Secession Speakeasy #196: Rural Missoula County Pushes to Become Montana's 57th County

Released September 3, 2026.

Professor Wall (Grant M. Dahl) and the Secession Minstrel return to the effort to split rural eastern Missoula County, Montana, into a new county. Organizers now call it County 57: Montana has 56 counties and has not created one since Petroleum County in 1925. The proposed county would run along Highways 200 and 83 from Potomac through Greenough and Seeley Lake to Condon, with roughly 4,000 to 4,500 year-round residents. A 21-page feasibility report the group released on July 20 argues it could pay its own way with 18 to 20 full-time staff and lower property taxes.

Wall calls the 2027 Legislature the deciding step. Under current law, voters across the whole parent county decide on a new county, which organizer Ted Morgan says hands Missoula’s city voters a veto. He wants the vote limited to residents of the proposed county. As Morgan told the Seeley Swan Pathfinder, “We’re just asking them to let the people vote.” Wall rejects county officials’ talk of rural frustration: “secession movements don’t come out of mere frustration. It comes from untenability.” The Minstrel argues the deeper split is cultural. The valleys, in his view, live off land and resources, while Missoula’s growth rests on real estate speculation by part-year residents from California, though he grants organizers are wise to campaign on everyday services.

Also in this episode

• The hosts’ rebuttal to Missoula County chief administrative officer Chris Lounsbury, who argues that a larger tax base lets the county’s communities subsidize one another
• A Seeley Lake neighborhood watch letter about inconsistent service from the sheriff and other county agencies, and a commissioners’ reply that the hosts say answered none of it
• Montana’s other requirements for a new county, including 250 square miles of surveyed land outside Forest Service holdings and a town for the county seat, as Dan Clark of Montana State University’s Local Government Center described them
• The Minstrel’s worry that demands for more county services undercut the case for leaving, and Wall’s reply that those demands came from the neighborhood watch, not County 57

Secession Speakeasy is an independent program produced by Grant M. Dahl. The views expressed are those of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect those of the Texian Partisan, Texas Nationalist Enterprises, or the Texas Nationalist Movement. Featuring an episode is not an endorsement.