A Vast Network of Indigenous Trails

By editor

Greenough, Missoula County, Montana

If you stand at Clearwater Junction today, watching the cars roar past on Highway 200 and Highway 83, you might be tempted to think that the Montana Department of Transportation invented the idea of putting a crossroads here. But the truth is, the state engineers were about ten thousand years late to the party.

Long before the first surveyor ever looked through a transit, this spot was known to the Salish and Pend d'Oreille people as Čćnpá (pronounced Ch-tsin-pah), named for a prominent warrior. It was the grand central station of the Blackfoot River corridor, the hub of a transportation network so vast and efficient that it makes our modern asphalt seem like a clumsy afterthought.

From this junction, the trails ran to the four points of the compass, and they were not merely paths through the woods. They were the arteries of a continent-spanning economy.

If you went east, past the Ovando area, known in Salish as Sntntnmsqá (Place Where A Person Tightens a Horse's Reins), you would eventually cross the Continental Divide and drop down into the buffalo-rich prairies of the Missouri River. If you went south, the trails carried you over the hills to the Clark Fork River.

If you headed west, you followed the water down to the confluence with the Clark Fork, a place known as N?aycčstm (Place of the Big Bull Trout). And if you turned north, the trails led you toward Placid Lake (Čtáll?e, or Dry Land Exposed when the Lake Recedes in Fall) and Seeley Lake (Ept Ćixwćwt, Has Osprey). From there, you could keep going all the way to the Bob Marshall Wilderness or the mouth of the Swan River at Bigfork.

The people who built and maintained this network did not need dynamite or diesel machinery. They used the landscape itself, reading the contours of the earth with an exactness that modern engineering can only envy. They traveled these routes for millennia, moving with the seasons to harvest game, fish, roots, berries, and medicinal plants.

When the first white explorers and trappers finally arrived in this country, they did not hack their way through an untracked wilderness. They simply followed the roads that were already there, usually with a Salish or Nez Perce guide to keep them from getting lost on the interstate.

Today, the old trails are mostly invisible to the untrained eye, buried under pavement or overgrown by the forest. But the geography remains unchanged. The rivers still run where they always ran, the passes still cut through the mountains at the same elevations, and the junction at Čćnpá is still the best place to decide which way you want to go. The names on the highway signs may be new, but the road itself is older than history.

See also

• Journey Through the Blackfoot, detailing Lewis's 1806 passage along this same corridor
• The Blackfoot River Corridor, covering the broader history of the river
• Danger Ahead!, the story of the Nez Perce guides who refused to travel further east on these trails