blackfoot-valley

Saleable produce included truck-gardened vegetables and diary prod- ucts such as butter and cheese. In season, those commodities were taken in settlers’ wagons to be sold not only in the remaining nearby mining camps and Deer Lodge, but also in more distant and larger markets like Helena and Butte. The settlers soon realized that for other than limited specialities such as these, the area was better suited to livestock raising for sale as meat on the hoof. With large areas of open range available, cattle ranching became more significant than family farming since the latter could in many cases provide no more than a hand-to-mouth subsistence. In time, the size of landholdings in the valley increased, more through consolidation from sell-outs and pur- chases than any government action. (Eastern congressmen and government officials who control the federal lands were - and still are - notoriously slow to recognize the needs of the much drier west, especially the interior west.) By the 1880s, it was also possible to buy land from the Northern Pacific Railroad, which put some of its land-grant acreage up for sale. The first homestead in the larger area was claimed in 1865 on Warm Spring Creek in the Avon Valley just north of the present town of that name. The Nevada Valley itself saw its first permanent settlers in the later 1860s, the first coming from petered-out gold diggings such as Washington Creek. Among the earliest were Thomas Coleman and family, Ed Smith and family, Henry Helm (1867), Adolph Hoephner (1867), John and Mike and “Big Jim” Geary (1867), Bill and Johnny O’Neil, and Alvin Lincoln (1869). In the ensu- ing years, more trickled in and set up homes. As the years went by, many more came to the valley from Butte, in a spillover of people who did’nt care for the hectic mining and increasing industrial life there. Many of those were of Irish origin, and although people of other nationalities were and are repre- sented as well, the area took on a distinctive Irish-American character that is very discernable today, especially around Helmville. In this connection, a story well known in the Nevada Valley and brim- ming with Irish folklore, is worth repeating. A few lines from Powell Coun- ty: Where it all began, tell of a banshee that haunted the old Duffey Ranch (perhaps the 1880s) A banshee is a spirit in Irish and Gaelic folklore sup- posed to take the shape of an old woman who foretells a death in the family by wailing outside a dwelling. The story, attributed to Drummond pioneer Bil- ly Price, related an incident on the Duffey Ranch, located in the Cottonwood Creek area near Helmville, a bit upstream from the present Ranch headquar- ters. This is the story as Billy Price relayed it 120 years ago. 114