Bad Rock Trail

By editor

[Thompson Falls, Sanders County, Montana, 1809]

The aboriginal people of the Northwest, possessing a great deal more sense than the white men who followed them, knew exactly what to call the treacherous stretch of geography along the Clark Fork River. They called it Bad Rock. It was an honest name for an honest piece of misery, a steep and cursed obstacle that had to be negotiated by anyone wishing to travel up or down the river corridor.

The North West Company trader David Thompson, a man who spent his life measuring the wilderness and finding it generally disagreeable, was the first European to document the trail in 1809. He built his trading post, Saleesh House, within sight of the rock, which gave him a front-row seat to the local politics. According to Thompson, Bad Rock was not merely a geological nuisance; it was the preferred venue for settling disagreements between the Kootenai, the Salish, and the Blackfeet. If you were going to ambush your enemies, you might as well do it where the terrain was already trying to kill them.

For the next seventy years, Bad Rock remained a commanding presence on the route. It was cursed by a parade of western notables, including the explorer Isaac Stevens and the road-builder John Mullan. When Father Pierre-Jean DeSmet crossed over the rock in 1841, he was so appalled by the experience that he committed his terror to paper. "I had before seen landscapes of awful grandeur," the good father wrote, "but this one surpassed all others in horror. My courage failed at the first sight." It takes a special kind of landscape to make a Jesuit missionary lose his nerve.

The Northern Pacific Railway arrived in 1883 and decided that the best way to deal with Bad Rock was to blow it up. They blasted away portions of the trail to make room for their transcontinental line, substituting dynamite for courage. The Montana Department of Transportation repeated the process in 1936, carving out a shelf for Highway 200.

Today, you can drive past Bad Rock at sixty miles an hour, in a heated automobile, without giving a single thought to the Kootenai warriors or the terrified Jesuits who preceded you. But the rock is still there, looming over the highway, a silent reminder that before we paved the West, the West was entirely capable of defending itself.

See also

• Bad Rock Trail at Thompson Falls, Sanders County (Montana Department of Transportation)
• [Saleesh House] - David Thompson's trading post, built within sight of the trail.