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I am unable to find the LAASANEN surname in the Montana census indexes for 1880, 1920 or 1930. However, I can help you with the place names. Extracted from the book, "Names on the Face of Montana: The Story of Montana's Place Names," by Roberta Carkeek Cheney, Copyright 1983, 1984, seventh printing June, 2000. When you find brackets [ ], this is information from my own personal knowledge.
"BONNER (Missoula County), east of Missoula [now the County Seat], had one of the state's first large sawmills. The town was named for E.L. Bonner, an early settler in Missoula and first president of the Missoula and Bitter Root Valley Railroad (1888). The post office opened in March of that year with Lane Paskill in charge."
"BUTTE (Silver Bow County), a county seat, was first called Butte City [this was prior to 1900 when Butte was located in the large county of Deer Lodge. This county was subsequently broken down into several smaller counties including Silver Bow, Granite, Powell, etc.]. A post office was granted under that name in July 1868 [this was then known as Montana Territory, as it had not yet become a state]. Anson Ford distributed the mail from his drug store. Miners dubbed the city, taking the name from the nearby sentinel-like peak (Big Butte) which stands 6,369 feet above sea level. The first recorded visit by white men to this hill was in 1856. Judge C.E. Irvine and a party from Walla Walla, Washington stopped there on an exploration trip. They found a prospector's hole that later led to the Original Lodge and some elk horns lying about when they figured had been used to dig the hole.
"Gold was discovered there in July 1864 by G.O. Humphrey and William Allison. By 1875 the name had been changed to Butte; silver was bringing riches, and copper was beginning to be seen as Butte's fortune" (Copper Camp). Beneath the city lay one of the world's richest mineral deposits. There are some 250 miles of streets on the surface of Butte Hill, and more than two thousand miles of underground corridors and tunnels.
"Marcus Daly *1841-1900), an Irish immigrant, learned about ores and mining while in Nevada; he rushed to Butte when the rich strikes of 1874 were reported. There is drilled, and at four hundred feet found not the silver that he anticipated, but the richest vein of copper known. The vein was fifty feet wide, and in twenty years Daly became the head of one of the world's most powerful monopolies, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company.
"A townsite patent was issued for Butte in 1876 and the city was incorporated in 1879. By 1885 Butte had a population of 14,000 and the copper boom was on. The Montana School of Mines was established in 1900."
"GRANITE (Granite County). In the early 1880s, when Granite was a boom town, the mining companies furnished water to residents for $1.50 a month. It was hauled in barrels mounted on sleds or carts and ladled out at the rate of two or three buckets a day to each housewife--a little more was allowed for wash day. The post office opened in 1886 with Carlton Hand as postmaster; it was closed in 1897-98, then open until 1908. Granite grew up as a mining town when Charles D. McClure, who had been foreman of the Hope Mine in Philipsburg [very near the town of Granite], persistently prospected Granite Mountain and finally found "bonanza ore." The Granite Mountain Mine proved to be one of the richest of its kind and the little town sprawled on the hillside became a booming mining camp. According to Abbor, "There was no night . . . every day was 24 hours long . . . But there was little disorder, the folks were all too busy. During the years it worked, this mine contributed over $25 million to the mineral wealth of Montana." The Census of 1890 listed 1,310 inhabitants; it was then the eleventh in size in the state. When silver declined, the mine closed and people moved away. Today it is a ghost town."
"GRANITE COUNTY has a land area of 1,728 square miles. It is north and west of the Continental Divide. The area was originally called Flint Creek Valley. The first settlement sprang up in 1866, when the Comanche Quartz Lode was located. The county is named for the celebrated Granite Mountain Silver Mine; the mountain is named for the granite rock found in it. Granite County was created in March 1893."
I hope this information fills in a little about the places your ancestors lived in the U.S. There were many ethnic groups attracted to this area either because it reminded people of home (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark), or because of the mining jobs it provided (Irish, Germans, Slovenians, French, Canadian, Chinese, etc). It was (and is today) a diverse ethnic area of Montana
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