The landscape of Montana changed from transitional post-glacial environment to the temperate grasslands and mountains that characterize it today.

The people descended from the Clovis founders developed, over thousands of years, the full diversity of Native American cultures — hundreds of languages, dozens of distinct cultural traditions, civilizations that built cities and earthen monuments and intricate social systems.

European contact came.

Diseases swept across the continent, killing the majority of the Native American population in some regions within generations of first contact.

Colonization and dispossession followed.