Montana is one of the most beautiful places on earth, yet hardly anyone lives there. Why do sprawling metropolis pop up in places like Cleveland and Phoenix, but not Montana?
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Most cities don’t (or rather didn‘t) care so much about landscape and scenery but about infrastructure and accessibility. That‘s why almost every larger city is close to some form of major waterway or railway. It makes it easier to transport goods and food, creates jobs which attract people.
There’s no industry there?
Waterways and trade plus migration. It’s historically much harder to expand across landmasses if there’s no waterway connecting the new settlements with existing ones. People can’t go it alone very well and so deep inland areas are slower to develop in most places.
Transportation, trade, difficulty in living there, and the willingness of people to start businesses there. Some places are great for visiting but living and working are very different. The cost to transport goods around the planet from Los Angeles is much less than from Montana. That last leg is very expensive.
Ironically I am born and raised in phoenix. A ton of people aren’t local, most say they moved to get away from the snow. It’s a large city, which at least used to have a low cost of living, it doesn’t snow, and there are lots of jobs. It’s hella hot, but our summer is about as long as winter in Montana and fall-spring is pretty great.
The city it’s self propped up because a large river runs through the town and bronze age natives actually completed significant canal work before abandoning the area. The climate and water resources allowed for exceptional farming and ranching.
Wyoming hardly has any railroads and lots of valleys and mountains in the north west corner so we end up with lowest populated state
Most big cities happen where trading routes cross – which often means ports; but not always.
Basically, humans start where there’s food. Once they have food, they start looking at other resources. But most things that aren’t food require special resources, which usually means it’s really easy to make them in some places, and hard to make them in others. Specific types of food are like this too: Rice needs lots of water, and some warmth; while potatoes are fine in the cold, and can’t grow in standing water.
Because of this, people move stuff around – a lot. There’s evidence of people whose only job was to move special resources or things made of special resources around for longer than we’ve been building cities. Often, these people would tend to naturally meet up in certain places to trade things: meeting in one place meant that traders could trade things between more than two people at once, and have access to more different kinds of special resources or things made from them. And over time, if there’s a city near that place, it’s often easier to just meet up in the city.
Once traders are meeting in a city; it also makes sense for people who make things to be in that city also. If I need two or more special resources to make my thing (like bronze – tin and copper don’t come from the same place; or iron and glass), it’s easier to get those special resources if I’m in the place where people are trading them. And, even if I can get all my resources easily, it’s easier to sell my things if I’m near the traders. So the city grows.
Now, it also makes sense to be in the city if you need to be near people – if your job is something like a leader (mayor, king, or anywhere in between), or a record-keeper (for taxes, laws, etc.), or anything similar. Because there’s already a lot of people there, you can be closer to more people; so you spend less time going to people, and more time working with them. So these people move to the city as well.
This all happens faster in ports because traders often like traveling by water (it’s easier to move a lot of stuff over water than over land), and because food needs water – either to water plants, or fishing. Traders particularly like ports where two bodies of water meet (either two rivers, or a river and a stable body like a lake or a sea), because it means you get traders from both bodies of water. With more trader and more food, port cities tend to grow faster than other cities.
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The two cities you named both follow this. Cleveland is near where a river (the Cuyahoga river) meets Lake Erie, which later made it a good place to run railroads to. Phoenix is where the Salt and Gila rivers meet; and is one of the best places to do farming in a very long distance, as well as having copper mines nearby.
In contrast, Montana doesn’t have a lot of special resources, and isn’t between places that do. Most of what Montana produces is food (cows mostly); and most of the resources you want to bring across Montana are going between other big cities. Because of this, what few “stop and meet” locations there are just aren’t as interesting as other places; and Montana’s cities are mostly endpoints for trade (sell your stuff, buy new stuff, turn around), not crossing points.
The exceptions to this tend to be the result of legal or political matters. Making a city a capitol tends to fuel some growth, for example. However, many of these exceptions tend to be because something is legal or illegal: Las Vegas grew massively after Nevada legalized gambling, for example.
Umm… because when tens of thousands of people settle in a Montana, it becomes a Cleveland?
I’m sure this will get downvoted to hell, but maybe this question belongs in r/NoStupidQuestions
Water ways are the high way of our fore fathers. A river promises easy travel. No one gives a damn if it is beautiful if you can’t get there. Modern tech is really only in the last 50 years in terms of travel and even that is generous. Rivers allowed for barges of goods and people. That’s why the Oregon Trail was such a significant bit of history. Land is hard to traverse. Water is a cake by comparison. This is why the Mississippi historically was a massive trade and travel route.
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