Montana State Coat of Arms

The coat of arms is the shield device from Montana's great seal. The shield shows a specific Montana landscape: the Great Falls of the Missouri River with mountains behind it, combined with the tools of the two industries that shaped the territory: mining and farming.

Below the shield, the state motto Oro y Plata appears on a scroll. The phrase is Spanish for Gold and Silver, the two metals most associated with Montana's early mining economy. The coat of arms appears on official state documents and in government buildings.

Congress created the Montana Territory on May 26, 1864. The first territorial legislature convened later that year and established a territorial seal that included the coat of arms design. The legislature formally authorized the seal in 1865.

When Montana became the 41st state on November 8, 1889, the state government continued the same shield design that had served the territory. The design has remained essentially unchanged since its territorial origins.

The Montana coat of arms centers on a shield with a Montana landscape in the background and tools of industry in the foreground. Below the shield is the state motto on a scroll.

The Montana coat of arms places the state's landscape and its two founding industries on a single shield. The mountains and the Great Falls of the Missouri River identify the place. The pick and shovel show mining, the activity that caused rapid settlement in the 1860s. The plow shows farming, the industry that outlasted the mining rushes.

The motto Oro y Plata closes the design with a direct statement about Montana's mineral wealth. By choosing a Spanish phrase, the designers connected Montana to the broader tradition of western mining culture, where Spanish mining vocabulary had been in use since the Spanish colonial era.

The current Montana coat of arms design traces directly to the territorial seal first used in 1865. No separate official coat of arms preceded that territorial design.