So across this vast area, across all its diversity of distinct tribal cultures and ecosystems—from the buffalo plains east of the Continental Divide to the salmon rivers to the west—Indian people, including non-Salishan tribes such as the Kootenai and the Nez Perce, lived in broadly similar ways. Although the boundaries between tribes were often vague and overlapping, each had a sense of its home ground, and if not a special claim, then certainly better access, to the resources there.¹³ The tribes were known to one another as being particularly skillful in making certain goods or as rich in particular plants or animals or other supplies. The Salish might have a bounty of bitterroot or particularly fine deer or elk hides; the Pend d’Oreille a surfeit of bison or berries; the Kalispels a great store of camas; the Spokane a plenitude of dried salmon. While some of these surpluses were generally consistent from year to year (the tribes to the west, after all, almost always had plenty of salmon), other kinds of plants or animals varied with the shifting climate, with the cycles of drought and rain, and with the severity of the winters. In general, however, each tribe, while relatively self-sufficient, also produced, or harvested, certain surpluses that they would exchange with other tribes. The exchange of local surpluses benefited all participants by providing each tribe with greater diversity of goods, by reducing the amount of labor any one tribe was forced to undertake, and by strengthening inter-tribal relations. Often these exchanges occurred in the form of traditional gift-giving, which could occur either in formal gatherings between tribes or in simple person-to-person meetings or visits. But in all cases, exchanges were governed not only by shared values of gift-giving and generosity, but more broadly, by a shared sense of what was appropriate and right in their relations with each other and with the earth.

The inter-tribal world formed a coherent and stable whole on the basis of that common ground. Certainly, over the course of millennia, tribal people had to adapt and contend with a range of historical change that is probably beyond our knowledge today—not only changes in climate and fluctuations in the availability of various foods, but also the inevitable vicissitudes in relations between nations.¹⁴ But it seems clear that for a very long time, the tribes of the Northern Rockies and eastern Plateau shared a common way of life, and a common form of social organization—and through inter-tribal trade and patterns of exchange, they maintained a coherent regional economy and culture that provided dependable sustenance, and careful stewardship of the environment.¹⁵ As we look more closely at what gave that way of life such stability, it seems clear that fish—and in particular bull trout—played a critical role.
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Top image: Salish man fishing, Bitterroot River near Ɫq̓eɫml̓š (Stevensville), 1854. John Mix Stanley lithograph from Isaac Stevens’ Narrative and Final Report of Explorations.
Endnotes, Bibliography and Acknowledgements

While Salish and Pend d’Oreille people would also regularly travel west to fish for salmon or to trade with the salmon tribes,²⁰ the rivers, streams, and lakes in what is now western Montana and northern Idaho were rich in other fish, many of which played crucial roles in the traditional diet, including such important species as pisɫ (westslope cutthroat trout), x̣͏ʷy̓ú (mountain whitefish), sl̓aw̓s (largescale sucker), čléneʔ (longnose sucker), and q͏ʷq̓͏ʷé (northern pikeminnow). And of course, there was also aay — the bull trout.

But at many other times and places, these strangers, who had little familiarity with the land, could find no game at all and were left destitute. In a number of instances, the visitors became utterly dependent upon tribal people for food. John Mullan, the day after he reported seeing so much game in the Big Hole, said he “saw none,” and noted that while “this place is generally a favorite resort for game . . . unfortunately for us, it seemed to be most scarce when the necessity for it was greatest.”²² Many historians have recounted how Lewis and Clark got lost trying to follow the Lolo Trail over the Bitterroot Mountains, were unable to find game, and survived only by eating the horses that the Salish had given them just a few days before. Relatively few historians, however, seem to have noticed that the Salish and Nez Perce people encountered by the expedition seemed quite well fed—and in fact shared substantial quantities of food with their hungry visitors.²³

Such strangely contradictory reports of abundance and scarcity pepper the reports and journals of many of the first non-Indian visitors to the region. Their observations may seem paradoxical, but in all probability they were largely accurate. In part, these early records reflect the newcomers’ relative lack of knowledge of the resources, and how to procure them. But they also reflect a central feature of the ecology of the Northern Rockies—a feature that had long before helped shape the way of life of the Salish and Pend d’Oreille people: most of the edible plants and animals of the region were indeed abundant—but only in certain places, and only at certain times.

The tribes’ aboriginal territories encompass a tremendous range of ecosystems—from low-lying, well-watered valleys to alpine tundra, from old-growth cedar forests to short-grass prairies and high sagebrush deserts. Annual precipitation and average temperatures can vary greatly between areas only a few miles apart. Across the seasons and years, temperatures could range from more than 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit to over 100 degrees above. For half of the year, typically, the land was covered in snow and ice. Years of drought regularly cycled through the region, resulting in marked changes in the availability of game, and also of roots and berries, many of which are only ripe for harvest for short periods of time. Bitterroot, an important staple in the traditional diet, occurred in enormous quantities, but it requires very specific soil and moisture conditions, and it is ripe for harvest for only a few weeks each year. In each of the particular locations where bitterroot grows, it comes as a brief “visitor” welcomed by the people with ceremony and prayer. Once the elder women have reported to the chief that the bitterroot is ready—usually in late April or early May—it must be dug, dried, and stored within a two or three-week period. The same is true of other major plant foods, such as huckleberries. Some others, such as camas, are available throughout the summer and fall, although they are more easily spotted during the brief period in which their bright blue flowers bloom. A few plant foods, such a serviceberries and hawthorn berries, have a brief period in which they are ripe and abundant, but those left on the bushes dry out and can still be gathered later in the year.

The tribes hunted at all times of the year, but game populations also move with the seasons and occupy a variety of habitats over the course of the year, and are scarce at certain times and places. In fall, when animals were in prime condition, and when the young of the year were able to survive on their own, hunters sought to harvest great numbers of deer, elk, bison, and other game, which were dried and stored for the long winter ahead. And whether a single animal was killed, or a group surround-hunt took as many as one hundred deer at a time, the people took care not to kill too many — to let enough escape to ensure the survival of healthy game populations. As with the harvesting of plants, the taking of animals was imbued with spiritual respect, with a consciousness that when the world came to be as it is, certain animal-people decided to become what we know today as deer, bison, elk, antelope, moose, caribou, and to give themselves as food for the human beings. In the Salish and Pend d’Oreille way, a successful hunt is as much the animal giving itself to the people, as it is the hunter taking the animal. Meat was shared equitably in the encampments between those who had good luck and those who did not. There was an acceptance that sometimes meat would be plentiful, and sometimes it would not.

In an environment where resources ebbed and flowed in such dramatic fashion, the Pend d’Oreille and Salish and other tribes of the region were nevertheless able to flourish for millennia living solely as hunters, fishers, and gatherers—without any agricultural crops, and no livestock prior to the introduction of horses some three hundred years ago. In the words of anthropologist Wayne Suttles, they had mastered the art of “coping with abundance”—that is, of capturing the brief, intense bounties of the plants and animals of their territory. They had developed a profound geographical and ecological understanding of their enormous homeland and of the population dynamics of its plants and animals across seasons—and across the longer spans of decades and even centuries. The ancestors came to know even the long climatic cycles of temperature and precipitation, whose variations would later raise havoc with non-Indian farmers and ranchers, who were less able to adapt quickly to periods of severe drought or unusually bitter winters. Salish and Pend d’Oreille people developed technologies finely tuned to harvesting and storing that shifting bounty with the least effort and the greatest reliability. The elders tell how that knowledge and understanding came from both spiritual guidance and from the kind of practical experience that can only be gained by living in one place for many generations. And while the Salish and Pend d’Oreille were not agricultural, they nevertheless maintained an active hand in managing their diverse and complex food base. As has been extensively documented elsewhere, the tribes nurtured and augmented the productivity of plant and animals foods through the careful and highly skilled use of fire, which increased forage for game, and also revitalized and fertilized berry patches, camas fields, and other plant foods.

But the Salish and Pend d’Oreille, in their effort to gain steady sustenance in a dramatically variable environment, also drew upon an additional, critically important resource: fish. In a land of shifting abundances, fish were an unusual food in two crucial respects. First, they were readily available year round; and second, they provided a high quality source of protein. During the seasonal spawning runs, in spring and fall, tribal people caught bull trout, cutthroat, whitefish, and other fish using expertly crafted weirs and fish traps along many of the streams and rivers. At other times of year, fish were still easily harvested, if in lesser quantities, in virtually any stream or river in every corner of the tribes’ sprawling territories— and Salish and Pend d’Oreille fishers harvested them not only with weirs and traps, but also with gaffing hooks, spears, fishing poles and lines, dipnets, and even bows and arrows.

Global studies of hunter-gatherer-fisher societies have documented both the stress induced by seasonal fluctuations in the availability of food, and the importance of protein as a dietary component. Animal protein in particular, as a concentrated source of energy, assumed a place of premium importance in many tribal diets—particularly at times of scarcity.²⁶ In the Northern Rockies, that generally meant winter—particularly late winter, when the stores of dried foods were dwindling and the fresh roots and forbs of spring had not yet appeared. Fish were the one plentiful source of animal protein that remained readily available throughout the year. As Eneas Pierre (1908-1985) remembered, the Salish therefore always located their winter camps at places known to have good fishing throughout the cold months. He recalled that in the nineteenth century, the main Salish winter camp was located along the Bitterroot River, ci č̓ Ɫq̓eɫml̓š ci x̣eyɫ č̓ ciʔ ci č̓ nisq̓͏ʷo—“at Wide Cottonwoods [the area of Stevensville, Montana], a little further across the river.” He continued,

u i šeʔ iʔistč,
that’s where they would winter,

še ɫu x̣͏ʷa iše x͏ʷʔit sw̓ew̓ɫ.
because there were plenty of fish there.

K͏ʷem̓t l še u iše istč
That’s why they would winter there, the people at

ɫu sqelix͏ʷ l Ɫq̓eɫml̓š.
Wide Cottonwoods [Stevensville].

In the Bitterroot River, it should be noted, bull trout were one of the principal species of fish, historically present in most if not all of the river’s thirty-nine tributary streams — and many of them were apparently of the larger fluvial or adfluvial form, as we describe on the following page. As Mr. Pierre notes, a dependable supply of fish was a determining factor in the location of winter camps there — ͏kʷem̓t l še u iše istč, he said – “that’s why they would winter there.” As a subsistence strategy, it certainly makes sense. Gordon Hewes, in a seminal essay on fish in the diets of indigenous peoples, found that “Measured by the caloric effort required to obtain them, aquatic foods as a whole have an exceptionally high degree of nutritional efficiency.”

The importance of fish in the overall subsistence strategy of the Salish and Pend d’Oreille may come as a surprise to readers of the standard anthropologies of the tribes. To be sure, when there was opportunity for tribal hunters to bring in red meat, that was usually the preferred food. Much of the ethnographic and historical literature, however, has both overstated the importance of game and also understated the importance of fish for these tribes. In perhaps the least rigorous area of his generally excellent research, the ethnographer James Teit, who conducted field work on the Flathead Reservation beginning in 1909 under the direction of Franz Boas, dismissed fishing as “of much less importance to the Flathead tribes than hunting.” Teit did not define “importance,” although he was apparently using the crude measure of total caloric percentage in the diet — a metric that could not gauge the role of fish within the context of the tribes’ seasonal cycle and the region’s ecology, with its dramatic ebbs and flows of weather and food resources. Teit did note how “plentiful” fish were in the waters of the tribes’ territories, and he acknowledged that “no doubt in earlier times, when the people were more sedentary, fishing was engaged in to a considerable extent by certain bands of the Kalispel and Pend d’Oreille, especially by the people living around Flathead Lake.” But Teit never tried to rectify the rather contradictory picture he drew, and the researchers who followed him into Salish and Pend d’Oreille communities in the early to mid-twentieth century repeated almost verbatim his off-hand minimization of the importance of fish in the tribal way of life of the Northern Rockies.³⁰

Fish did in fact play a critical role in the traditional Salish-Pend d’Oreille subsistence strategy, and bull trout were the most important of the fish. They were plentiful, and the large adults were by far the biggest of any of the indigenous species; they were an ideal food for sustaining a hungry population through the long, harsh Montana winters. Known to science as Salvelinus confluentus, the bull trout is endemic to western North America.³¹ It originally inhabited much of what is now the northwestern United States and southwestern Canada, including the entire Columbia River basin from Montana west to the Pacific coast, as well as the Puget Sound area, much of British Columbia, the Klamath River system in Oregon, the Jarbridge River in northern Nevada, the McLoud River in northern California, and possibly certain rivers in southeastern Alaska. There were even populations east of the Continental Divide in presentday Alberta and Montana.³²

There were and are three distinct life-history patterns among bull trout in what is now western Montana: a stream-resident form that lived entirely in small headwater streams; a fluvial form that lived as an adult in the larger rivers but spawned in the small tributaries; and an adfluvial form, which lived as adults in large lakes such as Lake Pend Oreille, and like the fluvial form, returned to spawn in the streams once they reached sexual maturity at about age five.³³ The adfluvial form of bull trout were the ones that reached the greatest size — the biggest reaching over three feet in length and weighing well over twenty pounds. Unlike Pacific salmon, bull trout do not die after spawning, but spawn repeatedly (in many cases annually) over a life span that averages about ten years, and in exceptionally favorable conditions exceeds twenty years.³⁴ The different forms of bull trout were well known to the Salish and Pend d’Oreille, and are reflected in their terms for the fish — aay, for the larger form, and ɫʔay, for the smaller variant.

Bull trout are perfectly adapted to the clear, cold mountain waters of Salish-Pend d’Oreille territories. After the female deposits her eggs and they are fertilized by the male, water temperatures must remain below 9° Celsius (46° Fahrenheit), with optimal temperatures hovering around 2° to 4° Celsius (35 to 39° Fahrenheit), as the eggs incubate.³⁵ The fry emerge from the eggs over seven months later, during the following spring or early summer. They grow gradually, with the fluvial and adfluvial forms eventually becoming entirely piscivorous (fish-eating). Throughout the bull trout’s development — indeed, throughout its life — water temperatures need to remain below 15° Celsius (59° Fahrenheit). After one to three years, the juvenile fluvial trout move into the mainstem rivers, and the juvenile adfluvial trout make their way down to the big lakes. After two to four years in the large bodies of water, the bull trout have reached adulthood, and return upriver to spawn. In the great spawning migrations of the Clark Fork drainage system, bull trout moved over immense distances — roughly 175 miles upstream from Lake Pend Oreille to the headwaters of the Jocko, and nearly as far for those populations swimming from Flathead Lake up to its headwaters.³⁶ Bull trout covered a vast region, and they did so in vast numbers.

Many tribal elders who came of age before the construction of dams in western Montana have offered vivid stories of the abundance and enormous size of bull trout at many places across the tribes’ aboriginal territories. Joe Eneas (1896-1997) recalled fishing for bull trout in the Jocko River near Ravalli, and how he and his family would “get these big bull trout. Oh, big ones. Hook them, snag them.... Yeah, there’s lots...these bull trout that come up the river.”³⁷ Mr. Eneas also remembered catching them at St. Mary’s Lake, in Mission Creek, and at McDonald Lake. And he and his family would ride across the open, unfenced, roadless prairies of the Mission Valley until they reached the falls of the lower Flathead River -- St̓ipmétk͏ʷ, “the place of the falling waters,” where Kerr Dam would be constructed in the 1930s. Mr. Eneas’s family would camp there for a week or two, primarily to fish for bull trout. “The main thing it was known for,” Mr. Eneas recalled, “was it was a good fishing place, because as the water falls, it’s kind of like a hole. That’s where we fished.”³⁸ Harriet Whitworth (1918-2008) remembered her sister, Agnes Vanderburg (1901-1989), describing the way the people would build rafts to harvest “huge” bull trout at Big Salmon Lake, which today lies within the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area.³⁹ Big bull trout were also caught in the drainage system of the South Fork of the Flathead River by Louie Cullooyah, whose son Joe Cullooyah (1930-2003) recalled his father telling stories of catching enormous fish there.⁴⁰ And Louie Adams (b. 1933), relating his family history, said that on January 1, 1897 his yayaʔ (maternal grandmother), Louise Vanderburg, was born at Nɫʔay — Place of the Small Bull Trout, around the confluence of Rattlesnake Creek and the Clark Fork River. At the time of Louise’s birth, her father, Victor Vanderburg, was busy along the river — fishing for bull trout.⁴¹

Nɫʔay -- a name that came to be used by Salish and Pend d’Oreille people to refer to the city of Missoula — is one of many Salish-Pend d’Oreille placenames that refer specifically to bull trout or other fish. These traditional placenames offer us a powerful way of understanding the tribal way of life. They also provide another window of access to the ancient origins of the tribal presence in western Montana. Linguists say that placenames are, in a number of cases, among the oldest words in the Salish language; some of them incorporate words or particles from proto-Salish or now-extinct Salishan dialects that existed thousands of years ago. Many of these placenames are rooted in the Coyote stories, the stories of the world’s creation and transformation at the beginning of human time. A number of them reflect the tribal use of fire to shape the land — the mix of small meadows and open forests of ancient trees that characterized many of the lower elevation valleys in tribal territory prior to the arrival of non Indians. A smaller number refer to historical incidents or people. But probably the majority of tribal placenames describe the resources that were found at a particular place in remarkable quantities or of unusual quality.

If Salish-Pend d’Oreille placenames provide us with one of the most powerful and profound ways of understanding tribal cultural ecology in general,⁴² then they also testify to the abundance and importance of bull trout in particular. For throughout the drainage systems west of the Continental Divide, a remarkable number of places were named for bull trout. Indeed, it appears that more places were named for bull trout than for any other plant or animal.⁴³ The Clark Fork River, in particular, is distinguished by placenames of considerable prominence that refer specifically to bull trout. Indeed, the names appear to reflect tribal knowledge of which forms of bull trout could be predictably found in which reaches of the river or its tributaries. As mentioned above, the confluence of Rattlesnake Creek and the Clark Fork is called Nɫʔay, meaning Place of the Small Bull Trout. This was probably in reference to an abundance of the stream-resident form of bull trout.⁴⁴ A few miles upstream, the confluence of the Blackfoot and Clark’s Fork River — the area of present-day Bonner -- is called Nʔaycčstm, meaning Place of the Large Bull Trout, in apparent reference to the fluvial or adfluvial form.⁴⁵ The area of the rapids just upstream from the Clark Fork delta — a major center of Pend d’Oreille life -- was called Snɫuʔɫw̓é, referring to how fish were speared there.⁴⁶ And the Clark Fork’s headwaters at Butte — specifically, the area around Silver Bow Creek — is called Snt̓apqey, meaning Place Where Something Is Shot in the Head. In the 1950s, Salish elder Eneas Granjo explained that this name referred to the way Salish people harvested bull trout at the headwaters of the Clark Fork — by shooting them in the heads with bows and arrows. In other words, the bull trout were so large and so numerous, and the waters of Silver Bow Creek so crystal clear, that the fish could be gathered in this unusual way.⁴⁷

Many other placenames referred to fishing. The outlet of Seeley Lake is called Epɫ x̣͏ʷy̓ú — Has Mountain Whitefish. Lower Jocko Lake is called Nisisuté(tk͏ʷ), from the schools of člen̓e (longnose suckers) that formed shapes in the water. Dozens of other traditional names describe sites primarily known as places for fishing.

Over the past century and a half, as many traditional food resources declined or tribal access to them was blocked, many Salish placenames fell into disuse and were forgotten. Unlike Coyote stories and more formally established parts of tribal oral history that are retold regularly to younger generations, names of places often fall out of memory relatively quickly once tribal use of those places has ceased, and the elders who knew them pass away. We have tantalizing clues, from both tribal and non-Indian sources, that a number of these lost names referred to bull trout. John Peter Paul remembered a placename in the Swan Valley often mentioned by his mother — Epɫ ɫʔay (Has Small (or streamresident) Bull Trout) but he could not recall the exact site. When Lieutenant John Mullan, a member of Isaac Stevens’ exploratory parties that began traversing western Montana in 1853, was guided through the Blackfoot River valley by Salish and Pend d’Oreille guides, he referred to the stream that we know today as Monture Creek as “Salmon Trout river” or “Salmon Trout creek” — almost certainly in reference to bull trout.⁴⁸

Mullan’s reports offer us some of the clearest and most detailed reflections in the written record of the value of bull trout to the tribes of this region. In April 1854, Mullan traveled to an ancient traditional Pend d’Oreille camp, located where the lower Flathead River leaves Flathead Lake. In the Salish language, this place — now occupied by the town of Polson, Montana -- is called Nč̓mqné(tk͏ʷ). Mullan wrote, We found at the lake four lodges of the Pend d’Oreilles, who have been here some weeks fishing; they presented to us, on arriving at their camp, with some fine fresh and dried salmon-trout. This lake, and also the Clark’s fork here, abounds in excellent fish, the salmon-trout being the most abundant. These latter are caught from the lake, often measuring three feet long. It forms one of the chief articles of food for the Pend d’Oreilles at this season. During the winter they often camp here when the lake is frozen over, when, cutting holes in the ice, they secure an abundance of these most excellent fish. While here, during the night we were aroused by a noise from the river, when, going to see whence it came, we found three men swimming the Clark’s fork; they had been fishing on the opposite bank, and, having secured a large number, they were returning to their homes. The night was somewhat cold, yet such is the hardiness of these men that they think nothing of undergoing fatigue of this character. On their arrival at our camp they presented us with a number of these so dearly earned but excellent fish.⁴⁹

The Pend d’Oreille band that lived in the Flathead Lake area was known in the Salish language as the Sɫq̓tk͏ʷmsčin̓t — the People of the Wide Water, after the name of the lake, Čɫq̓é(tk͏ʷ), meaning Wide Water. The lake was the center of Pend d’Oreille life — as the ethnographer James Teit wrote, “the earliest recognized main seat of the Pend d’Oreilles...[with] several winter camps in the vicinity of the lake.”⁵⁰ Anthropologist Carling Malouf wrote that “the density of occupation sites around Flathead Lake, and along the Flathead River...indicates that this was, perhaps, the most important center of ancient life in Montana west of the Continental Divide.”⁵¹ John Mullan’s account certainly suggests that one of the reasons why these places were such vibrant centers for the Pend d’Oreille was “the abundance of [bull trout,] these most excellent fish” — “one of the chief articles of food for the Pend d’Oreilles at this [spring] season.”⁵²

The importance of fish in the tribal way of life is reflected, in fact, in the oldest purely historical oral tradition of the Pend d’Oreille people — the story of the dispersion of the Salish. There were probably several such movements over the course of the millennia, but the original migrations are estimated by linguists to have occurred some four thousand years ago. In a recording made in 1975, the great tribal historian Pete Beaverhead spelled out in simple but precise terms the reason for this momentous change in tribal life:

...ye sqélix͏ʷ k͏ʷem̓t k̓͏ʷɫtuwín̓ t sʔiɫn.
...these people, then they were running out

K̓͏ʷɫtuwín̓ t x͏ʷix͏ʷey̓úɫ.
of food. They were running out of game

K̓͏ʷɫtuwín̓ ec̓x̣ey x̣eyɫ n̓e w t sw̓ew̓ɫ.
animals. They were almost running out of

Miɫ x̣͏ʷʔit....
fish. There were too many of them....

“Mil k̓͏ʷ es yapcini.
“We are all running short on everything.

K̓͏ʷ es čsq̓amé.”
We are all getting hungry.”⁵³

As Mr. Beaverhead told the story, the game supply was exhausted — and the fish supplies were “almost” exhausted. At that early date in tribal history, just as thousands of years later, fish were the safety net undergirding the tribal subsistence strategy. It was a telling indication of the depth of the crisis faced by the Salish nation, a measure of the extent to which the human population was pushing against the limits of the environment, that even the resource that provided the stable reserve of the tribal food base — the always dependable supply of fish — was in danger of depletion. Fish were so important in the food security of the tribe that the Salishan ancestors made the momentous — and wise — decision to disperse as a people before they reached that critical tipping point.

Indeed, it seems clear that fish, and bull trout in particular, were a crucial part of what made the Salish and Pend d’Oreille way of life not just a means of surviving, but generally comfortable, secure, and healthy. Fish helped ensure that the tribal mode of subsistence in western Montana, far from being a desperate “challenge to survive,” was exceptionally dependable over a very long period of time.

As we have noted, both the Salish and Pend d’Oreille often preferred red meat when it was available. But when we look more closely at a number of first-hand accounts, it becomes increasingly clear that both meat and fish — especially bull trout — were prized, and often both were harvested in the same area, at the same time.⁵⁴ An illustrative account is given by Isaac Stevens as he proceeded up the Blackfoot River in July 1855 — immediately after negotiating the Treaty of Hellgate with the leaders of the Salish, Pend d’Oreille, and Kootenai tribes:

Occasionally the trail led us back from the river, and we found abundant streams of water and large forest trees, but the woods were of an open character, with good grass and arable land; and, finally, on emerging from the canyon we came to a most delightful camp in the valley of the Blackfoot. Here we put to work our Pend d’Oreille guide and hunter, who had been placed at our disposal by Alexander, head chief of the Pend d’Oreilles, and who in less than an hour had for our supper the finest string of trout I ever saw in the mountains. Not content with which, however, he started out again; we soon heard the report of his gun, and half an hour afterwards he brought into camp an elk weighing at least seven hundred pounds. This elk he killed in a somewhat narrow fringe of forest trees, interspersed between the Kamas prairie of the Flatheads and the waters of the Blackfoot.⁵⁵

As this account suggests, fishing was conducted not only as a dedicated activity — and as a crucial part of winter sustenance -- but also in conjunction with every other part of the seasonal cycle. The recorded oral histories of the tribes are sprinkled with references to fishing, many of them offered almost in passing. People fished during hunting trips in the fall, as Stevens related in 1855, and as many Salish elders have recalled from their trips to the Seeley and Placid Lake areas in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. And during the spring and summer, the men often fished while the women dug bitterroot or camas or picked berries. Fishing was a big part of the varied activities during the summer months as well, as Mose Chouteh (1891-1987) recalled in this interview recorded in 1956: Years ago, when I was a very small child, my uncles, my aunts, my grandparents, they... would get on canoes, three or four of them, made out of bark...we would go to store up on fish.... They would braid their traps and in these traps they would dig holes and the fish would go in and they would catch them in these large cones.... They would stay there for several days and then they would leave to the other end of the lake [Lake Pend Oreille]. And they would hunt for deer, elk, [black] bear. They would trap beaver. They would leave from Cusick early in the spring and they would stay at...Lake [Pend Oreille] for two or three months. They would be there all summer long.⁵⁶

The sq̓͏ʷyox̣͏ʷ or fish traps that Mr. Chouteh described in Lake Pend Oreille — along with x̣͏ʷličn̓ (weirs) and esp̓nep (dams) and x̣͏ʷoyep (dipnet) — were deployed by Salish and especially Pend d’Oreille people throughout their territories and were the primary method of harvesting the spawning runs of fish. More often, people fished using simpler technology, including hook and line with poles of willow, lodgepole pine, or other wood, lines of sinew or plants such as ninebark and dogbane, and hooks made of bone or thorns or even the claws of small birds. They also used nɫw̓etk͏ʷtn (spears) and nq̓lq̓lx̣͏ʷé (gaffing hooks), and in certain times and places used bows and arrows. They sometimes fished from boats at night, using fire to attract the fish and spear them.

But as Pete Beaverhead said, larger quantities were harvested during the spawning runs through the use of fish traps and weirs. Kʷem̓t n̓e put c̓̌ʔey̓ilš, put tw̓aq ɫu picčɫ, k͏ʷem̓t nc̓y̓ilš ɫiʔe t es momoop ɫu x̣͏ʷy̓u, u pisɫ, u ɫʔay — “when the leaves fall in the autumn, then the whitefish, trout, and bull trout go upstream. There were many fish that went up the streams.” K͏ʷem̓t lše u es, es q̓͏ʷyoʔox̣͏ʷey, es awstm “es q̓͏ʷyoʔox̣͏ʷey” ɫu sqelix͏ʷ — “This is where the people fish by making trenches in streams with dry wood — it is called by the people ‘es q̓͏ʷyoʔx̣͏ʷey.’ “ Mr. Beaverhead recounted in great detail the way these weirs and fish traps were built and used, and in his descriptions of the considerable time and effort dedicated to this method of fishing, he provided powerful testimony to the vital importance of fish in the tribal mode of subsistence. Oftentimes, he said, when people would go to check their traps, they would be gone until well after midnight. X̣͏ʷa n̓em k͏ʷek͏ʷst m eɫ ciʔaʔap — “Maybe they will return in the morning.” And after the fish completed their spawning run,

k͏ʷem̓t n̓e put ɫu x̣͏ʷa k̓͏ʷinš sčace še eɫ weɫk͏ʷp
then some weeks later, all the fish will go

ɫu sw̓ew̓ɫ esyaʔ, eɫ n qe cuntm “eɫ nʔax̣͏ʷt.”
back downstream -- this is what they call

K͏ʷem̓t eɫ k̓͏ʷuʔul̓is ɫu acm̓iʔis y̓e put u l n̓ihe sewɫk͏ʷ še čcnwex͏ʷ.
Then the people build their

“eɫ nʔax̣͏ʷt.”
trenches again.”⁵⁷

Salish and Pend d’Oreille people often smoked or air-dried fish and stored them; when needed, they could then be boiled and eaten. The storing and consumption of fish, like all the other traditional foods, was governed by the strong cultural ethic against wasting anything:

K͏ʷem̓t pentč u esyaʔ u es čtemm̓ ɫu sp̓iqaɫq
They always used everything — the berries,

uɫu sw̓ew̓ɫ uɫu st̓at̓aap
the fish, the things they killed like the ruffed

ɫu sk͏ʷisk͏ʷs ɫu stem̓.
grouse or anything else.

Esyaʔ u es iɫistm;
They ate everything

esyaʔ u es čtemm̓.
and used it all — nothing was wasted.⁵⁸


The homeland of the Salish and Pend d’Oreille people was a place of abundant but fluctuating resources. It was an environment both rich and challenging, and the traditional way of life was perfectly developed to meet that challenge — to harvest with finely tuned expertise the evanescent foods of the land and waters, and to provide a stable sustenance for tribal people. A crucial part of that stability was the availability of fish, particularly bull trout, and the tribes’ remarkably efficient methods of catching them. As we shall see, the strangers who first came to western Montana in the early nineteenth century had a far harder time subsisting — and an equally hard time understanding why Indian people seemed so relaxed, so confident, when they were surely teetering on the brink of starvation.

The effect the conversion of the Indians might have on the trade...would be highly beneficial. They would in time imbibe our manners and customs and imitate us in Dress; our Supplies would thus become necessary to them which would increase the consumption of European produce & manufactures and in like measure increase & benefit our trade as they would find it requisite to become more industrious and to turn their attention more seriously to the Chase in order to be enabled to provide themselves with such supplies; we should moreover be enabled to pass through their lands in greater safety which would lighten the expence of transport.⁹⁵

The continued abundance of the fisheries within and near the Flathead Reservation at the turn of the twentieth century was also noted by University of Montana professor of biology Morton Elrod. In A Biological Reconnoissance [sic] in the Vicinity of Flathead Lake (1902), Prof. Elrod reported not only that Crow Creek was “a famous fishing resort” (and the route of one of the tribes’ principal trails across the Mission Mountains), but also that other streams and lakes were both full of fish and greatly valued by tribal people: McDonald Lake (“a great resort for the Indians and those who visit the reservation, on account of the excellent fishing and beautiful scenery”); the Swan River (“a great fishing resort”); Swan Lake (“fishing is good”); and perhaps most of all the falls of the Pend d’Oreille (Flathead) River -- the future site of Kerr Dam, and the area where John Mullan had so vividly recorded the importance of bull trout to tribal people a half century earlier. It remained so in 1900 and 1901, when Prof. Elrod visited the falls: “This is a great fishing resort for the Indians on the reservation, and one seldom visits the place without seeing several tepees on the bank some place near.”^114b

Tribal people relied even more on the fisheries within the reservation not only because of the depletion of game, but also because it was becoming increasingly dangerous to exercise their treaty rights to practice the traditional ways on ceded lands outside the reservation. Many non- Indians greeted Indian hunting, gathering, and fishing parties with hostility, and Montana’s new system of game wardens did not recognize the primacy of tribal people’s treaty rights. In the tragic incident known as the Swan massacre of 1908, this rising tension culminated in a game warden and a deputized civilian killing four members of a Pend d’Oreille family hunting party in the upper reaches of the Swan River, immediately east of the Flathead Reservation boundary. The warden was himself killed in self-defense by one of the women in the party.¹¹⁵ The climate of racially charged violence dissuaded increasing numbers of tribal people from partaking in off-reservations trips, even though many families were in dire need of the food they could obtain — and even though the resources inside the reservation were dwindling and those outside were in some areas more abundant.¹¹⁶ The Swan Valley itself was home to exceptional fish populations. Ken Huston, an early non-Indian resident of the Swan Valley, recalled the vast numbers of bull trout that spawned at the forks of Elk Creek, a tributary of the upper Swan River, in the early to mid twentieth century:

“When I was a kid, hundreds and hundreds of bull trout in Elk Creek. They were just laying like cordwood up there. Up there just below where they spawn. Waiting to go up and spawn. Hundreds and hundreds of bull trout...I spent years and years and years up there as a kid. Every fall I’d go up there and get my eight, ten bull trout and come out....them fish up there...spawning, fanning their beds. Look in them big holes and see hundreds and hundreds of them bulls. They was so beautiful. They’re bright spawning colors. Just laying there. Just like cord wood. Prettinere laying one on top of the other. Look like a big salmon run, you know.”

Butch Harmon, born in 1941 and an avid observer of bull trout in the Swan Valley, recalled seeing bull trout in Elk Creek at lengths approaching four feet, and caught one that measured 33 inches. And Ed Beck, an early non-Indian settler in the Swan Valley, recalled that in the early twentieth century, the fish swarmed “every riffle in the summer...they were cutthroats.... And there’d be just a black cloud...and the big ones, there’d be big ones, too. You could see the big ones.... There was bull trout and cutthroats, and whitefish.”¹¹⁷

In some portions where the current is less swift the bed is made up of a constantly shifting mass of fine silt-like materials, probably from the concentrators and reduction works at Anaconda and Butte. Throughout the entire length of this river the water is full of this solid matter in suspension. The amount of solid matter carried down by the Deer Lodge River [i.e., the upper Clark Fork] from this source must be very considerable, and of course proves fatal to all kinds of fish life. We seined the river very thoroughly in the vicinity of Deer Lodge and did not find any fish whatever.

This stream is said to have been well supplied with trout and other fish, but none have been seen since the concentrators began operations. Other life was also scarce; no living mollusks or crustaceans and but few insect larvae were seen.¹²⁷

Evermann also reported that Silver Bow Creek—the place once so abundant in bull trout of large size that it was known to the Salish and Pend d’Oreille as Snt̓apqey, referring to the harvest of bull trout there using bows and arrows—was now a biological dead zone:

Warm Spring and Silver Bow creeks are ruined by mining operations…Silver Bow Creek…comes down from the vicinity of Butte City, and its water has the consistency of thick soup, made so by the tailings which it receives from the mills at that city. No fish could live in such a mixture…¹²⁸

The mills to which the logs were being floated were also, in many cases, owned and operated by Anaconda. The company set up mills at Hope, Idaho, and at three places in Montana: St. Regis, Hamilton, and Bonner. All of Anaconda’s milling operations were eventually centralized at the latter site, located on the Blackfoot River just above its confluence with the Clark Fork. This was the area known to the Salish and Pend d’Oreille people as Nʔaycčstm—the Place of the Large Bull Trout. Eventually, the Bonner mill would process well over 100,000,000 board feet of timber per year.¹³⁴ In 1891, the U.S. Fish Commission’s Evermann, observed that

the [Blackfoot] river for 3 or 4 miles above the mill is literally filled with logs which have been cut from the heavily timbered country through which the river flows and which were being floated down to the mill. . . The mountains on either side are of highly metamorphic sandstone, and in most places densely timbered, but at the present rate of destruction it will not be many years until these magnificent forests are wholly destroyed, the mountains made barren, and the volume and beauty of the streams greatly diminished.¹³⁵

Indeed, the 1890s were also a period of cultural revitalization and innovation in the Salish and Pend d’Oreille communities. It was during this time that Salish leader Sam Resurrection—mentioned earlier for his fierce defense of tribal fishing and hunting rights—introduced the modern form of powwow dancing and celebration to the Flathead Reservation. The first “Arlee celebration”—an annual powwow that remains the reservation’s largest—was held in 1898.¹⁴² Culturally and economically, the period around the turn of the century was one in which Salish and Pend d’Oreille people were finding ways to maintain their older ways of life within a newly restricted resource base. The continued availability of fish, including bull trout, was a part of that newly regained stability.

All of that would be turned on its head in April 1904, when President Theodore Roosevelt signed into law the Flathead Allotment Act, pushed through Congress by Montana congressman Joseph Dixon (who would later run TR’s 1912 “Bull Moose” campaign for the presidency). The act was merely the application to the Flathead Reservation of a national policy, first established in 1887 with passage of the General Allotment Act (or Dawes Severalty Act), which sought to dismantle tribal ownership of land within reservations—the backbone of tribalism as a collective economic and social system. On each reservation subjected to the law, including the Flathead Reservation, the government surveyed lands, allotted individual parcels to individual tribal members, and then declared any remaining tracts “surplus.” Those “surplus” lands were then thrown open to non-Indian settlers under terms similar to those of the Homestead Act of 1862.

Tribal leaders bitterly protested the Flathead Allotment Act, even making arduous journeys across the country to Washington, at their own expense, to try to stop what they saw as a grave injustice. They pointed out that the Hellgate Treaty of 1855 had explicitly “reserved” the Flathead Reservation—approximately one-twentieth the size of the lands the tribes had ceded to the U.S.—for the “exclusive use and benefit” of tribal people. To the extent that the treaty allowed for the allotment of individual parcels of land, it was clear that it was to be done only at the request and with the consent of individual tribal members.¹⁴³ In 1971, the United States Court of Claims, in a unanimous decision in favor of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, concluded that “Plaintiff’s Reservation was opened to white settlement and entry in breach of treaty, and without the consent of the Tribes.”¹⁴⁴ But in 1904, none of these arguments mattered to Congress or the President. In the spring of 1910, after six years of surveying, enrollment, allotment, and other bureaucratic procedures, the reservation was thrown open to a flood of homesteaders, who quickly assumed a position of demographic and economic dominance.

Thousands of pounds of this fish have been netted in Flathead Lake during the past season, and sold mostly in Kalispell, where they bring from twenty to twenty-five cents per pound in our retail markets; if it were not a good food fish it could not be sold for such prices; if the netting of this fish is continued it will only be a short time till this fish is exterminated. To save it from this fate, the law permitting its being netted ought to be repealed, and its capture limited to the hook and line the same as other trout.1¹⁸⁴

MONTANA sportsmen have declared war on the Dolly Varden or bull trout, the cannibal of the trout family, in the realization that the big fellows are devouring their daily toll of fingerlings and larger trout planted and preserved through activities of the state fish and game commission.¹⁸⁵

The 1925-26 report’s assault on bull trout was motivated in part by a fervent desire to develop the whitefish fishery in Flathead Lake on a commercial scale. The policy was laid out in an article within the report entitled “Flathead Lake and the Whitefish,” written by a former member of the commission, Judge Walter M. Bickford. “There can be no doubt in the mind of any well informed fisherman that the catching and marketing of the bull trout caught with the whitefish will be of great aid in future efforts at raising the whitefish.” Bickford claimed that fisherman hauled in 113 million pounds of whitefish each year in the Great Lakes, and that a similar bounty awaited Montanans if they would simply eliminate the “worst enemy” of whitefish, the bull trout. The result would be a flow of money and food: “Catch the bull trout, then, and add to the efficiency of work later to be done, at the same time derive a
revenue and supply food of a most desirable kind to the people.” Bickford did not explain how whitefish could be so abundant in the Great Lakes, given the presence of enormous lake trout. Nevertheless, his view of bull trout was emphatically clear: “its destruction would be a good thing.”¹⁸⁶

The inconsistency and internal conflicts over bull trout within Montana’s government undoubtedly contributed to the fish’s decline through the course of the twentieth century. As we have seen, that was just one of many factors, along with the transformation of the region’s rivers and lakes through mining, logging, dam building, urban development, and other activities beyond the scope of this essay, including agriculture and the introduction of exotic species.¹⁸⁷ In the span of just a few decades, Salish and Pend d’Oreille people saw bull trout dwindle from the abundance known to the elders to a fish teetering on the brink of extinction. Indeed, it is difficult for us now to realize just how abundant and how large these fish were
-- which explains, in part, why researchers have until now underestimated the importance of these fish in the tribal way of life.

Yet this is also a story of resistance and renewal. The bull trout have survived, if in reduced numbers and, in most areas, of lesser size. Tribal leaders have continued to assert their treaty rights and fought to rebuild tribal sovereignty in the management of resources. Tribal people have continued to practice the traditional ways in the face of danger and derision. State and federal policy, in the second half of the twentieth century, became rooted in a more rigorous scientific basis that recognized the importance and value of native species, including bull trout, and ultimately committed millions of dollars to their protection and revitalization. In recent years, many people, both Indian and non-Indian, from a diverse range of agencies
and institutions, have come together to try to heal and restore some piece of the bountiful environment handed down by the ancestors.

By the mid-twentieth century, tribal members finally won their long struggle to gain legal recognition of their right to fish, hunt, and gather on public lands throughout their aboriginal territories. By the late twentieth century, the reconstituted tribal government had begun to reclaim, piece by piece, the sovereign authority it had lost since the time of the treaty. After decades of cultural loss, elders and younger tribal people starting working together to record, teach, and pass on the language and knowledge of the ancestors.

the natural and cultural values of the Lower Flathead River Corridor shall be preserved for present and future generations of the Tribes; that management shall give priority to enhancing resource values associated with traditional cultural uses of the corridor such as hunting, fishing, plant harvesting, and other cultural activities; that resource uses in the corridor are managed to be compatible with the restoration and maintenance of the river’s outstanding natural and aesthetic qualities; and that management shall be consistent with the needs and desires of the Tribes.¹⁸⁹