The Gate That Named Everything

The canyon east of town has carried its name for more than two centuries, and the name itself is a confession. French-Canadian trappers moving through the valley in the eighteen twenties were the ones who coined it. They called the narrow rock gorge Porte de l'Enfer, which translates as Door of Hell. What they were recording was not dramatic scenery. They were recording bones.

The Salish people, known to themselves as the Selis, had traveled through this canyon for generations on their way east to hunt bison on the open plains beyond the mountains. The Blackfeet, who held those plains, did not welcome the passage. They came through the canyon in ambush parties, and they came often enough that the canyon became associated in the collective memory of the region with sudden violence and death. The Salish called the place Im-i-sul-e-tiku, a phrase historians have translated as Place of Dread by the Water.

The French trappers who followed the fur trade into the northern Rockies shortened the geography into a single phrase. Porte de l'Enfer became, in English, Hellgate. When Christopher Higgins and Frank Worden established a trading post here in eighteen sixty, they called their settlement Hellgate Village. When they relocated about five miles east in eighteen sixty-four to build a proper mill on water power, the new community briefly kept the association before taking the name Missoula Mills.

The canyon itself survived all the name changes. It still pinches the Clark Fork River into a narrow corridor of rock just east of downtown. Interstate ninety passes through it now, and you can drive the route at seventy miles per hour, the walls closing in on both sides for a few seconds before the valley opens again, a modern traveler moving fast through a passage that once required a great deal more courage.