blackfoot-valley

early the next year. Deer Lodge County remained intact until early 1901 when the Seventh State Legislature approved its division into two distinct entities: Deer Lodge County comprising the area around Anaconda, and Pow- ell County west of Deer Lodge (named for 10,168 foot Mt. Powell and John Wesley Powell). With a total population of 7,180 people in the 2000 census, Powell County divides into three distinct parts of similar size. Its northern one-third is forest and mountain country, uninhabited and much of which lies within the Bob Marshall Wilderness with its crown jewell, “The Chinese Wall” of up to one thousand foot cliffs forming thirteen miles of the Conti- nental Divide. The county’s middle third is the area with which we are most concerned, as it includes the Ranch and the towns of Helmville and Ovando, within the drainage of Nevada Creek and the (Big) Blackfoot River. (Ovando’s population was listed as 71 by the 2000 census; Helmville was not sepa- rately enumerated, but the town itself has roughly half as many residents as Ovando.) The southern third is the most populous section and is drained by the Clark Fork of the Columbia River, which runs through it, and contains the towns of Avon (pop. 124) and Elliston (pop. 225) on the little Blackfoot River and Garrison (pop. 112) where the little Blackfoot joins the Clark Fork. Eight miles upstream on the Clark Fork lies the county seat of Deer Lodge, which with a population of 3,421 inhabitants accounts for almost half the population of the entire county. The above are all places in Powell County listed sepa- rately by the 2000 census. As small as they are, Elliston, Avon, and Garrison all have rail connec- tions with Helena and Missoula on the main line of the old Northern Pacific tracks. Deer Lodge and Garrison are just off Interstate Route 90, as is Drum- mond (pop.318), which lies in neighboring Granite County a bit farther west and about twenty miles south of Helmville on a mostly gravel-surfaced road. About the same distance from Helmville in the opposite direction and reached by faster paved roads is Lincoln (pop. 1,100), located on the upper (Big) Blackfoot River in Lewis and Clark County. Lincoln gained national no- toriety on April, 1997, when the long-sought-after “Unabomber,” Theodore J. Kaczynsky, was apprehended in his isolated shack four miles out of town. He was accussed of killing three people and maiming or injuring another twenty- three around the county in fifteen mail-bomb attacks over the previous eigh- teen years. The intended victims were people he saw as anti-environmental- ists or connected with organizations he considered related. People in Lincoln knew him as just a mild-mannered hermit, a “nice guy” who periodically bicy- cled into town for supplies and used the library. Kaczynsky was tried and con- victed in California the following year, where he is now serving a life sentence. 99