Pend d'Oreille Hunting Grounds
By editor
Thompson Falls, Sanders County, Montana
For thousands of years this stretch of the Clark Fork was a favorite hunting, fishing, and gathering ground for the Olispé (Pend d’Oreille), many of whom live today on the Flathead Reservation. The Salish-language name for the Thompson Falls area is Seqeylqm, referring to the sound of water falling over the drop.
Oral history describes a time when Salish-speaking peoples lived as one great tribe, then split into bands as population outgrew local food, spreading across western Montana and west into Idaho and Washington. Seqeylqm sat near the heart of a Clark Fork travel corridor linking relatives from east of the Rockies to the Columbia Plateau—first on foot and in birch-bark canoes, later by horse, train, and automobile.
That tribal importance is why David Thompson and the Hudson’s Bay Company placed Saleesh House nearby in 1809. The post operated into the 1820s. The marker insists that the falls were a homeland and a highway before they were a dam town—and that the sound in the name is older than any English map.
See also
- Saleesh House at Thompson Falls, Sanders County
- Road to the Buffalo at Thompson Falls, Sanders County
- Flathead House at Plains, Sanders County
