Montana's fastest-growing city, Yellowstone gateway and a Main Street that still feels like a Western town
Bozeman is Montana's fastest-growing city and the most cosmopolitan gateway to Yellowstone — a college town with a walkable Main Street of craft breweries, bookstores, and gear shops that hasn't lost its ranching-town character. The Gallatin Canyon and Big Sky ski resort are 45 minutes south, making it as much a winter base as a summer one.
The Gallatin Valley was mapped by the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1805 and has been inhabited by Crow, Blackfeet, and Shoshone peoples for millennia. Bozeman was formally founded in 1864 as a supply centre for Montana Territory's mining camps and named after John Bozeman, who blazed the Bozeman Trail through Crow and Sioux hunting grounds — a route that provoked Red Cloud's War and was closed by the US Army's capitulation in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868.