Searching For Fur And A Finer Life

By editor

Paradise, Sanders County, Montana, April 2026

David Thompson, a man who spent his life looking at the stars through a telescope and mapping the wilderness with a precision that bordered on the fanatical, was the first Euro-American to record his travels along this particular stretch of the Clark Fork River. The local Salish people, observing his peculiar habits, named him "Koo Koo Sint," which translates to "He Who Looks at Stars." It is a poetic name for a man whose primary business was the entirely unpoetic extraction of animal pelts for the profit of distant shareholders. Early in 1809, Thompson came through this canyon searching for an ideal site to establish a fur trading post, eventually settling on a spot northwest of here near present-day Thompson Falls, where he built the "Saleesh House."

For the next fifty years, the canyon saw a steady procession of miners, trappers, and traders, all hurrying through on their way to somewhere else, presumably somewhere with more fur or more gold. Eventually, settlers began homesteading the Wild Horse Plains Valley, twelve miles downriver, deciding that if they could not get rich quick, they might as well get poor slowly by farming. The real change arrived in the late 1880s with the completion of the railroad, linking Missoula with Lake Pend Oreille in Idaho. This iron road connected Puget Sound to Lake Michigan, and suddenly the number of settlers moving west dramatically increased, proving once again that Americans will go anywhere provided they do not have to walk.

Across the river from the marker rest the ruins of an old homestead established in the early 1900s. It seems ideally located, nestled against the water, but it suffered from one minor defect: no road led to the site. The residents had to ferry themselves across the river or follow the perilous railroad track, a daily commute that must have tested their commitment to the finer life they were supposedly searching for. They called the area Paradise, which seems a bit optimistic for a place you can only reach by risking death by drowning or locomotive, but the West has always been built on a foundation of aggressive optimism.

See also

• Searching For Fur And A Finer Life at Paradise, Sanders County (Lolo National Forest, erected 2011)
• Wild Horse Plains for more on the nearby settlement.