Kootenai River

By editor

Troy, Lincoln County, Montana

The river takes its name from the Kootenai people, who lived and hunted across this corner of Montana, Idaho, and Canada. In 1855 they were settled south of Flathead Lake with the Salish on the Flathead Reservation—a treaty geography that did not erase older seasonal rounds along the river that still bears their name.

They kept generally friendly relations with neighboring mountain tribes and suffered repeated Blackfeet raids from across the Continental Divide—horse-stealing and scalp-raising expeditions that made the Kootenai corridor a dangerous edge of the plains war complex. British fur-company men arrived as early as 1809. Placer discoveries and mining followed about sixty years later, overlaying a tribal river with a prospector’s map.

The marker at Troy is brief because the river’s story is long. Water, salmon history, cross-border kinship, and the fur trade’s early claim all run through the same channel. Later industrial Libby and Troy would add dams and mills. The name on the water remains the first fact.