The Kalispel People and David Thompson's Trading Post
Near Sandpoint, Idaho
The people the French-speaking fur traders called Pend d'Oreilles, a name often explained by ear ornaments, include the Lower Kalispel, an indigenous nation whose traditional territory encompassed the drainage of Lake Pend Oreille, the Clark Fork River, and the Pend Oreille River. They lived in villages along the lakeshore and river banks, fishing for cutthroat trout and other species, hunting deer and elk in the mountains, and trading with neighboring peoples across a wide territory stretching from present-day Montana into eastern Washington and British Columbia. David Thompson, a surveyor and explorer working for the North West Company, established a trading post called Kullyspell House on the shore of Lake Pend Oreille in eighteen nine, one of the company's network of interior fur trade posts.
His journals from his time in the area describe the Kalispel living in several bands along the lake and river. The Kalispel were eventually reduced to a small reservation on the Pend Oreille River in Washington state, dispossessed of their hereditary lands around the lake. But they did not entirely disappear from the area.
Kalispel people continued to return to their traditional grounds around what is now Sandpoint, continuing a presence that the treaties had tried to end.
