The Last Best Place; it’s a nickname that more than one million people in Montana know well. But even in the Last Best Place there are some areas that are just better than others—the Best Places in the Last Best Place, if you will.

As part of an ongoing series exploring the best places to live in each of the 50 states, Movoto Real Estate (an online real estate brokerage based in San Mateo, CA) gathered data to learn which place in Montana is truly the the best; the real Last Best Place. After we sifted through our data, we concluded that West Yellowstone took home the top prize. Still, West Yellowstone isn’t the only place to make the cut. Here are the 12 best cities in Montana, the treasures of The Treasure State:
West Yellowstone, Colstrip, East Helena, Baker, Big Timber, Helena, Sidney, Havre, Shelby, Cut Bank, Manhattan and Bozeman.

How did West Yellowstone climb to the top of our list? What made Cut Bank a cut above the other places? Read on for a breakdown of our methodology, as well as detailed explanations— or, as we like to think of them, the golden nuggets—of what makes each place stand out.

To create our ranking, we looked at the 50 most populous cities in Montana with more than 1,000 people living in them. This means that even small places with just 1,183 residents such as Boulder were included in the study. After we compiled our list, we ranked each area based on six criteria. The criteria we used were: Cost of living, Crime rate, Education, Median household income, Home value and Commute time.

Once we had our list of cities, both small and large, we ranked each place from one to 50 for each criterion, with one being the best possible score. We then found the average rank of each city’s criteria. Readers should note our crime data is reported on a per 100,000 person basis in order to create accurate comparisons.

Here’s why each city made our list.

1. West Yellowstone

Topping our list of the best places in Montana is West Yellowstone, home to 1,271 residents, making it the smallest location we looked at. In fact, West Yellowstone’s size might be one reason it ranked so highly.
Where did West Yellowstone succeed? The town took the top ranking in commute time and total crimes per 100,000 people. It takes just eight minutes for the average West Yellowstone resident to get to work. In contrast, it takes a resident of Stevensville, the place that ranked the lowest in commute time, an average of 27 minutes to get to work. As for crime, West Yellowstone has 312 crimes per 100,000 people annually. To put this into perspective, Polson, the area that placed lowest for this criterion, has 6,670 crimes per 100,000 people each year.

2. Colstrip
The 50th Anniversary Issue of “Sports Illustrated” designated Colstrip as Montana’s official “Sportstown” on the strength of the city’s 23 parks and considerable sporting amenities including fantastic facilities for basketball and volleyball.
What catapulted Colstrip to the No. 2 spot in our study was a top ranking in median household income, slightly more than $74,000 a year. This is about $18,000 more than in Columbus, the second-ranked place for this criterion and about $50,000 more than in Hamilton, which has a median household income of about $24,000 annually.

3. East Helena
Once an infamous speed trap for people traveling to and from the much larger city of Helena, East Helena now has several things going for it that might give people greater incentive to pull over and take notice without being coerced by the flashing lights of a police cruiser.
Anchoring East Helena’s position in third place on our list were the city’s high marks in total crime, high school diploma attainment rate, and the area’s median household income. According to our data, East Helena has 849 crimes per 100,000 residents annually, good enough to have it take the No. 3 spot for this criterion. As for high school diploma attainment, 89 percent of residents of East Helena have at least a diploma or its equivalent. Residents in East Helena have a median household income of about $46,000, the 10th highest income for places on our list.

4. Baker
Nicknamed “The Friendly City,” Baker is a small farming community situated very close to Medicine Rocks State Park—an area so beautiful that no less a luminary than President Theodore Roosevelt once remarked that it was, “as fantastically beautiful a place as I have ever seen.” Although many cowboys carved their names into the sandstone in the late 1800s, modern residents might be proud to carve the city’s current statistical rankings into the rocks.
Baker, which tied for fourth place with Big Timber (more on that below) ranked particularly well in two area—its cost of living and median household income. This city of just 1,741 people, among the smallest on our list, has a cost of living rank of 83, the sixth best rank among the places in our study. The national average is 100. As for income, the typical household brings in $49,028 annually—18 percent higher than the state’s median income ($41,358).

5. Big Timber
“A River Runs Through It” and “The Horse Whisperer” are just two of the films that took advantage of Big Timber’s unique confluence of mountains and rivers in order to bring beautiful images to the silver screen. To the more than 1,600 residents who dwell in Big Timber, the combination of affordable housing, high educational achievement, solid median income, and a very low crime rate creates a praiseworthy quality-of-life tapestry.
Big Timber was the fourth safest city of the cities we studied, ranking behind West Yellowstone, Boulder, and East Helena. According to our most recent data, there were just 908 total crimes per 100,000 residents. Other than this, Big Timber’s median household income is high compared to the Montana average at $45,833

6. Helena
Originally founded by the gold prospecting “Four Georgians” (actually one Georgian, one Alabaman, one Iowan, and an Englishman), Montana’s capital city is now home to nearly 28,000 residents, making the most populous city on our list. The mining industry is stable to this day, bolstered by Montana’s second highest graduation rate, a short average commute to work given the population size, higher than average income, and affordable housing.
Of the criteria we studied, Helena fared the best in education, falling behind Bozeman (No. 13 on our list). Just shy of 93 percent of residents in Helena have a high school diploma. By comparison, about 87 percent of Montanans have a diploma.

7. Sidney
While Sidney has long been one of the U.S.’s top producers of sugar beets, oil production has been an on-again, off-again competitor of the sugar beet industry in recent decades. Although the two industries have not always worked in synergy with one another, with high-dollar oil production wages luring sugar beet laborers away from Sidney’s longstanding industry, the short commute time, a cost-of-living rank well above the state average, and Montana’s third highest median income work in harmony to land Sidney in our top 10.
According to our data, the median household income in Sidney is $52,460, which is contemporary with Columbus (No. 22), the second highest rank in this category. Both of these places, however, are about $10,000 beneath Colstrip’s median household income of $74,095.

8. Havre
Wahkpa Chu’gn is a site in Havre where Native Americans ran bison off of cliffs in order to kill them or make them easier to hunt and skin. Fortunately, no such measures are presently required to get Havre’s current population of about 9,300 to stay put… at least not when Havre has one of the shortest average commutes and most educated populations in Montana, paired with a better-than-average cost of living and median income. For history buffs, Havre was also the site of the final battle of the Nez Perce War in 1877—the Battle of Bear Paw.
The second of our three-way tie for seventh place, Havre has an average commute time of just 12 minutes, almost half the average commute time of Stevensville (No. 43), the municipality with the longest commute at 27 minutes. Additionally, about 90 percent of residents have at least a high school diploma, good enough to help the city place seventh in this category.

9. Shelby
As a fighter, Jack Dempsey was one of the most aggressive and hardest-hitting fighters of any era, and he married these traits with heightened stamina and a durable chin to become one of the greatest boxers in history. When Shelby bet on Jack Dempsey to deliver it national exposure by hosting a world championship fight in 1923, the gamble failed. Dempsey’s abilities shone through and he was awarded the victory over Tommy Gibbons, but the fight was a financial disaster that left Shelby floored.
While missing out on its bid to become a major city, Shelby’s features are as well rounded as Jack Dempsey’s boxing talents. The diversity of wildlife and topographical features make Shelby an attraction for hunters and nature enthusiasts while short commutes, a low cost of living, and a below average crime rate round out an arsenal that makes it an attractive place to live.
Like Harve, the average commute time for Shelby residents is a scant 12 minutes. As for the city’s cost of living rank, the city placed seventh with a score of 83. This is significantly lower than Whitefish (No. 18), the Montana city with the highest cost of living, a modest 103.

10. Cut Bank
Located in the shadow of Glacier National Park, Cut Bank is eponymously named after the Cut Bank Creek that it sits alongside. Cut Bank is also located adjacent to a Blackfeet Indian reservation, and it boasts a Native American population of nearly 20 percent.
In centuries past, the Blackfeet would retreat into the nearby mountains on vision quests. However, today’s residents of Cut Bank don’t need to seek higher knowledge and understanding in order to glean that having the lowest cost of living in Montana is a pretty good thing. Add to this a short 11 minute commute time, the third lowest rank for this criteria, and Cut Bank is definitely a cut above the rest.

11. Manhattan
Manhattan might be a small town with just just 1,520 residents and less than two square miles altogether, but it’s climbed our list of places with ease, thanks to exceptional scores in household income, home value, and crime rate.
The median household income in Manhattan is $52,350, high enough to have the area rank fourth in this category. Homes in the town are valued at $229,800—55 percent higher than the state’s median home value. Finally, Manhattan’s crime rate is 63 percent lower than the average for Montana.

Treasure in the Mountains
Lurking in the figurative shadows cast by larger cities like Billings and Missoula, as well as the literal shadows cast by the considerable mountain ranges, are an assortment of smaller Montana cities that can be just as appealing to live in depending on what you value. In the end, it’s only fitting for the Treasure State to remind us that sometimes the smallest gems are the most valuable; it all depends on the criteria you use to rate them.

Movoto is a national real estate brokerage serving more than 30 states. Our blog has been recognized for its unique approach to city-based research by major news organizations around the world such as Forbes and CBS News.