Shared place names hide different meanings

There are 170 streams in Montana named Spring Creek, and three of them are in Jefferson County. One contributes to Little Whitetail Creek, just below where the McClusky Fire burned for two months last summer; another is a small tributary to Turnley Creek and its beaver dams just west of the town of Elkhorn; the third is the longest, running from the Montana Tunnels Mine to Jefferson City, where it pours into Prickly Pear Creek.

When a space on earth is given a name it becomes more than just the sum of its parts, and it becomes a place. Why a chunk of earth is named what it is can serve different purposes. It can be descriptive, like Rock Creek. Some names are attempts to etch on the map a permanent reminder of the namer or someone who first turned that space into a place, such as Wilson Creek. Others, and perhaps the most beautiful, are attempts to put to paper the way a place makes one feel, as with The Angels Bathing Pool in Montana’s Mission Mountains. No matter the origin, it is important for geographic features to have standardized names.

It was just a function of how Anglo-Americans moved across the landscape that the names of modern features were not all configured at once, and so while one pioneer came across a creek in northeast Montana that had cottonwood trees on it and so proclaimed it Cottonwood Creek, a miner in southwest Montana came across a similar creek and did the same thing. So here we are, with 87 Cottonwood Creeks in Montana. If you believe like me that places matter and names give them power, this fact might drive you nuts.