The extreme economic deprivation of Native Americans in the area led to the term "Hill 57" becoming a symbol and "a byword for urban Indian poverty".
[3] Hill 57 is a low-rise[4] plateau[5] located adjacent to the city limits of Great Falls, Montana, about 2,000 feet (610 m) north of 9th Avenue North/Northwest Bypass on Stuckey Road and abutting to the Valley View neighborhood.
[7][11][a] About 15,000 years ago, the Laurentide Ice Sheet blocked the north-flowing Missouri River, creating Lake Great Falls.
The most complete version of the name's original was reported by Ralph Pomnichowski in the Great Falls Tribune in 2009, who wrote that, in 1926, Heinz 57 salesman Art Hinck (or Henck)[4] arranged rocks on the hill into the form of a gigantic "57" and then painted them white.
[5] Attorney Ellen Thompson, who has written about the landless Native Americans living at the site, also says that a Heinz 57 salesman arranged rocks on the hill in the form of a giant "57", although she does not say whether they were painted white or not.
[4] In 1969, Representative John Melcher cited "legend" that the hill's name came from the large number of "Heinz 57" cans strewn over the landscape there.
[20][29] A major drought which hit Montana in 1917 (and lasted until 1920)[30] drove many landless Native Americans off the plains and into these settlements near Great Falls.
But the most permanent settlements were on Hill 57, Mount Royal, along Wire Mill Road in Black Eagle (an unincorporated village on the north bank of the river where the Anaconda Copper smelter was located),[18] near the Great Falls Meat Packing Plant (now demolished, but then located several hundred feet north of 5700 18th Avenue N.),[29] and on the bank of the Missouri River near what is now Sacajawea Island.
[20] While many Native American families survived during the summer by picking food, clothing, and firewood out of the town garbage dump, snow and ice precluded such scavenging during the winter.
[33] In 1917, at the start of World War I, Anaconda Copper began hiring large numbers of local landless Indians for work in their smelter.
Angry white workers blamed the Native Americans for taking their jobs and stealing equipment from the plant, and burned the Indian camps around Great Falls to the ground.