Phillips County Museum - Elvis and the Homesteaders

A stop on American Prairie: Rewilding the Plains, a free self-guided tour.

Start your prairie day in Malta, a town that grew from a numbered siding on James J. Hill's railroad in the late 1880s. Local lore says a railway official named it by spinning a globe and landing on the Mediterranean island. Enjoy the story, but treat it as lore.

Inside the Phillips County Museum, the star is Elvis, a 33-foot duck-billed Brachylophosaurus skeleton. The rest of the rooms cover who came after the dinosaurs: Native nations, cowboys and outlaws, miners, and the homesteaders who flooded the Hi-Line after Congress doubled free claims to 320 acres in 1909. Drought arrived within a decade, and the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s finished off many of the farms that were left.

Keep those families in mind as you drive south today. Much of the empty country you will cross was once fenced into hopeful half-sections. Next door, ask about tours of the restored 1903 H.G. Robinson House, and check the museum website for current hours.

Getting here: The museum sits on US Highway 2 on the east side of Malta, about three tenths of a mile east of the junction with US 191.

Did you know?: On July 3, 1901, the outlaw Kid Curry and his partners robbed a Great Northern train near Wagner, just west of Malta, and got away with about 40,000 dollars.

Photo op: The museum keeps a 700-pound Apatosaurus thigh bone that visitors are welcome to pose beside - stand next to it for a sense of scale.

More on Wikipedia: Malta, Montana · Brachylophosaurus · Homestead Acts · Dust Bowl

Phillips County Museum - Elvis and the Homesteaders

Stops on this tour