blackfoot-valley

Many of the scattering of non-Irish names - such as English and Welsh- were acquired by marriage, their owners thus part Irish. One who was not, simply bears the inscription “Mary, Indian girl, died 1893.” She was with a group of Flathead Indians from St. Ignatius, the early Catholic Mission forty miles north of Missoula, who came through the valley on their yearly hunt, and died while here. Her parents asked that she be buried at the cemetary. As explained in the Powell County book: “John Geary, the trustee, explained that only Catholics were buried there. With that, the Indian father crossed himself saying ‘Me Catholic,’ and muttered a few prayers. Every year for a number of years on their return trips to the valley they would visit the little grave in the Catholic cemetary.” Of course, by no means were all Helmville area settlers Irish or Catho- lic - the pioneers included some English and other British names as well as German and Scandinavian. Adolph Hoephner, a former miner of German extraction, was one of the Nevada Valley’s first settlers, arriving with a team of mules and starting his horse and sheep ranch on upper Nevada Creek. In 1869 he began irrigating, the first settler in the Nevada Valley to do so. A little later came the “Douglas Creek Deutsch.” Douglas Creek, along with closely parallel Cottonwood Creek, both flow in part through the present Ranch headquarters area, repectively just a third of a mile and two-thirds of a mile east of the headquarters complex itself. These settlers arrived from Pellworm Island, one of the North Frisian Islands off the Atlantic coast of Schleswig, which forms Denmark’s Jutland Peninsula. The first of their homesteads, a bit upstream of present Ranch land on Cottonwood Creek, was staked out by Matt Peterson, a German, although his name reflects at least one paternal Danish forebear. (This is not at all surprising when one realiz- es that the Schleswig region had several times switched back and forth between German and Danish control. During the time in question 121