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
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