blackfoot-valley

Strictly speaking, the Nevada Valley proper - the drainage basin of Ne- vada Creek itself - runs northwest to southeast for 22 miles. We will consider it here as extending from the vicinities of Avon to Ovando, with Helmville and the Ranch headquarters between the two but closer to Ovando. This brings its extended length to 40 miles as measured in a straight line. The Nevada Valley was bypassed by the major stage lines running east to west parallel to the Clark Fork, and later the railroads as well. Although a small stage branch line came to be established, it was off the beaten track. As we have seen, it was a low-use area even for the Indians, a kind of no-man’s land between the main homelands of the Flathead and the other Salish groups to the west, and those of the Blackfoot and other plains buffalo hunters from the east of the divide who came here periodically to fish, hunt, or raid. The first white men to come in were the gold seekers, starting in the early 1860s. That decade saw the founding of Blackfoot City and other gold camps. Farther north, the Nevada Creek drainage was touched, but less significantly, with good diggings found in the gulches of the upper Nevada Valley - not Nevada Creek itself, but other creeks coming down from the Continental Di- vide: Washington Creek, American, Madison, Buffalo, and California Gulches, all within a 30-square-mile area between Blackfoot City and Helmville. Here again, it did not take many years for the richest diggings to play out. Most miners left. Those who stayed in the area had to turn to other pursuits. Blackfoot City, a few miles from Nevada Creek, held on longer than most of the mining camps, but lost its post office in 1883 after the Northern Pacific bypassed it. Its last store closed in 1912. A few families stayed on until the late 1920s. The community of Finn, a transit and market point, had only “one store, two saloons, two livery stables, one hotel, and two residences by 1883.” 112