History with Phil: Montana towns and how they got their names

Montana is a land of wide-open skies, rugged landscapes, and remarkable imagination when it comes to naming towns. Some towns were named for local features, others after distant places or famous people, and a few were named in ways that are completely whimsical. Take Malta, for example. This northern Montana town began as a simple railway siding, but legend has it that a railroad official blindfolded a worker, spun a globe, and whichever place his finger landed on became the town’s name. His finger rested on the Mediterranean island of Malta, and thus a small Montana prairie town inherited the name of a faraway European island, purely by chance.