October Fifteen, Eighteen Ninety-One

On the morning of October fourteenth, eighteen ninety-one, approximately three hundred Bitterroot Salish packed what remained of their possessions onto horses and wagons and prepared to leave the valley their families had occupied for centuries. By the following day, October fifteenth, they were gone.

The Salish had signed the Hellgate Treaty in eighteen fifty-five, which established the Flathead Reservation to the north but specifically allowed Chief Victor's people to remain in the Bitterroot pending a presidential survey. In eighteen seventy-one, President Ulysses Grant issued an executive order declaring that the survey had been conducted and that the Bitterroot valley was not suited to tribal needs, claims historians have identified as false on both counts. Chief Charlo refused to go, and a copy of the treaty was circulated in Washington for years with a forged version of his signature endorsing removal. Charlo eventually agreed in eighteen eighty-nine, not from persuasion but from starvation. So many of his people had been reduced to destitution by encroaching settlement that agreeing to move became the only path to food.

General Henry Carrington arrived from Fort Missoula in October eighteen ninety-one with a contingent of troops to escort the band north. Elders who made that journey later described it as a funeral march. The sixty-mile route to the Jocko Valley took three days. Soldiers did not permit stops.

The valley they left behind was already filling in around them. Homesteads, cattle operations, fenced fields: the landscape that the Bitterroot Salish had managed as seasonal hunters and fishermen was being converted to private agriculture even as they prepared to depart. In twenty sixteen, members of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes walked that same sixty miles in reverse, from the Jocko Valley back toward Stevensville, to mark the hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the removal and to make the journey something that could be witnessed and named.