Jefferson County is a land of gulches – though we’ve also got canyons, hollows, and valleys. According to the United States Board of Geographic Names (USBGN), “linear depressions in Earth’s surface that generally slope from one end to the other” are valley features. Within that category of landform are gulches, coulees, draws and many other place name types. Some chunks of earth fit the bill of the USBGN but instead are called the name of the stream that flows within them. In Jefferson County, Willard Creek – in the Elkhorns – is a good example of this.
The names on our valley features are at times typical and at others solely unique. We’ve got three Black Canyons – one off Prickly Pear Creek along Tizer Road, another down by Doherty Mountain, and another still off McCarty Creek – but there are in fact 13 Black Canyons in the state of Montana. That said, we’ve got the only Buttermilk Jim Gulch in the state and may it forever be so.
One might think that whether something is a gulch or a coulee or a draw has to do with the features themselves. This may be true for canyons, typically narrow and steep-walled, but for the aforementioned it appears to be as cultural and regional as anything. Gulches are often associated with mining, and Jefferson County was, is and, will continue to be mining country. Many of our gulches are named after the first mineral claims held within them, and those names came from the prospectors who discovered them.
There’s a fair amount of metaphors of life steeped in the language of valleys. They offer change and struggle, and to get anywhere in this land you’ve got to cross them. I find a metaphor in their delineations. When a valley begins or ends is not a line of consistent contour, but is more a combination of contour and slope and surrounding relief. One valley can meet another and yet be different. Even though it is tough to codify, you know a valley when you see one and that it is different than the high country around it.
There’s lessons for sophistry in geography, and in this instance, of mountains and valleys. Where one ends and another begins is hard to define, and the edges between the two blur. But those two facts do nothing to negate the existence of summits and basins, or even good and evil – benchmarks for navigating the world.
