THE CHURCH ON THE CHANGING FRONTIER
CHAPTER I
The Range Country
A vast expanse of endlessly stretching plains, dun-colored table-lands, mysterious buttes against a far horizon, and “always the tremendous, almost incredible distances”—this is the typical Range country. There are a sweep to it and a breadth, and such heavens over the earth! In the East, unless some crimson sunset attracts indifferent eyes, the sky makes less of the picture than the earth. But this is sky country.
Roughly, the Range area comprises the states between the Middle West and the Far West, and includes a wide variety of landscape. Contained in this picturesque area are eight states with parts of others, a million square miles over which are spread four million people about a third less than are crowded into New York City. The four counties here studied, each in a different state, provide fair samples of a great deal of the country. Beaverhead County, in Montana, and Sheridan County, in Wyoming, are not far distant one from the other. Both are partly mountainous, rugged in contour, with wide valleys rimmed by mountains, and miles of undulating range land and low-lying hills traced by rivers. This is the country where “the smoke goes straight up and the latch-string still hangs on the outside of the old-timer’s cabin,” where still the “sage-hen clucks to her young at the water-hole in the coulee ... with lazy grace, the eagle swings to his nest in the lofty pinnacle and the prairie dog stands at his door and chatters.”
Beaverhead is in the extreme southwestern corner of Montana, slightly northwest of Yellowstone Park and straight south from Butte. It is bounded by Rocky Mountain ranges on the west, south and northwest. On the south and west it faces the State of Idaho. The county is well drained and watered by the two principal rivers, the Big Hole and Beaverhead, and by their tributaries, and here, too, the Missouri River has its source. Beaverhead County embraces 5,657 square miles or 3,620,480 acres. Of this area, 1,365,000 acres are included in the Beaverhead National Forest Reserve scattered over the north, west and southern parts of the county. A small part of the Madison National Forest also extends into the county on the west. The altitude at Monida, in the southern part of the county, is about 6,500 feet above sea level.
