Miss Oula is the lady this town is named after. Back in the 1870s, this was just a couple of log shacks in a valley of the Clark Fork River. Cowboys, miners, and other disreputable sorts gathered here, usually with the law or wives searching for them. One day, a woman showed up. She was driving a wagon filled with other women, patent nostrums for various male complaints, and other things needed on the frontier.

No one ever knew her first name; they just called her "Miss Oula". She nursed those hardy pioneers through epidemics of bubonic plague, yaws, cholera, beri-beri, measles, syphilis, chickenpox, bullets, and other hazards. Miss Oula and her companions comforted the men in their need, charging them only the going rate. They cooked meals for them and charged only a slight markup. Eventually Miss Oula had won the hearts of all of the men in the county, and then the men's wives arrived.

Obviously they couldn't associate with Miss Oula and her girls, but they were very grateful for what had been given to their husbands. Miss Oula and Co. were ordered into a small section of town near the railhead, but the town's name was changed from "That Stinkin' Piece Of Unreal Estate On The Clark Fork River, Montana" to "Miss Oula, Montana" in her mammary. Eventually the post office, which kept confusing "Miss Oula" with someplace in Mississippi and hence delayed payment of various government pensions and other checks slammed "Miss" and "Oula" together to create the name the town currently bears: Missoula, Montana.

Miss Oula herself was killed by an irate husband; the reasons behind this are too sordid to go into in detail but they involve manacles, leather underwear, another man, a turtle, two barrel cacti, and an irate husband who couldn't hit the side of the barn from the inside.

Miss Oula's funeral procession took two days to pass the center of town, primarily because of the saloons there. With two hearses and literally tens of mourners (the town still wasn't very big) there was great moaning and wailing and keening and drinking. The wake before the funeral took two months and completely depleted the local ice supply (embalming hadn't reached this far West yet) and the entire liqour supply of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming.

The location of her grave is unknown, since no one could remember where they buried her. People tried, but the headaches and upset stomachs resulting from her wake didn't wear off until 1918 and by then the US was at war with Prohibition and folks had other things on their minds.

And so she lays buried somewhere in these hills, unless floods or avalanches or something have carried her body off, but her mammary lives on.

(NOTE: It's state law in Montana that Miss Oula be stricken from history, so when writing about her one is required to use the term "mammary" instead of the more common term denoting rememberance. This was forced into the Statutes by the aforesaid wives and subverted by the aforesaid cowboys, miners, and other ne'er-do-wells.)