37. Daniels County

One of the most fascinating tidbits I've found while researching Montana counties is that according to an analytic tool called the Index of Relative Rurality(IRR), Daniels County, Montana, is the most rural county of all 3100 plus counties in the United States.  The county came into being on June 1, 1920, when the Legislature took a portion of northeastern Valley County (#20) and western Sheridan County (#34) to create the new entity which was named for a local rancher, Mansfield Daniels.  The county covers 1,427 square miles, almost all of which is dry land.  As of the 2010 U.S. Census, 1,751 people called Daniels County home.  As is so often the case in eastern Montana, the most recent Census is also the lowest population count in a county that has steadily lost population since it first appeared in the U.S. Census in 1930 when 5,553 people claimed it as their home.  Daniels County lies on the Canadian border, bordering the province of Saskatchewan.  Only Sheridan County (#34) separates Daniels from North Dakota.  Topographically, the land is rolling prairie, and the county has more ghost towns than actual thriving centers.  And if you're still pondering that "most rural county" status, it's based on, among other things: a) population; b) population density; c) extent of urbanized area; and d)  distance from a metropolitan area.  And no, I have no idea what c means.  As for d, Scobey, the Daniels County Seat, is 150 miles from Regina, Saskatchewan, 225 miles from Minot, North Dakota, and over 300 miles from Montana's largest city, Billings.  Let's just say that if you don't want to shop at the local market, you've got a fur piece to drive.

The Daniels County Court House

Scobey, Montana

The Daniels County Court House is pretty much what I expected to find in rural county seats around Montana.  To me, it looks like what an Old West county courthouse should.   In actuality, it's one of a kind, at least in Montana.  And we can't even call it the Old West.   Scobey got its first post office (and its name) in 1901, and the town wasn't incorporated until 1916.  As for its name, remember Mansfield Daniels, the rancher for whom the county is named?  He named the town after a friend of his, Maj. Charles Richardson Anderson Scobey, a cattleman in the Glendive area (Dawson County, #16).  Today over half the residents of Daniels County live in Scobey, where the 2010 U.S. Census counted 1,017 residents. There are two stories concerning the Courthouse building.  The sanitized version claims that it was originally the Commercial Hotel.  I prefer the story Don Spritzer tells in his Roadside History of Montana where he claims the building is the remodeled One-Eyed Mary's House of Pleasure. (p. 27)  I heartily recommend Spritzer's book where you can also read about Scobey's professional baseball team--recruited from the scandal ridden 1919 Chicago White Sox.

I have a personal connection to Scobey, albeit a rather tenuous one.  At the time my father was preparing to graduate from Seminary at Boston University, a District Superintendent from Montana visited the campus to recruit young ministers.  Meeting my dad, the D.S. asked Father's plans and learned that Father intended to return to his home state of West Virginia.  At that, the D.S. asked "Why do you want to go back to West Virginia where there's a Methodist Church on every street corner?  Come out to Montana where we have wide open spaces and need people to fill them."  Somehow that appealed to the gypsy in my father, who then asked "What do you have to offer me?"  The D.S. offered Scobey, but when he described the location and topography of Daniels County, my parents together asked "Don't you have anything else?"  He did, and in 1946, three years before I was born, my parents moved to Stevensville in Ravalli County (#13).  Too bad, Scobey, you could have had me as a Native Son.

The United Methodist Church

Scobey, Montana

Community names in Daniels County do not show much imagination.  As we have seen, both the county itself and its seat are named for people important to the area.  Other communities in the county include Flaxville, named because of the flax that grows there, Four Buttes, so named because of the four hills that rise just outside of town, and Whitetail, named, you guessed it, for the numerous white-tailed deer in the area.  Peerless (originally named Tande for a local resident)  got its current name when the townsfolk moved the town to conform to the Great Northern Railway's tracks and choose the name of their favorite beer, Schlitz-Peerless.  OK, so that showed at least a sense of humor.  Madoc, now a ghost town, got its post office in 1910, but the postal officials called the community Orville.  Local residents didn't take kindly to that name, and eventually chose Madoc as a compromise among the many names suggested.  Lord knows what names were rejected.  As for two other ghost towns, no one today seems to know how either Julian or Navajo got their names, and there's no one alive to tell us.

The Madoc School

Madoc, Montana

City-data.com gives us a few interesting "facts" about Daniels County residents. For one, the median age of folk in the county is 50.  For another, 2,425 people belong to either the Roman Catholic or Evangelical Lutheran churches in the county--674 more people that the census counted, and that doesn't include the Methodists or "Others."  I have a personal knowledge of how church records are kept, and my guess would be that a lot of those church members reside in the various cemeteries around the county.  Thirty-six percent of county residents claim to have Norwegian ancestry, and another twenty percent claim to be of German stock.  As we could surmise, agriculture is the largest industry in the county accounting for forty-three percent of the market.  Curiously, Broadcasting and Telecommunications comes in second at eight percent, beating out the traditional second place holder, Construction, which only accounts for seven percent.  Of the farms in Daniels County, their average size is 2,240 acres and they produce $74,733 in products sold annually at a cost of $71,623.  The average age of the farm head is 58.  Wheat is harvested on 258,251 acres which accounts for the tallest building in any given Daniels County town--the grain elevator.

Grain Elevators in Flaxville, Montana

36. Judith Basin County

While traveling through the area in 1805, Captain William Clark saw a northward flowing river, so clean and beautiful, that he named it for his fiancée, calling it the Judith.  The river's source is in the Little Belt Mountains, and its mouth is at its confluence with the Missouri, some 124 miles northeast of the source.  The area drained by the Judith and its tributaries, bounded on three sides by the Highwood, Little Belt, Big Snowy, and Judith mountains, with the Missouri River on the north, bears the name Judith Basin, and on December 10, 1920, the Montana Legislature took land from Cascade (#2) and Fergus (#7) Counties to form Judith Basin County, after what historian Donald Spritzer calls "one of Montana's longest, most expensive, most bitter county division fights." (Roadside History of Montana, p. 289.)  Five communities vied for the title of County Seat, with Hobson and Stanford each putting $25,000 into the fight, but in the end, Stanford became the seat of government for the newly formed county. The county covers 1,870 square miles and as of the 2012 U.S. Census estimate, it held 2,024 residents.  The 1930 U.S. Census was the first to be held after the county's formation, and it counted 5,238 people.  The county's population has declined with every subsequent enumeration.

The Judith Basin County Courthouse

Stanford, Montana

Named in honor of Stanfordville, NY by Calvin and Edward Bower, ranchers who brought 100,000 sheep to the area in 1880,  Stanford today is a small town with less than 400 people counted in the 2010 U.S. Census.  The largest building in town is the county courthouse, and it was this structure that started me on the journey that has led to the current Glory of the West project.  Tax revenues from the iron ore and coal that was mined nearby paid for the courthouse, and this gives Judith Basin County the distinction of being the only Montana county to build their house of government without floating a bond issue.  The town itself got its start in 1875 as a stage station on the route between Billings and Fort Benton. The arrival of the Great Northern Railroad forced the town to relocate two miles, but brought many new settlers to the area.

Next door to the courthouse stands the Judith Basin County Museum.  Open from June through August, the Museum charges no entrance fee, but does accept free-will offerings.  It also has a variety of gifts for sale, not including any of the 2,000 sets of salt and pepper shakers or 5,000 buttons in the museum's collection.  I can only note that that's a salt and pepper shaker set for every man, woman and child in the county.

Hobson is the only other incorporated town in Judith Basin County, but other communities include Benchland, Geyser, Moccasin, Raynesford, Windham and Utica.  There is the wonderfully named ghost town, Ubet, which also started as a stage stop and got its name from the answer folks received when they asked about the possibility of overnight lodging.  "You bet!" was the constant answer.

The people of Judith Basin County continue to have a friendly and warm sense of humor.  On the Sunday after Labor Day, they celebrate What The Hay! on the Montana Bale Trail.  From its beginning in 1990 as a friendly rivalry between two neighboring ranchers, What The Hay! has grown into a major community attraction involving  Hobson, Utica and Windham, as well as the various ranches between the three towns. In 2011, the Travelocity gnome was one of the attendees.

The TravHAYlocity Gnome

On the Montana Bale Trail

Hobson, Montana

This is definitely a rural county, with a long history of animal husbandry and agriculture.  Prior to white settlement, the Judith Basin held hundreds of thousands of bison, and Native American tribes came from all directions to hunt in the area.  The first settlers brought sheep and cattle.  By the 1880s, the Judith Basin roundup saw some 500 cowboys converge on the area to make sure the locally raised cattle made it overland to the nearest rail depot, Casper, Wyoming, over 400 miles away.  One of the cowboys to work these roundups was a youngster from St. Louis, Missouri, a privileged youth whose father gave in to the teenager's desire.  Charles Marion Russell came to Montana in 1880, not yet 16 years old, and in 1882 he ended up in the Judith Basin.  As Spritzer says, "if Montana has a patron saint, it is probably Charlie Russell." (p. 278)  Some of Russell's earliest and most iconic paintings deal with ranch life in the Judith Basin.

Today, agriculture dwarfs all other occupations in the county.  Fifty-seven percent of working males and sixteen percent of working females are farmers, ranchers, or agricultural workers.  Construction work comes in second at eight percent.  According to city-data.com, the average size farm in the county covers 2,626 acres and brings in $102,031 on average per farm.  This sounds fine until we look at the average cost per farm which totals $102,571 per year.  The average age for principal farm operators is 54, which, combined with the continual loss of population does not bode well for the future of farming.

Grain Elevator at Raynesford, Montana

And yet it is a beautiful land.  Bordered on three sides by mountain ranges, some with peaks over 8,000 feet high, the rolling hills of the Judith Basin continue to entrance travelers, as they have from the beginning. Spritzer opens his section on the Central Valleys with a quote from Mrs. Clemence Gurneau Berger, wife of the leader of one of the first group of settlers in the region, a band of métis (people of mixed French Canadian and Native American blood).  It seems fitting to let Mrs. Berger have the last word:

We came in by way of the gap to the famous Judith Basin which was, indeed, a paradise land of plenty, game of all kinds, lots of good water and timber. What more could we want? After finding what we had searched for, our journey ended right here.

The rolling hills and farm land of Judith Basin County

35. Sanders County

William Fisk Sanders was born May 2, 1834 in Leon, New York.  In 1863, when President Lincoln appointed his uncle Sidney Edgerton as Chief Justice of the Territory of Idaho, Sanders and his family moved to the new Idaho Territory as well.  Edgerton advocated for splitting Idaho into two separate territories, and in 1864, Lincoln named him governor of the new Montana Territory.  Edgerton returned to Ohio after a couple of years, but his nephew remained a Montana resident for the rest of his life.  He was a lawyer and prosecutor in the early territorial days, and served in the territorial legislature.  Sanders was the first President of the Montana Historical Society.  When Montana became a state in 1889, Sanders was elected the first Senator from the new state.  He died in 1905, in Helena (Lewis & Clark County, #5), and is buried in Forestvale Cemetery there.  I can find no record of him ever living in the northwestern corner of the state that now bears his name, but six months prior to his death, a portion of Missoula County (#4) was taken to form the new Sanders County.

The Sanders County Courthouse

Thompson Falls, Montana

David Thompson, explorer and agent for the Hudson Bay Company, did spend a considerable amount of time in what we now call Sanders County.  Thompson, who has been called "the greatest land geographer who ever lived," was born in London in 1770.  At the age of fourteen, he entered an apprenticeship with the Hudson Bay Company, and left England for British North America.  In 1807, in a British response to the Corps of Discovery (Lewis and Clark), Thompson was sent into the Rocky Mountains and beyond to find a new route to the Pacific.  Along the way he established the first trading posts west of the Rockies, including Saleesh House near the site of the Sanders County seat, which bears his name, Thompson Falls.  In addition, his name can be found in the Thompson River, the Little Thompson River, Thompson Pass, all in Sanders County, and the Thompson Lakes chain in neighboring Lincoln County (#56).  The native people of the area called Thompson Star-Looker, or Koo-Koo-Sint, now the name of a popular fishing access site on the Flathead River, approximately fifty miles upstream from Saleesh House and still in Sanders County.  The name also has been applied to a Bighorn Sheep viewing site in Sanders County.  ParksCanada has published a pamphlet titled The Koo-Koo-Sint Trail on Thompson's importance to the Pacific Northwest which is available as a pdf file.

Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep (Ovis canadensis)

Along Montana Highway 200 

Koo-Koo-Sint Sheep Viewing Area

Today, some 11,000 people call Sanders County home (according to the 2010 U.S. Census), a population spread mostly through a narrow river valley that stretches some 115 miles along Montana Highway 200 from the Idaho state line just west of the town of Heron, Montana, to a few miles west of the town of Ravalli where 200 joins U.S. 93.  Wikipedia's entry on Sanders County lists eleven cities, towns and census-designated places in the county, and eight of those can be found on or adjacent to Highway 200.  The Northern Pacific Railroad (now the Burlington Northern-Santa Fe) came through the valley in the 1880s and brought thousands of workers to the area.  The discovery of gold in the mountains south of the river (and across the state line in Idaho) brought thousands more, and two boomtown communities, Belknap west of Thompson Falls, and Weeksville, west of Plains, flourished at least temporarily.  Today they are known mostly for a community store (Belknap) and a topographical feature (Weeksville Creek).  The towns themselves are long gone.

The 1855 Treaty of Hellgate set aside a portion of Missoula County (#4) to form the Flathead Indian Reservation.  With the formation of Sanders County, the western end of the reservation became part of the new county.  Today the towns of Dixon and Hot Springs, and the communities of Old Agency, Niarada and Lonepine all remain part of both Sanders County and the Reservation. Hot Springs' Homesteaders' Days celebration each June honors the legacy of both the native people and the white homesteaders who came to the area following the opening of the Reservation in 1910.

The Clark Fork River at Thompson Falls

Hot Springs is so named because of the various springs that provide soothing warm (and yes, hot) water to various pools and plunges around the area.  One of the best known is at the Symes Hotel, right in the middle of town.  The Symes provides more than relaxing baths, however.  Each weekend the Hot Springs Artists' Society presents live concerts on stage at the Symes.  Quinn's Hot Springs Resort, approximately 30 miles south near the Sanders County town of Paradise, is home to the Montana Baroque Festival, a presentation of the Sanders County Arts Council. 

The Flathead River

Near the community of Perma

Flathead Indian Reservation

The county's topography lends itself more to recreation than agriculture.  According to city-data.com, the average sized farm in Sanders County is just 745 acres with an annual value of agricultural products sold per farm of $30,342.  The mountains that cover most of the county provides miles upon miles of hiking trails, mountains to climb, streams to fish, and rivers to canoe.  Montana's largest river (by volume) is the Clark Fork of the Columbia.  It enters Sanders County from the south and flows in a generally northwestern direction till it crosses into Idaho five miles west of the town of Heron.  Three dams block the flow of the Clark Fork River as it carries its water out of Montana:  Cabinet Gorge at the Montana/Idaho state line; Noxon Rapids just upstream from the town of Noxon; and Thompson Falls within walking distance of the county court house. All three dams allow reservoirs to fill behind them, creating lake-like features that are popular for fishing and boating.  One of the Clark Forks main tributaries is the Flathead River which enters the county from the north and flows almost due west to its confluence with the Clark Fork near the town of Paradise.  Note that if you want to use the Flathead upstream of the Koo-Koo-Sint fishing access, you will need a tribal recreation permit unless you are an enrolled member of the Salish-Kootenai Tribes.  It is worth mentioning that the ice dam that held Glacial Lake Missoula in place was near Cabinet Gorge on the state line at the western end of Sanders County.