Saleesh House

By editor

Thompson Falls, Sanders County, Montana, November 1809

In the early nineteenth century, the fur trade was a cut-throat business, which is to say it was a perfectly normal American enterprise, except that the people running it were British and the people doing the actual cutting of throats were occasionally Blackfeet. David Thompson, a man who liked to look at stars and draw maps, arrived near the mouth of the Thompson River in November 1809. He was working for the North West Company, and his job was to beat the Hudson's Bay Company to the punch, which he did by building three simple log buildings with mud and grass roofs that leaked whenever it rained.

He called it Saleesh House, and it was the second trading post ever built in what is now Montana. The Salish Indians were his primary customers, and they were happy to trade beaver and muskrat pelts for weapons and other goods, mostly because they needed the weapons to keep the Blackfeet from killing them. They liked Thompson well enough, calling him "Koo-Koo-Sint," or Star Looker, because he spent so much time staring at the sky instead of looking out for bears.

The post did a brisk business until the 1820s, when the North West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company decided it was cheaper to merge than to keep fighting each other. By then, the Blackfeet had become so hostile that the company decided the beaver weren't worth the trouble, and they abandoned the place. The mud roofs caved in, the logs rotted away, and the forest took it all back, hiding it so well that it took a team of university archaeologists to find it again a century and a half later.

See also

• Saleesh House at Thompson Falls, Sanders County (Erected by Unknown, erected Unknown)
• David Thompson
• Fort Thompson Playground