49 > 8

Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that Ludwig has new license plates. Well, new old plates. Different plates. 

A long time ago I bought a 1974 set from Fergus County (8) and jumped through the minor hoops required to get them legal. While we lived there I sporadically looked for some from Missoula County (4) and found a couple pairs, but being a much-desired county number they were out of our range...a couple hundred dollars a pair if I remember correctly.  When we lived in Deer Lodge County (30) I looked for tags with that number but never found any. 

I'd mostly given up but recently stumbled upon a Park County (49) pair and snatched them up toot suite. 

(By the way, if anyone has a line on a pair of 1971 Park County MT plates for Gertie, I'd love to hear about it. She sports Yellowstone County (3) plates currently.)

<pedantic text>
Like a few other states, the leading number on Montana's license plates denotes the county where they were issued. Like all but one* of those states, the county's number is determined by its population at the time they developed the system; in Montana's case they used the figures from the 1920 census. And here arises a minor mystery.

Why was Park County assigned 49? There are 56 counties in Montana and Park County was never anywhere near the bottom seven or even the bottom thirty in population. It should have been assigned 9, in fact. (If the numbers were reassigned according to the 2020 census it'd be 11.)

I asked the question on a facebook community page and, naturally, received mostly tinfoil hat-type answers. There were bribes involved (why?); someone on the license plate numbers commission was jilted by a lover from Livingston; the railroad did it for opaque reasons, blah blah blah. One person responded with what is almost certainly the correct answer: it was a simple transposition error. Powder River County got the 9 Park County shoulda gotten and vice versa.

Some year I'll delve into the newspaper and transportation department archives to confirm this, but until then I'm applying Occam's Razor.

*Wyoming has a bonkers scheme where the county numbers are assigned in order of the total value of each county's taxable property, as of 1930.