The Hellgate Treaty of 1855: Twenty Million Acres

In July of eighteen fifty-five, Isaac Stevens, the young governor and superintendent of Indian Affairs for Washington Territory, summoned the leaders of the Salish, Pend d'Oreille, and Kootenai nations to a council at a place called Hell Gate, near the mouth of the Bitterroot Valley. The treaty signed there on July sixteenth would define the next century and a half of life in this valley.

The tribes had come to the council expecting to negotiate peace with the Blackfeet, who had long raided their bison-hunting parties on the eastern plains. What they got instead was pressure to cede land. Over several contentious days, Stevens pushed the three nations to give up approximately twenty million acres of their combined territory in exchange for a reservation of roughly one and a quarter million acres in the Flathead Valley, plus promises of annual payments, schools, a hospital, and federal protection from Blackfeet raids. Translation was poor. Key terms were imprecisely conveyed. The tribal leaders, including the Salish chief Victor, pushed back, but the weight of American expansion was bearing down. They signed.

The resulting Flathead Indian Reservation took in most of Flathead Lake and the country south of it. Its boundaries felt vast to the federal negotiators but were a fraction of what the nations had used and called home. Critically, the treaty reserved hunting and fishing rights both on and off the reservation, a protection that the tribes have defended in courts ever since.

In nineteen oh four, things got worse. Federal officials pushed through the Flathead Allotment Act, breaking the reservation into individual parcels and declaring hundreds of thousands of acres 'surplus' available to non-Indian settlers. By the time allotment was complete, the tribes had lost more than half of their reservation land. What they retained, and what they govern today as the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, they have administered with increasing sovereignty ever since.