Road to the Buffalo

By editor

Thompson Falls, Sanders County, Montana, August 2022

The Salish people knew the land and its creatures long before the strangers arrived with their instruments and their insatiable hunger for the skins of animals. The beaver, a creature of industry and quiet purpose, was a neighbor in the streams and rivers. It built its lodges in the cold water and shaped the land in ways that sustained other life. But to the men of the North West Company, the beaver was not a neighbor; it was a currency, a means to wealth in a distant world they called Europe. David Thompson, a man who measured the earth with his tools, saw the destruction that was coming. He wrote in his narrative, "Every intelligent man saw the poverty that would follow the destruction of the beaver, but there were no chiefs to control it; all was perfect liberty and equality." It is a strange liberty that leaves a land barren.

Thompson was not a cruel man. He was a careful observer, a recorder of latitudes and distances, a maker of maps that would outlast the world he was helping to dismantle. He had come west over the Rocky Mountains in 1807, following the rivers, learning the country from the people who already knew it. He established Kootenae House on the upper Columbia, then moved south and west, pressing deeper into the territory that the Salish and their neighbors had occupied since time beyond counting. He traveled by canoe and on horseback, through country that was difficult and beautiful, and he wrote it all down in his journals with the precision of a man who believed that knowing the shape of the earth was a form of mastery over it.

In the winter of 1809, Thompson established a place he called Saleesh House, near the falls of the river now known as Thompson Falls. It was the first permanent trading post in western Montana. He claimed the region for a king across the ocean, a proclamation that meant nothing to the mountains or the people who had lived among them for generations. The post became a center of exchange, where the knowledge of the indigenous trappers was traded for the manufactured goods of the strangers. The Salish brought the wealth of the waters to the wooden walls of the house, participating in a commerce that would, in time, alter the balance of their world.

The men of the brigades traveled vast distances, enduring the harsh winters and the difficult terrain. They were driven by the demands of a market they could not see, a market that demanded hats made from the fur of the beaver. The waterways, which had always been paths of life and connection for the tribes, became supply routes for an expanding empire of trade. The peltry was gathered, bundled, and hauled away, leaving behind a landscape that was slowly being emptied of its original inhabitants. Thompson himself recorded the cost in his journal on a February Sunday in 1812, noting that his party, short of provisions near the Forks, had killed a mare belonging to the Indians, "for which we have to pay." The accounting of the fur trade was always imprecise, and the debts it incurred were never fully settled.

Saleesh House was a busy and economically successful operation in its early years. Thompson completed a chain of four posts across the Columbia Basin, linking Kootenae House, Kullyspel House near Flathead Lake, Saleesh House, and Spokane House on the Spokane River. These establishments anchored the North West Company's claims in the interior before Thompson made his celebrated descent of the Columbia River to its mouth in 1811. He was mapping a continent, and the Salish people were part of that map, their trails and their knowledge incorporated into the great survey without their consent.

The business of the fur trade was relentless. In 1821, the North West Company merged with the Hudson's Bay Company, and the flag over the trading post changed, though the purpose remained the same. The new company renamed the post Flathead House and moved it several times over the following decades, following the Indian travel routes and winter camping grounds that had been used for generations before Thompson arrived. The strangers needed the knowledge and the labor of the tribes to sustain their enterprise, and they followed the people even as they depleted the country those people depended upon.

The final iteration of the post, Fort Connah, was established on Post Creek near today's St. Ignatius in 1846, under the management of Angus McDonald. It was the last fur trading post in the contiguous United States, and it was closed in 1871 by order of the United States government. The era that Thompson had helped to initiate at Saleesh House had run its course over sixty years, and the beaver that had driven it were largely gone from the streams. The poverty that Thompson had foreseen in 1797 had arrived, not only for the beaver, but for the people who had shared their country with the trade.

See also

• Road to the Buffalo at Thompson Falls, Sanders County (Hecla Charitable Foundation, Noxon Senior Citizens, erected 2022)
• Saleesh House for more on David Thompson's trading post and its later history as Fort Connah