According to local tradition, Ekalaka began in the eighteen eighties when an old buffalo hunter, planning to open a saloon for cowpunchers, bogged down in a snowdrift while hauling logs to another site, unloaded them, and built there instead, declaring that any place in Montana was a good place for a saloon. The old undaunted pioneer spirit of the West was said to linger there. When the place became a town, it was named for Ekalaka, an Indian girl on the Powder River who was the daughter of Eagle Man, an Oglala Sioux, a niece of the war chief Red Cloud, and also related to Sitting Bull. She became the wife of David H. Russel, the first white man to settle permanently in that locality.