Time Line
Flathead Indian Reservation
Pre-Contact - 1799
 

Shining Shirt, a prophet claimed by both the Salish and the Kalispels, told the people that men with fair skins and long black robes would come. They would make slaves of the people, but, nonetheless, they should not be resisted. Later, the people would rise again.

Flathead oral traditions hold that the people have inhabited western Montana since time immemorial. 

In the first decades of the twentieth century, anthropologist J. A. Teit speculated that before the arrival of horses, the Flatheads lived on the plains east of the Rocky Mountains. In another place he apparently contradicted this, suggesting that their material culture before horses was most like that of the Plateau tribes. His theories were based mostly on traditions and legends translated by one interpreter. 

Anthropologist Harry Hobert Turney-High, Montana State University professor in the 1930s and early 1940s, said that the Salish and Kalispels came from the west, perhaps the upper Klamath region in Oregon, while the Kootenai came from the east. When they came the country was still occupied by a tribe of small people—"Foolish Folk"—who were exterminated by the Flatheads. 

Flatheads obtained horses from tribes farther south and west (Shoshone, Ute, Comanche), who had gotten them from the Spaniards. The Blackfeet at this time lived on the Saskatoon Plains near Eagle Hills, four hundred miles east of the Rocky Mountains. With horses, the Blackfeet left their forested homes and migrated onto the plains of the upper Missouri.

A smallpox epidemic decimated the Flatheads. They contracted the disease during the times they camped with the Nez Perce. The population of Flathead tribes may have been reduced by half before 1800.

© 2004 Flathead Reservation Historical Society. All rights reserved.
For information about using parts of this site, please contact Michael L. Umphrey