Wild Horse Plains

By editor

[Plains, Sanders County, Montana, 1881]

Between seventy thousand and one hundred and thirty thousand years ago, the Bull Lake ice age glaciers dammed the Clark Fork River Valley, creating Glacial Lake Missoula. All the waters from the Clark Fork drainage backed up to form a lake so vast it would have made the Mediterranean look like a puddle. When the ice dam finally broke, the river carried more water than the combined flow of all the streams of the world, scouring the landscape and leaving behind a circular valley at an elevation of 2,450 feet.

The Native American tribes who traveled through the area in the early 1800s were practical people. They looked at this fertile, sheltered valley and decided it was the perfect place to winter their ponies, harvest salmon, and hold great councils. They called it Wild Horse Plains, a name that possessed the twin virtues of being both accurate and descriptive.

The mountain men, trappers, surveyors, and map makers who followed were equally practical, though generally less interested in councils and more interested in beaver pelts. They passed through the valley, admired the grass, and moved on. It wasn't until the late 1860s that white settlers began to arrive in earnest, bringing with them the holy trinity of Western civilization: farming, ranching, and lumbering.

For a few decades, Wild Horse Plains was a quiet, prosperous place where a man could raise a crop of hay and a herd of cattle without too much interference from the outside world. Then, between 1881 and 1883, the Northern Pacific Railway arrived. The railroad, as it always did, brought progress, noise, and a sudden influx of people who were in a hurry to get somewhere else.

The town began to increase in size and importance. Businesses flourished, and the citizens, feeling the sudden weight of their own civic dignity, decided that "Wild Horse Plains" was entirely too frontier-sounding for a modern railroad town. They shortened the name to "Horse Plains," which was an improvement only in brevity. Finally, deciding that even "Horse" was too rustic, they settled on "Plains." It is a name that manages to be entirely accurate while conveying absolutely nothing of the valley's history, which is, after all, the American way.

See also

• Wild Horse Plains at Plains, Sanders County (Montana Historical Society)
• [Glacial Lake Missoula] - The ice age lake that carved the valley.