Glendive was founded in the early 1880s, and its growth was promoted and sustained by the Northern Pacific Railroad. Legend holds that Sir George Gore, on a hunting expedition with famed mountain man Jim Bridger, named a creek in the area Glendale Creek after a similar one in his native County Donegal, Ireland. Over the years, the word "Glendale" somehow transformed into "Glendive." Prior to the arrival of European Americans, indigenous peoples, including the Crow and the Lakota Sioux, called the area home. The arrival of the Northern Pacific in 1881, along with the passage of the Enlarged Homestead Act in 1909, lured people from America and abroad to this isolated region to pursue their version of the American dream.