Unite, ye history buffs of Missoula County. We’ve got a job to do.

We’ve lived here for a century and a half, and it’s time we find out why – not why we live here, but why this place is called “Missoula.”

The question arose last week, 150 years after legislators of Washington Territory created Missoula County on its far-flung eastern lands on Dec. 14, 1860. That was four or five years before the name “Missoula Mills” was attached to the town that grew up on the banks of, well, postpone the river-naming narrative for another time.

Forget, too, the spelling of a word derived from a native term that, for some reason, we’ve come to pronounce “Mazzoola.” The old Salish wouldn’t have said it that way.

And skip lightly past the ages-old discussion over the meaning of the original term, be it “Nemissoolatakoo” or “lm-i-sul-e” or “In-May-soo-let-que.” There are at least half a dozen interpretations on record, the most viable referring to something chilling or ominous that waits in the canyon above town.

French fur traders long before 1860 called the Missoula area “La Porte de l’Enfer”– the Gates of Hell, or Hellgate – for those same foreboding reasons, the death and mayhem that occurred in the canyon and that might occur again.