The Tobacco Valley of northern Lincoln County takes its name from the tobacco root plant, Valeriana edulis, that the Ktunaxa people harvested from the valley floor for centuries before European contact. The root was an important food and trade item for the Ktunaxa, and the valley where it grew in abundance became a place of gathering and exchange in the indigenous economy of the northern Rockies. When David Thompson of the North West Company became the first European to explore the area in 1808, he found a landscape that had been shaped by human use for generations, and he named the valley for the plant that gave it its distinctive character.

Thompson's journey down the Kootenai River in 1808 was part of his larger project of mapping the Columbia River system and establishing the North West Company's presence in the fur trade of the Pacific Northwest. He was one of the great geographers of the fur trade era, and the maps he produced of the Kootenai country were the first systematic cartographic record of the region. The Tobacco Valley that he described was a place of exceptional beauty, with the Whitefish Range to the east and the Purcell Mountains to the west framing a broad valley floor that the Kootenai River drained northward toward the Columbia.

The fur trade era that Thompson inaugurated in the Tobacco Valley lasted for several decades, as the North West Company and later the Hudson's Bay Company maintained trading relationships with the Ktunaxa people of the valley. The valley's position on the trade routes between the Columbia Plateau and the northern Rockies gave it commercial importance in the fur trade economy, and the posts that the trading companies established in the region were the first permanent European presence in the Tobacco Valley.

The gold discoveries that brought prospectors into the Tobacco Valley in the 1860s and 1870s transformed the region's character. The prospectors who flooded into the area after reports of gold discoveries came primarily from the United States, following the mining frontier northward from the placer districts of Idaho and western Montana. A mining town sprang up in the valley, and for a period the Tobacco Plains had the character of a gold rush community, with the transient population and the commercial activity that characterized the mining frontier.

The mining activity in the Tobacco Valley was real but not sustained. The placer deposits that attracted the initial rush were worked out relatively quickly, and the hard-rock deposits that might have supported a longer-lived mining economy were not developed on a significant scale. The mining population that had flooded into the valley in the 1860s and 1870s departed as quickly as it had come, leaving behind the infrastructure of a mining community that was quickly absorbed into the agricultural settlement that followed.

The agricultural settlement of the Tobacco Valley in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gave the region a more durable economic base than the mining rush had provided. The valley's fertile soils and its position along the Great Northern Railway line made it attractive to homesteaders, and the community of Eureka that developed at the valley's center became the commercial hub of the northern Lincoln County economy. The Tobacco Plains community that had existed as a mining camp was absorbed into the broader agricultural settlement, and the name Tobacco Plains came to refer to the valley as a whole rather than to a specific community.

The Tobacco Valley Board of History has preserved a remarkable collection of historical buildings from the 1880s through the 1920s at a heritage site in the valley. The collection includes a general store, a schoolhouse, a library, a church, two log cabins, and a hand-operated fire engine, all dating from the period of the valley's agricultural settlement. The buildings represent the material culture of the homesteading era in the northern Rockies, and they provide a tangible connection to the community life of the Tobacco Valley in the decades before the automobile and the modern economy transformed the region.

The history of Tobacco Plains is a layered one, with the indigenous history of the Ktunaxa, the fur trade era of David Thompson, the gold rush of the 1860s, and the agricultural settlement of the late nineteenth century all contributing to the character of the place. The Tobacco Valley Board of History's preservation work ensures that the material evidence of at least one of these layers remains accessible to visitors, and the valley's natural beauty provides a context for understanding why the place attracted human attention across so many centuries.

The Ktunaxa people whose history in the Tobacco Valley predates European contact by centuries were not passive observers of the changes that the fur trade and the mining rush brought to their homeland. The Ktunaxa had maintained a distinctive culture and economy in the Kootenai country for generations, and their relationship with the land was shaped by a detailed knowledge of the valley's resources that the European newcomers could not replicate. The tobacco root that gave the valley its name was one of many plants that the Ktunaxa harvested from the valley floor, and the knowledge of when and where to find it was part of the accumulated ecological knowledge that the community transmitted across generations.

The Ktunaxa's response to the fur trade was pragmatic and adaptive. They traded with the North West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company on terms that reflected their own understanding of the value of the furs they were providing, and they maintained their cultural identity and their territorial claims throughout the fur trade era. The mining rush of the 1860s was a more serious challenge, bringing a population of transient prospectors who had no interest in the Ktunaxa's territorial rights and who were backed by the political and military power of the United States government. The Ktunaxa's displacement from the Tobacco Valley was part of the broader dispossession of indigenous peoples that accompanied the mining frontier across the West.

What Remains Today

The Tobacco Valley Board of History maintains a collection of historical buildings at a heritage site in the Tobacco Valley, including structures dating from the 1880s through the 1920s. The collection includes a general store, schoolhouse, library, church, two log cabins, and a hand-operated fire engine. The site provides a tangible connection to the agricultural settlement era of the Tobacco Valley.

Eureka, the commercial center of the Tobacco Valley, is a functioning small city with visitor services, and the surrounding valley retains much of the agricultural character that the homesteaders established in the early twentieth century.

Visiting

Tobacco Plains is located in the Tobacco Valley of northern Lincoln County, accessible via US Highway 93 north of Eureka. Eureka is the nearest city with visitor services, located approximately 7 miles south of the Canadian border on US Highway 93. The Tobacco Valley Board of History can provide information about the heritage site and its historical buildings.

Glacier National Park is approximately 60 miles southeast of Eureka via US Highway 93 and US Highway 2, and the Canadian border crossing at Roosville is approximately 7 miles north of Eureka.