Montana scenery1/7/2024 As the new settlement grew, a post office became a necessity. Ovando Hoyt, the town’s namesake landed in the valley in the 1882. They called it Cokalahishkit, “The River of the Road to the Buffalo.” Long before the Corps of Discovery passed by what is now Ovando, many of Montana’s original people including the Kootenai, Salish, Nez Perce, Blackfeet, and Pen d’ Oreilles used the Blackfoot corridor to travel to the prairie lands to the east to hunt bison. In several places small shallow ponds or wetlands sit in between these formations. These are the almost conical shaped features properly called kames. In other parts of the valley finer materials filtered through crevasses in the glacier and created, as Meriwether Lewis penned in his journal, “knobs”. The valley was a mess of ice and mud!Īs the glaciers slowly receded with a warming climate, deposits of rock and mud were left behind creating the elongated moraines seen today. In the summers melting ice carrying rocks and soils from the higher terrain became muddy silt laden water randomly spreading anywhere a channel could be found. This segment of the Blackfoot Valley also served as a glacial outwash plain. Large glaciers, born in the high country to the north spilled to the valley and spread outward forming a large apron of ice or in geo speak, a piedmont glacier. Glaciation of the Pleistocene era is responsible for the unique topography of the region. And like many old Montana towns, Ovando, its human enclave has weathered countless storms and changes and has withstood the passage of time. Since Montana earliest years when homesteaders made their way here, the valley has remained a ranching domain. ![]() Mountains of the fabled Bob Marshall Country form its northern horizon and forested uplifts of the Garnet Range guard the southern perimeter. Long on scenery and short on population the middle Blackfoot River Valley is the epitome of rural Montana.
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