Time Line
Flathead Indian Reservation
1800 - 1839
 

The Louisiana Purchase gave the United States control over the Mississippi Valley. President Thomas Jefferson planned to move the land from Indian control by increasing Indians' dependence on trade goods and teaching them agriculture. Letter from Thomas Jefferson.

David Thompson in the Athabasca Pass © National Archives of Canada

The Salish met David Thompson, representing the Northwest Trade Company, at Lake Pend O'Reille. He provided them with firearms (probably .59 caliber trade muskets, with three to four foot octagonal barrels) and iron tipped arrowheads in exchange for pelts, dried salmon, and twelve pounds of camas root. The guns gave the Salish better chances of surviving against their enemy, the Blackfeet. Thompson then traveled 75 miles up the Clark Fork into today's Montana and during mild weather in November and December built Salish House trading post on the north bank of the river at a jagged cliff named Back Rock, near today's Thompson Falls. This was Montana's first trading post. It had three log structures: a warehouse, an office, and living quarters. This remained the center of the fur trade in Flathead country for forty years, though its location changed three times and it came to be known as Flathead Post. The Flatheads began trading buffalo robes and pelts for trade goods. By 1840, as much as one fourth of the bison they killed was for the market.

David Thompson entered the Mission Valley, the first white to record a visit to the Valley (although it is probable that Jacques Finlay, a French-Canadian free trapper had traveled the valley earlier). In Thompson's journal he noted that in a Salish camp of about 60 teepees near Mission Creek, about 20 were those of widows. Their enemies, the Blackfeet, had been getting trade muskets, gaining a significant military advantage. (White)

In 1926, A group of historians believed they located the spot he first saw the valley, using notes and sketches in his journal. They said it was at the "apex of the knoll on the line between T22N, R19W and R20W, in Section 1, T22N, R20W, about 40 rods south of the township corner, the latter coincident with the shore of the lake." This was upon the ranch once owned by Montana Governor and U. S. Senator Joseph Dixon and now the McAlpin Ranch.

Flathead Post was built by the new Hudson's Bay Company, formed from the merger of the Northwest Company and the Pacific Fur Company. It was a stockade south of Salish House on the Clark Fork River.

The Flatheads sent a delegation of two Salish and two Nez Perce to St. Louis to find the holy men predicted by their prophet Shining Shirt. Two of these men died and were buried in St. Louis, their names recorded as Paul and Narcisse and their tribes as Nez Perce and Flathead. Their visit triggered excitement in St. Louis among people with a religious zeal. The Jesuits began recruiting and training young missionaries in Europe for the Rocky Mountain mission field.

By 1835 another Flathead delegation traveled to St. Louis, led by Old Ignace. He took two sons, aged ten and fourteen, and traveled met with Father Helias. In 1837, Old Ignace led yet another delegation of three Flatheads and one Nez Perce toward St. Louis. They were all killed by Sioux on the North Platte. In 1839, the Flatheads sent two French-speaking Iroquois. This delegation met Father Peter John De Smet at St. Joseph Mission at Council Bluffs. He made no promises, so they continued on to St. Louis, where they appealed for missionaries to Bishop Rosati.

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