Tobacco Plains

By editor

[Eureka, Lincoln County, Montana, 1808]

About fifteen thousand years ago, a glacier the size of a small continent sat on top of the Kootenai River valley, grinding the bedrock into dust and leaving behind a collection of hills that geologists, who have a name for everything, call drumlins. When the ice finally decided to melt, it dammed the river and created an inland sea. When the water drained away, it left a valley so fertile that the Kutenai Indians decided it was the perfect place to grow tobacco.

They cultivated a native strain of the plant on the plains near the river for centuries, giving the area its name and establishing a monopoly on the local vice. The Kutenai were a practical people, and they understood that a good smoke was worth defending.

In 1808, the great North West Company trader and geographer David Thompson arrived on the Kootenai River. Thompson was a man who spent his life measuring the wilderness and finding it generally disagreeable, but he recognized a good trading opportunity when he saw one. The Canadian fur companies moved in, carrying on a lively trade with the Kutenai, the Salish, and anyone else who had a beaver pelt to spare. For fifty years, the Tobacco Plains were a quiet, profitable corner of the fur trade empire.

Then, in the mid-1860s, someone found gold on Wild Horse Creek in southeastern British Columbia. The news traveled south, and suddenly the Tobacco Plains were overrun by American prospectors, a species of men who would walk barefoot through a blizzard if they thought there was a nugget at the end of it. Most of them found nothing but disappointment, but their reports of the valley's abundant resources drew a second wave of settlers: cattlemen, farmers, and loggers who figured that if they couldn't dig their fortune out of the ground, they would cut it down or graze it.

By the 1890s, steamboats were plying the Kootenai River, carrying mail and supplies to the inhabitants north of Jennings. It was a brief, romantic era of riverboat captains and paddlewheels, which ended abruptly in 1901 when the Great Northern Railway arrived. The railroad, as it always did, replaced the romance of the river with the efficiency of steam and steel. The steamboats were tied up and left to rot, the prospectors moved on to the next strike, and the Tobacco Plains settled down to the quiet business of growing timber and cattle, leaving the tobacco to history.

See also

• Tobacco Plains at Eureka, Lincoln County (Montana Historical Society)
• [David Thompson] - The North West Company trader who first explored the Kootenai River.