Wilsall, Montana

Wilsall exists because the railroad ran out of track here. In 1909 the Northern Pacific pushed a branch line up the Shields valley and stopped, and right at the end of the line a town was born almost overnight, the shipping point where the valley's grain and cattle met the rails. The odd little name is the best part. It honors Will Jordan, of the Jordan cattle outfit, and his wife, Sally. Somebody took Will and took Sally, the Will and the Sall, and married the two names together into one. Wilsall. So the whole town is, in a way, named after a marriage. (Source: Wikipedia, Wilsall, Montana.)

That life-size bronze mountain man standing watch over the valley has a name, Thunder Jack, and the name has a sweet story behind it. He is not a real person. The local artist Gary Kerby sculpted him in 2006 to honor all the trappers who came through, and the Shields Valley first-grade class of that year is who actually christened him Thunder Jack. He stands in for the real ones. Weathered and wind-bitten men like John Colter, Thomas Fitzpatrick, and Jim Bridger, hundreds of them, who pushed deep into the Rockies chasing beaver pelts for the hat trade back east. They were unmatched marksmen, horsemen, and natural-born survivors, and they mapped this country with their boots long before any road or rail. Colter, who came west with Lewis and Clark and then stayed behind, was the first white man to lay eyes on the steaming geysers of the Yellowstone, and nobody back home believed a word of it. The statue is dedicated to everyone who came, endured, and made a home in this mountain valley before and since Captain Clark named it in 1806. (Source: Roadside America, Thunder Jack.)

After gold turned up at Alder Gulch and the boomtown of Virginia City sprang out of the Montana hills, every prospector in the country wanted a fast way in. The famous route, the Bozeman Trail, was also the deadly one. It ran straight through the hunting grounds of the Sioux and Cheyenne in the Powder River country, and it was about to set off a full-blown war. So they turned to the one man who carried a map of the entire West in his head, the old mountain man Jim Bridger. Bridger blazed a safer line to the mines, swinging west of the Bighorn Mountains and away from the worst of the fighting, and guided emigrant wagon trains up it in the 1860s. His route came right up this valley from the Yellowstone, followed Brackett Creek, climbed over the divide just west of here, dropped onto Bridger Creek, and rode that down into the Gallatin Valley and on to the gold. The man knew this country so well that the creek, the canyon, and the whole mountain range over by Bozeman still carry his name. (Source: WyoHistory.org, The Bridger Trail.)