Flathead Indians are little known outside of the area of Montana where the U.S. government placed them more than a century ago.
Their reservation, beautifully situated on Flathead Lake, with the Cabinet Mountains to the west and the Mission Mountains to the east, spans over a million acres, 92 percent of which is owned by the tribe and its tribal members. Large areas of the reservation are mountainous, providing little grazing and farmland. Flathead tribal enrollment in the confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes currently totals 6,377, with approximately half their members living off the reservation. The Kootenai members of the confederation live primarily in the northwestern part of the reservation near the town of Elmo. The Salish live in and around the communities of St. Ignatius and Arlee.
Historically, the term Salish refers to the linguistic character of a number of tribes that occupied the Columbia plateau of northwestern America. This language family included the tribes of the Flathead, Pend Oreille, Kalispell, Coeur d'Alene, Spokane, and other tribes. They lived in what is known as the plateau areas of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, western Montana, and the lands north to the Fraser River in Canada. When food became scarce, however, they wee forced to disperse. Most Salish-speaking people stayed near the Pacific Coast, but the Flathead and Pend Oreille Indians gradually moved eastward into Montana. Initially, the Flatheads lived east of the Continental Divide. The Pend Oreilles lived around what is now Paradise, Montana, as far south as Butte, and in the Bitterroot, Missoula, and Flathead valleys.
In the early 1700s, after being decimated by a smallpox epidemic in the East, the Flatheads returned to the area west of the Continental Divide. Around 1730, horses were introduced into the flathead tribal culture by the Shoshone Indians. The use of horses eventually appeared south to the Pend Oreille tribes, as well as the Kootenai (non-Salish-speaking) Indians. Although the Pend Oreilles always seem to have been amicable neighbors, several stories are told of small wars between the Flatheads and Kootenais, which finally terminated in peace through tribal intermarriage. By the 1850s, the flathead and the Kootenai tribes were close allies living in the mountain valleys of western Montana and making regular forays into Black-feet country--their common enemy--to hunt buffalo on the plains east of the divide.
In 1855, Isaac Stevens, governor and superintendent of Indian Affairs for the territory of Washington, met with representatives of the Flathead, Kootenai, and Pend Oreille tribes to persuade the three tribes to live together on one reservation. The leaders of the Pend Oreilles and the Kootenai eventually signed the so-called Hellgate Treaty, which provided a reservation that encompassed the southern half of Flathead Lake down through Jocko Valley. Although Stevens preferred that they all live north of the Missoula Valley, he reluctantly agreed to establish a separated reservation in the Biterroot Valley for the Flatheads.
Under intense pressure from white settlers, the government negotiated an agreement in 1872 with the Flathead band in Biterroot to move north into the Jocko Reservation. Two Flathead subchiefs, Arlee and Joseph Nine Pipes, agreed to move, but reigning chief Charlo refused to sign the agreement. Thus, Charlo and 390 tribe members stayed twenty more tough years in the bare Bitterroot, while the
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