Hungry Horse

There’s obviously a story surrounding the name of Hungry Horse, the next town east of Columbia Falls [1]. During the severe winter of 1900, two draft horses used for logging in the area, Tex and Jerry, wandered off. When they were found about a month later, they were all scraggly and hungry.

Although there’d been settlements in the area since the end of the 19th century, the Hungry Horse post office wasn’t established until 1948, when the federal government began planning to dam the South Fork of the Flathead River. The dam was completed in 1952.