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48 | SignatureMT Farmers organized their calendars around events like spelling bees, the annual circus, baseball games and threshing contests. To a homesteader, going to town usually meant combining business and trading maers with social activities. You had ar- rived in social hierarchy if you had your own localized county and county seat with its governmental outlets like a county aorney or county superintendent of schools. It meant sol- vency. And hope. But when the homesteaders emptied out of Montana in the drought-plagued "bust" of the 1920s, Golden Valley County wasn't so golden anymore and Richland County no longer delivered bountiful riches. Montana was the only state to lose population in the 1920s. What was le was the jig saw puzzle map of a state that, without citizens, was hard-pressed to support the infrastructure of so many county seats of local governments. But, they stuck anyway. irteen Montana counties are named because of their connection with geographic features, twelve of them for rivers that flow through them. Twenty-six counties are named for men. No Montana county is named for a woman except Judith Basin, but few Montanans could tell you who Judith really was, much less that she was never in Montana. SPOIL- ER ALERT: Captain William Clark named it for his future wife, Julia ( Judith) Hancock back home in Virginia. Among the white male names, many of them are for folks who have never even been to Montana like Madison, Jefferson and Gall- atin along with Lincoln and Garfield. Alternatively, colorful Montana personages with direct links to the state's history are spread across the map to lay claim to their Montana reputa- tions, think: Meagher, Custer, Sanders and Lewis and Clark. Even though Montana has seven Indian reservations, there is only one county named for any Montana-relat- ed Indian tribe (Flathead), unless you count Pon- dera, a marginal aempt to connect that tribe to Montana's history and, even then, the spelling owes lile to the original French name of Pend d'Orielle. Teton County also comes close with reference to the Teton Sioux, the westernmost branch of Dakota Siouan cultures, but etymology is oen cor- rupted with the claim, probably apocryphal, that French-Ca- nadian fur traders used the term "teton" for twin mountain peaks on the Rocky Mountain Front resembling breasts. A. B. Guthrie, Jr. tapped into that fanciful notion in his Big Sky epic when he placed Boone and Teal Eye, his central characters, on the Teton River. With a nod to resource wealth, there's Carbon County, Treasure County, Mineral County and Petroleum County. Some of the personal names are associated with a Catholic missionary (father Anthony Ravalli), cale barons ( James Fergus and Pierre Wibaux) an Army general (Phillip Sheri- dan) and a railroad magnate ( James J. Hill). Other personal names, now rather pedestrian and unremembered, persist: Daniels County for local rancher, Mansfield Daniels, McCone County, named for an obscure Montana State legislator, George McCone and Phillips County for a former state senator Benjamin Phillips. Of Blaine County's vastness, it is said that you can sit on your porch and watch your dog run away—for three days. It has the lowest population of all the counties at 0.274 persons per square mile. ere are more antelope in Garfield County than there are residents, but Blaine and Garfield's true name connections to Montana are still obscure. Liberty County, established in 1919, celebrated Railroad promoters and land speculators painted a picture of the "Garden in the Grasslands" throughout eastern Montana.