The Salish, Kootenai, and Pend d'Oreille: Ten Thousand Years in the Flathead Valley

The valley you are driving through has been home to Indigenous peoples for at least ten thousand years. Three nations made this landscape their own: the Bitterroot Salish, the Pend d'Oreille, and the Kootenai. Their aboriginal territory stretched across most of western Montana and into portions of Idaho, Wyoming, Washington, and what is now southern Canada. The Flathead Valley, with the broad lake at its southern end and the glaciated peaks ringing its edges, formed the heart of the Pend d'Oreille homeland in particular. The Kootenai, who call themselves Ktunaxa, lived in the far northwestern reaches of the valley and into the Rockies.

Before European contact, these nations traveled widely. After acquiring horses from the Shoshone people between sixteen fifty and seventeen hundred, the Salish and Pend d'Oreille became accomplished riders who made regular crossings of the Continental Divide to hunt bison on the eastern plains, often twice a year. They brought back dried meat and hides, and returned west loaded. The valley's rivers, meanwhile, filled with salmon, trout, and whitefish. Camas root, bitterroot, and huckleberries were gathered each season in places that had been gathered in for generations beyond counting.

These nations had a sophisticated oral tradition, a complex system of seasonal movement, and deeply rooted ceremonial life tied to this specific geography. Flathead Lake, which the Pend d'Oreille called the big lake, was not merely a backdrop to their world. It was a central fact of it. Fishing camps along its shores were occupied every summer. The Salish word 'sqelixw,' meaning the people, reflects a worldview in which humans are not set apart from the land but are part of it, as much as the bear, the elk, and the river.

All of that would be tested, profoundly, in the summer of eighteen fifty-five.