Kootenai Falls People and History

By editor

Troy, Lincoln County, Montana, August 2022

The Kootenai, or Tunaxa people, have known the thunder of these falls for thousands of years. Their territory spanned the great river that bears their name, a nation of seven bands living in harmony with the rhythms of the water and the seasons. They did not need to conquer the falls; they understood its power and respected its boundaries, portaging their canoes along ancient, well-worn paths when the river demanded it. The land provided abundantly for those who knew how to ask, and the Kootenai lived here long before the first white men arrived with their maps and their ambitions.

When the European traders and surveyors finally came, lured by the promise of wealth in furs, they found a landscape that challenged their every assumption. In 1808, David Thompson, a man driven to measure and record every inch of the earth, arrived at the head of the falls in a large canoe. He described them as "heavy, long falls between 2 steep hills," and was forced to portage his heavy loads across the land, a grueling task that took fifteen trips of an hour and a half each. Decades later, the Jesuit missionary Father Pierre DeSmet found himself crawling on his hands and knees to bypass the roaring water. The Americans who followed brought their iron roads, blasting the Great Northern Railway through the valley in 1891, and later carving the Great Parks National Automobile Highway into the rock. They saw the falls as an obstacle to be overcome, a problem of engineering, while the Kootenai had always known it as a sacred place of power and enduring life.

See also

• Kootenai Falls People and History at Troy, Lincoln County (Montana Department of Transportation)
• Kootenai River for more on the region's indigenous history.