Ronan: The Town Named for an Indian Agent

Originally called Spring Creek for the warm springs nearby, this Mission Valley town was renamed to honor Major Peter Ronan, who had served as the Flathead Indian Reservation's agent from eighteen seventy-seven until his death in eighteen ninety-three. When the federal government opened the reservation to non-Native homesteaders in nineteen ten, Ronan boomed overnight. Settlers poured in, the town incorporated two years later, and in nineteen twenty-three when Lake County was formed, Ronan made a bid for the county seat.

Polson won anyway, sitting on better views of the water. Ronan remained the agricultural heart of the Mission Valley, the flat benchland between the Mission Mountains and Flathead Lake still growing grain and raising cattle on what had been reservation land for decades.