegetative parts, how well suited the surrounding ground is to the kind of disturbed habitat the species exploits, and how often people kept reintroducing it through repeated plantings, feed spills, or discarded produce. Winter survival carries outsized weight in the final rating, since a species that cannot reliably overwinter locally has little chance of persisting no matter how well it scores on every other factor. A plant strong in every other respect but poorly suited to a Montana winter still lands in a low persistence category, while a hardy plant with only modest reproductive or dispersal ability can still climb into the moderate range.

The following ratings in Table 1 were based off the following:

• USDA cold‑survivability: weight 18%, based on the match of species winter hardiness to site minima; therefore affecting survival of perennials and vegetative parts.

• Growing‑season adequacy: weight 15%, based on ability to complete reproduction (flowering/seed set) within frost‑free days.

• Reproductive mode & propagule production: weight 20%, based on seed output and vegetative spread determine colonization potential and recruitment rates.

• Dispersal vectors & connectivity: weight 18%, based on availability and effectiveness of vectors (birds, water, livestock, machinery, humans).

• Disturbance & habitat match: weight 15%, based on presence and connectivity of disturbed niches the taxon exploits (middens, ditches, roadsides).

• Propagule pressure / human maintenance: weight 10%, based on frequency and volume of human introductions, repeated sowings, cull piles, feed spills.

• Persistence traits (seedbank/vegetative durability): weight 4%, based on longevity of propagules and vegetative parts that sustain populations between introduction events.

 Across these seven factors there were scores for each species mentioned in the survey of historical texts prior to weighting. So, for a given species each of its factors were scored a zero, at the lowest (e.g., no realistic chance in normal conditions, or fatal in normal winters) with five (e.g., very strong, near certain under typical local conditions, or reliably hardy well below local minima). These were converted into a weighted mean of the seven factors, called the base score, and then a USDA limiter (range 0-1) was used as a nonlinear gating function to reduce final probability when cold-survivability for a given species is obviously incapable of overwintering within the typical human inhabited elevations in Montana.

Table 1. Introduced plants in 19th-Century Montana: A register and assessment of high and moderate to high potential persistence at historical archaeological sites in Montana. Sources: (CABI 2024; Dirr 2009; Flora of North America Editorial Committee 1993; Hong and Ellis 1996; Kozlowski, et al. 1991).

Species	Probability of Persistence	Dispersal Vectors & Contextual Conditions
Avena sativa (common oat)	High	Light seed dispersed by wind, machinery, and animals; prefers moist seedbeds and cool seasons; establishes on disturbed or abandoned cultivated ground and in low-lying moist patches.
Brassica rapa subsp. rapa (turnip)	High	Fast life cycle; seeds disperse short distances by wind and machinery; persists in disturbed, nutrient‑rich patches and compost.
Fragaria × ananassa (garden strawberry)	High	Vegetative spread via stolons and occasional seed; persists in gardens, edges, and disturbed ground where runners root; bird dispersal possible for seed.
Hordeum vulgare (common barley)	High	Seed spilled at threshing/grain stores; moved by livestock, birds, water, and machinery; tolerates short seasons and cool springs so volunteers readily in fence rows, grain-spill sites, ditches, and abandoned plots.
Malus domestica (apple)	High	Seedlings arise from seed (bird/mammal ingestion and deposition) and from rootstock or graft suckers; established trees persist for decades and can form seedling cohorts along roadsides, irrigation ditches, and riparian corridors.
Medicago sativa (alfalfa)	High	Seed and managed sowings produce long‑lived stands; seed and root fragments spread along irrigation ditches, hayfields, roadsides, and disturbed riparian soils; persistence reinforced by cutting/grazing regimes and occasional vegetative survival.
Populus spp.	High	Wind- and water-dispersed seeds; fast-growing trees used in riparian plantings, windbreaks, and homesteads.
Rosa spp. (roses)	High	Vegetative spread by suckering and layering; hips eaten and dispersed by birds/mammals; persists in hedgerows, yards, cemeteries.
Ribes americanum / Ribes spp. (American black currant, currants, and gooseberries)	High	Bird/mammal dispersal of fleshy berries; can establish in riparian corridors, thickets, fence rows, and disturbed woodland edges; some Ribes cultivars escape to nearby sites.
Ribes aureum (golden currant)	High	Bird/mammal dispersed berries; establishes in woodland edges, riparian margins, and shelterbelts; likely near habitations and in disturbed edge deposits.
Rubus idaeus (American red raspberry)	High	Cane and root sucker spread; bird dispersal of fruit; cultivars readily escape into hedgerows, forest edges, and riparian corridors.
Shepherdia argentea (silver buffaloberry)	High	Bird and mammal dispersed drupes; establishes in riparian corridors, shelterbelts, and abandoned/edge sites; seeds persistent in local patches and likely in yard/midden contexts.
Cucurbita maxima (winter squash)	Moderate - High	Heavy seed production; animal dispersal and compost‑mediated recruitment; persists in dump sites, floodplain sediments, and disturbed ground.
Cucurbita pepo (field pumpkin)	Moderate - High	Readily volunteers from discarded fruit; seeds moved by animals, water, and compost; establishes in disturbed, nutrient rich sites.
Fraxinus pennsylvanica (green ash)	Moderate - High	Wind dispersed samaras; commonly planted in shelterbelts and yards.
Prunus virginiana (chokecherry)	Moderate - High	Fleshy fruits dispersed by birds/mammals; forms thickets by seedling recruitment and suckering; common in riparian zones and shelterbelts.
Raphanus sativus (cultivated radish)	Moderate - High	Rapid lifecycle; abundant seed; short‑distance wind and machinery dispersal; establishes in disturbed, nutrient‑rich patches and compost heaps.
Rubus × ursinus (California blackberry)	Moderate - High	Strong vegetative and seed dispersal; bird/mammal dispersed fruit; forms dense thickets in riparian zones, roadsides, and disturbed sites.
Solanum tuberosum (potato)	Moderate - High	Vegetative persistence from tubers/culls; dispersed via animal activity or human refuse; persists where tubers remain in soil or cull piles.
Syringa vulgaris (common lilac)	Moderate - High	Typically human‑planted ornamental that persists locally; limited natural spread but can naturalize near long‑occupied homesteads, cemeteries, and sheltered microhabitats.
Triticum spp. (wheat)	Moderate – High (spring wheat); Moderate (winter wheat)	Seed moved by harvest losses, livestock feed, and machinery; spring wheats suited to short growing seasons volunteer most readily across Zones 2–5; winter wheats need milder microsites or snow cover to survive cold winters.
Celtis occidentalis (common hackberry)	Moderate	Bird dispersal of fleshy drupes; establishes in riparian corridors, shelterbelts, windbreaks, field edges, roads, railroads, and disturbed urban/edge sites.
Prunus spp. (cottonwoods / poplars)	Moderate	Several Prunus species recruit from seed and sprout from rootstock; bird dispersal and planting for food/windbreaks encourage occurrence near sites and in refuse contexts.
Rubus × boysenii (boysenberry)	Moderate	Hybrid Rubus with vigorous vegetative growth; spreads by canes and root fragments; fruit eaten and dispersed by birds; establishes in abandoned fields and edges .
Ulmus americana (American elm)	Moderate	Wind‑dispersed samaras; historically planted as shade/street trees.

Standing back from the register, the pattern is the same one traced through the five pathways earlier in this piece. A plant's presence at a historical site is never self-explanatory. It has to be read against a wider set of facts, how it got there, what era it belongs to, whether it could plausibly have survived on its own once the people who planted it moved on or passed away. A stand of lilac beside an unmarked grave, a patch of alfalfa gone feral along an old irrigation ditch, a lone apple seedling growing where no orchard now stands, none of these things prove much in isolation, but each becomes a legitimate thread of evidence once weighed against the settlement history and the biology behind it.

It is worth being clear about what this register does and does not cover. Everything traced here, the fur trade gardens, mission orchards, military posts, and the early orchard and nursery networks, belongs to the nineteenth century. Montana's homesteading boom, the dryland farming rush that broke open cropland across the eastern and central part of the state in the early twentieth century, was still to come, and it introduced a far larger and faster wave of plant species than anything the nineteenth century managed on its own, arriving practically overnight by comparison to the slow, layered accumulation traced in this piece. That later chapter deserves its own register and its own post.

That is the same habit of mind this series will keep returning to as it moves from the plants themselves into the survey data collected on the ground, treating vegetation as one more kind of record the human past left behind, alongside the artifacts, features, and soils this

series will take up next.

A treat for you if you made it this far. A humorous scene by scene view of me, in 2016, moving from enthusiastic naivety to regretting my decision to try a raw chokecherry for the first time. Photo by Candice Odom, 2016. In case you were wondering what it was like, it was sour and a little bitter, it has a strange lingering mouth feel. Pro Tip 1: Of course remove the seed, but cook the thing! Pro Tip 2: Don't harvest wild berries along roadways because they can hyperaccumulate different toxic heavy metals in addition to herbicides.

If you find yourself interested in learning more check out the Deep Time Commons page where I continue to update a table on anthropogenic surface vegetation at archaeological sites in the United States. Additionally, a forthcoming volume by the Society of Historical Archaeology, Material Culture of Ethnic Diversity in the Industrial West, has a chapter titled "Unintended Leafy Legacies of Industry: a Montana Case Study in Applying Historical Ecology to Historical Cemeteries" where you can learn more.

Sources

Bundy and Train. 1880. "View of apple trees at Dwight T. Goodell's ranch near Helena, Montana." Bundy and Train Stereograph Collection (ST 007), Photo No. ST 007 HLC.29, Local Identifier p0012743. Montana Memory Project, Montana Historical Society Library and Archives, Helena, MT. https://www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/117679.

CABI. 2024. Invasive Species Compendium. CAB International, Wallingford, UK.

Deur, Douglas, and Nancy J. Turner, editors. 2005. Keeping It Living: Traditions of Plant Use and Cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America. University of Washington Press,

Seattle, WA.

Dirr, Michael A. 2009. Manual of Woody Landscape Plants: Their Identification, Ornamental Characteristics, Culture, Propagation and Uses, 6th edition. Stipes Publishing, Champaign, IL.

Flora of North America Editorial Committee, editors. 1993+. Flora of North America North of Mexico. Oxford University Press, New York, NY and Oxford, UK.

Hart, Jeff. 1976. Montana Native Plants and Early Peoples. Montana Historical Society Press, Helena, MT.

Hong, T. D., and R. H. Ellis. 1996. A Protocol to Determine Seed Storage Behaviour. IPGRI Technical Bulletin No. 1. International Plant Genetic Resources Institute, Rome.

Kozlowski, Theodore T., Paul J. Kramer, and Stephen G. Pallardy. 1991. The Physiological Ecology of Woody Plants. Academic Press, San Diego, CA.

Lepofsky, Dana. 2004. "Paleoethnobotany in the Northwest." In People and Plants in Ancient Western North America, Paul E. Minnis, editor, pp. 367-464. University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ.

Lowie, Robert H. 1963. The Crow Indians. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE.

Tushingham, Shannon, Charles M. Snyder, Korey J. Brownstein, William J. Damitio, and David R. Gang. 2018. "Biomolecular Archaeology Reveals Ancient Origins of Indigenous Tobacco Smoking in North American Plateau." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115(46):11742-11747.

Toole, K. Ross. 1959. Montana: An Uncommon Land, revised edition. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK.

Warner, Beers & Company. 1885. History of Montana: 1739-1885. Warner, Beers & Company, St. Louis, MO.

Weisel, George F. 1955. Men and Trade on the Northwest Frontier as Shown by the Fort Owen Ledger. Montana State University Studies, Vol. 2. Montana State University Press, Missoula, MT.

Montana State Board of Horticulture. 1901. First Biennial Report of the Montana State Board of Horticulture to the Legislative Assembly of the State of Montana for the Years 1899-1900. Office of the State Board of Horticulture, Missoula, MT.

Papanikolas, Helen Z. 1984. "Wrestling with Death: Greek Immigrant Funeral Customs in Utah." Utah Historical Quarterly 52(1):1-16.

Yalom, Marilyn. 2008. The American Resting Place: Four Hundred Years of History Through Our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA.

Samuels, Gayle B. 1999. Enduring Roots: Encounters with Trees, History, and the American Landscape. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ.

McWilliams, Jennifer K. 2017. "Plants as a Reflection of Culture and Popularity in Historic Cemeteries in Central and East Texas." Bulletin of the Texas Archaeological Society 88:97-104.