The Salish and the Bitterroot: A Valley Given Away Twice

The Salish people, whom early Euro-American traders sometimes called the Flathead, though they did not practice the head-flattening custom that name implied, had lived in the Bitterroot Valley for generations before any written record. It was their homeland in the most literal sense: the plants they relied on, the salmon runs they depended on, the geography of their spiritual life was organized around that valley.

The Hellgate Treaty of eighteen fifty-five created the Flathead Reservation to the north, around Flathead Lake. The Salish were told they could remain in the Bitterroot under Chief Victor and his successor Charlo until a survey determined the Bitterroot Valley was unsuitable for reservation use. The survey was never honestly conducted.

In eighteen seventy-one, President Ulysses Grant signed an executive order removing the Salish from the Bitterroot entirely. Chief Charlo refused to go. He refused for twenty years. His refusal is one of the long, stubborn, documented acts of resistance in Montana history. He remained in the Bitterroot with a remnant band while the American government around him insisted he had agreed to leave.

In eighteen ninety-one, Charlo and his people were escorted north by soldiers to the Flathead Reservation. Accounts from Salish oral history and from Army observers both describe a departure that was not voluntary. He was photographed in the Bitterroot before he left. He said, they will tell of me that I went. He did go, but not willingly, and not with consent.

The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes today govern the Flathead Reservation, one of the most economically and politically organized tribal governments in the country, with hydroelectric power, a tribal college, and a land management program that controls over one million acres. Charlo's name is on a mountain. His people are still here.