Milk River Days

On the evening of July 3 the Cowboys Rodeo opens Milk River Days in downtown Hinsdale. After it comes the street dance on Montana Street, the short main street that runs north from U.S. Highway 2. The dance is free. Hinsdale is an unincorporated town in Valley County on the Milk River, with 193 people at the 2020 census, and it calls itself “The Best Little Town in the Milk River Valley.”

The Fourth on Montana Street

The parade steps off at 11:00 a.m. on the Fourth. Kids’ games follow it, then horseshoe pitching, a ping pong drop, and a beef barbecue, and a community picnic belongs to the day as well. The Glasgow Area Chamber of Commerce & Agriculture lists a quick draw pistol shoot and a cannon shoot among the other entertainments. Montana’s Missouri River Country, the regional travel office, adds live music, dancing, and tournaments. The fireworks go up at dusk and, like the dance, cost nothing. The travel office describes the event as two days on the Fourth of July weekend. The chamber and the Wikipedia entry for the town give the two days as July 3 and 4.

The river runs along the north side of town, below a cut bank that separates Hinsdale from the county park at the water’s edge. A University of Montana geography note says the river is crowded in summer with people swimming from the dock, boating, and jet skiing. The chamber lists fishing for walleye, northern pike, and catfish over the celebration weekend, along with water skiing and boating over a 13-mile area.

A bicentennial party, fifty years on

Milk River Days began in 1976 as Hinsdale’s bicentennial celebration. Its organizers marked the half century with a book, 50 Years of Milk River Days, paid for with help from sponsors. In July 2026 copies were still for sale at Prairie Perks and the Pioneer Museum, or through Brady Johnson.

The festival’s Facebook page works as a bulletin board for the whole town. In the summer and fall of 2026 it posted photographs labeled “July 1987” and a parade video from the collection of Debbi Jones Sjostrom, shared by her daughter, Amy Sjostrom Johnsen. It also posted an article on the Hinsdale grain elevator, notices of community worship in the Legion park, and the question “Does anyone know what saloon this would have been from?” The page had announced a Fall Festival on Montana Street for October 12, 2025. In September 2026 it asked its readers which site they preferred, after one video drew 6,000 views on Facebook and 50 on YouTube.

Every fifth year, in years ending in 6 and 1, Hinsdale High School holds an All School Reunion for its alumni. The 2026 reunion was set for Thursday, July 2, on Montana Street, the day before the rodeo.

Six-shooter Bob’s town site

The Act of May 1, 1888 ceded a large area from the tribes, Hinsdale included, and opened it to homesteading. The town itself was created when the Great Northern Railway came through, and a post office was established in 1891. The original site, Old Hinsdale, lay about a mile and a half east of the present town and was once owned by Bob Walsh, known as “Six-shooter Bob.” The present town site belonged to William Woolridge, the depot agent in 1897. The tracks still run beside the highway on the south side of town. Amtrak’s Empire Builder passes on them without stopping; the nearest station is in Glasgow, 29 miles southeast.

Carroll Van West, the historian, wrote in 2020: “I have little doubt that few visitors ever stop, or even slow down much, as they speed along the highway.” Those who stop find one-story false-front buildings and two former banks, the First National and the Valley County Bank. Both are strongbox buildings touched by the Classical Revival style, built on hopes for growth along the U.S. Reclamation Service’s Milk River Project early in the twentieth century. Near them stand a c. 1960s American Legion Hall, St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, and a c. 1902 Methodist church whose cupola sits apart from it. Of the cupola, Van West wrote that it “must be a good story.”

The town has weathered the drought of the 1920s, dust storms in the Depression, and one of the worst droughts in the area’s history in the 1980s. In late August 2014 seven inches of rain fell in three days, bringing Hinsdale its third hundred-year flood in three years. Some family ranches, the Canen and the McColly among them, have passed 100 years of operation.

Tea with a tablespoonful of milk

Southeast of town is a buffalo jump once used by the Assiniboine and Sioux. Hunters dressed in thick brown hides drove the bison over a steep cliff. The jump is on private land and not open to the public. The Corps of Discovery reached the head of the Milk River in May 1805. The University of Montana note says Lewis and Clark camped by the river on the north side of present Hinsdale. The expedition named the river for its color, writing that “the water of this river possesses a peculiar whiteness, being about the colour of a cup of tea with the admixture of a tablespoonfull of milk.”