Where the Rain Never Reaches:

A History of Garfield County, Montana

INTRODUCTION

Garfield County occupies one of the emptiest corners of the American map, a stretch of high plains and eroded badlands in east-central Montana where the Big Dry Creek country meets the Missouri River breaks. It is a place better known today for cattle, wheat stubble, and dinosaur bones than for any single dramatic event, yet its history compresses, in miniature, most of the larger currents that shaped the northern plains: Indigenous displacement, the open-range cattle boom, the homestead rush and its bitter collapse, a scientific discovery of world importance, and, decades later, an armed standoff that made the county's name known across the country. To understand Garfield County is to understand how quickly a landscape can fill with people and how just as quickly, when the rain stops, it can empty again.

THE LAND AND ITS FIRST PEOPLE

Long before surveyors platted townships or homesteaders broke sod, the plains drained by Big Dry Creek were hunting territory for the Assiniboine and allied Sioux bands, who ranged across a vast portion of northeastern Montana in pursuit of bison. The Assiniboines' traditional territory stretched from the eastern edge of Minnesota west to the Milk River; while the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty recognized territory for northern tribes, subsequent executive orders and federal land negotiations assigned lands south of the Missouri River that were shared with Sioux bands. That joint claim, encompassing some twenty million acres, held until 1886, when negotiations with the federal government created the two-million-acre Fort Peck Indian Reservation to the north. The decades between were marked, as they were across the plains, by disease, the destruction of the bison herds, and increasing pressure from white traders and settlers. The land that would become Garfield County was never itself reserved as tribal ground, but the transformation of the Big Dry country from hunting range to cattle range to farmland cannot be separated from the treaty negotiations and dispossession that were unfolding around it.

The creek that gives the region its name was known to the earliest American travelers who passed nearby. Big Dry Creek first appears in the written record in the Lewis and Clark journals, in an entry dated May 6, 1805, and the creek remained the defining geographic feature of the county that would eventually take shape around it. Intermittent for much of the year and prone to disappearing into its own sandy bed by midsummer, the creek shaped both the ecology and the economy of everything that followed.

OPEN RANGE AND THE MAKING OF "BIG DRY COUNTRY"

For much of the later nineteenth century, the region was cattle country in the open-range sense: unfenced, lightly populated, and dominated by large outfits that grazed herds across public domain with little regard for boundary lines. Large cattle companies made use of the open range until the late 1880s, when the first fenced ranches began to appear, many of them established by cowboys who had previously worked for the big outfits. This was the "Big Dry" of local memory, a country defined less by any town than by a creek bed and the ranches strung along it, still administratively part of Dawson County to the east.

Into this cattle country came Arthur Jordan, a hunter and trader who, by his own later account, had grown familiar with the Big Dry drainage before deciding to settle there permanently. Jordan brought his family to the banks of Big Dry Creek in 1896, and after establishing a trading post that served local cattle and sheep operators, he and other area residents successfully petitioned for a post office in 1899, which the Postal Service designated with the name Jordan. A modest cluster of saloons, rooming houses, livery stables, blacksmith shops, and stores grew up around that post office over the following years. According to local tradition preserved by the Montana Historical Society, the town may not even have been named for Arthur Jordan himself, but rather for a friend of his from Miles City who shared the same surname, a small ambiguity that historians have never fully resolved.

HOMESTEADERS AND THE BIRTH OF A COUNTY

The town's true growth spurt came with the homestead boom of the early twentieth century, driven by federal land laws that offered enlarged claims to dryland farmers willing to risk the plains' unpredictable moisture. The homestead rush reached Garfield County in the latter part of the 1910s, at a time when the area was still legally part of Dawson County, and the population of the Big Dry Creek country swelled considerably between 1900 and 1920 as new arrivals staked claims across the open rangeland. The sheer number of new residents, combined with the practical difficulty of conducting county business from a courthouse many miles away, generated a local movement for self-government. By 1919 the residents of the district had reached a consensus that they required a county of their own, and Garfield County was carved out of Dawson County that year, with the new county named for James A. Garfield, the twentieth president of the United States. The choice of a county seat was contested rather than automatic. Jordan competed for the designation against the rival communities of Cohagen, Sand Springs, and West Edwards, with local newspapers in each town campaigning energetically on behalf of their respective candidates, before Jordan was ultimately selected as county seat by popular vote.

THE BUST

The optimism of the homestead years did not survive the decade that followed. Like much of eastern and central Montana, the Big Dry country was staked out on the assumption of dependable rainfall that never fully arrived. Drought conditions first appeared in isolated parts of northern Montana in the spring of 1917 and, accompanied by grasshopper infestations and crop failure, spread across the eastern and central portions of the state by the following year. By the fall of 1918 the economic effects of the drought were visible across the region, and the situation worsened further in 1919 when postwar wheat prices collapsed. An estimated sixty thousand people left Montana during the 1920s, many resettling in Washington, Oregon, and California, and Montana became the only state in the nation to lose population during that decade. Garfield County shared fully in this reversal. The population that had swelled during the homestead boom began to decline after 1920, and much of the abandoned homestead acreage reverted to grazing land, restoring the county's older identity as ranch country even as it retained the county government structure the boom years had produced.

BONES IN THE BADLANDS: THE DISCOVERY OF TYRANNOSAURUS REX

If the homestead era left Garfield County with more history than population, the county's eroded badlands offered something else of enduring significance: some of the richest Late Cretaceous fossil beds in North America. In 1902, the American Museum of Natural History fossil hunter Barnum Brown led an expedition into the Hell Creek country of eastern Montana. Working with the paleontologist R. S. Lull, Brown's party recovered a Triceratops specimen along with partial remains that would later be designated the holotype of Tyrannosaurus rex. That partial skeleton, though incomplete, gave science its first documented evidence of the animal, and Brown continued collecting from the Hell Creek beds on behalf of the museum through 1910, ultimately recovering multiple Triceratops specimens and other Cretaceous fossils from the same badlands. Six years after the initial find, Brown returned to the field and made a second, far more complete discovery. According to the American Museum's own exhibition records, Brown discovered a nearly complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton at Big Dry Creek, Montana, in 1908, a specimen whose skull the museum later described as remarkably well preserved, and the museum's photographic archive independently identifies the specimen's find site in identical terms, cataloguing it as recovered from Big Dry Creek. That skeleton, still on exhibit in New York, remains one of the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex mounts in the world and anchors Garfield County's continuing identity as a destination on Montana's dinosaur trail, commemorated locally at the Garfield County Museum in Jordan.

FORT PECK, THE REFUGE, AND A CHANGING LANDSCAPE

The county's geography shifted again in the 1930s with the construction of Fort Peck Dam on the Missouri River, a New Deal-era project that reshaped the northern edge of the county. Prior to the dam's construction, Big Dry Creek had joined the Missouri River in the northeast corner of the county; afterward, the impounded waters of Fort Peck Lake redefined that confluence entirely. The reservoir and the surrounding breaks were eventually incorporated into the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, a sprawling federal holding that today occupies much of the county's northern reach. The refuge extends along roughly two hundred miles of the lake's shoreline and encompasses some 1.1 million acres of canyon, badland, and prairie habitat, sustaining populations of antelope, elk, mule deer, and sage grouse, and its badlands continue to yield the fossil material that first drew Brown's attention at the turn of the century.

THE FREEMEN STANDOFF

Garfield County returned to national attention in 1996 under circumstances no local booster could have wished for. A loosely organized anti-government group calling itself the Montana Freemen had taken up residence on a ranch property west of Jordan, where members held mock common-law trials of public officials, including the Garfield County attorney, and filed fraudulent financial liens against private citizens and government agents. Led by a former crop duster named LeRoy Schweitzer, the group held that government authority should not extend above the county level, and it repeatedly acted out against local officials who challenged that position. Federal agents and the Freemen entered an 81-day standoff at the property, which local residents came to know informally as Justus Township. The confrontation began on March 25, 1996, when FBI agents arrested Schweitzer and an associate away from the property, and it continued until the final members of the group surrendered on June 14, 1996. Federal negotiators deliberately avoided the violent outcomes of earlier standoffs at Ruby Ridge and Waco, instead relying on patience, cut utilities, and eventual negotiation to bring the episode to a peaceful close. The siege drew national television crews to Jordan's Main Street for weeks and left a lasting, complicated legacy in a county whose residents were, by most contemporary accounts, unsympathetic to the Freemen's ideology even as many remained wary of the scale of the federal response.

GARFIELD COUNTY TODAY

Garfield County's population has never approached its homestead-era peak. The Montana Historical Society describes the county as one of the least densely populated places in the country, with roughly four-tenths of a resident per square mile, centered on Jordan as its seat of government. The county today counts some 260 farms, nearly three-quarters of which exceed a thousand acres, with cattle production and forage crops, along with spring and winter wheat, forming the backbone of the local economy. Oil development has played a role in the county's finances without ever rivaling agriculture's importance. What remains constant is the relationship between the land and the people who work it: a dry, wind-scoured country that broke the ambitions of thousands of homesteaders a century ago continues to support a much smaller number of ranching families, in much the same badlands that once gave up the bones of the tyrant lizard king.

WORKS CITED

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