Salish-Pend d'Oreille Culture Committee completes field research : Part One -

By Maggie Plummer
(editor's note: This is the first in a three-part series about several field research trips the Salish-Pend d'Oreille Culture committee took with tribal elders in 2005 and 2006, as part of the committee's Ethnogeography Project. The information in the articles is based on the committee's final trip reports.)

It was a time of buffalo jumps, of huge hunts that involved the people staying up and working all night on dry meat and hides.

It was a time of the ancestors, before the Salish and Pend d'Oreille people had horses, firearms and deadly European diseases.

In 2005 and 2006, the Salish-Pend d'Oreille Culture Committee conducted three separate field research trips with staff and tribal elders, to gather as much information as possible about traditional place names, their history, and their cultural uses.

They visited not only traditional places but also, in a way, the traditional time of those who came before.

The journeys were a culmination of the research for the culture committee's upcoming place name book, "Names Upon the Land," currently being completed by the Salish-Pend d'Oreille Ethnogeography Project.

Mike Durglo Sr. told some stories as the group visited the easternmost documented Salish camp, near Melstone. (photo by Tim Ryan)

The trips took in three areas of importance to tribal culture and history: the Musselshell River, the Upper Missouri drainage, and the Lower Clark Fork drainage (the Musselshell trip is the topic of this article).

Another purpose of the trips was to document the continuing relationship of the Tribes to these areas. Each trip was recorded in video and photos. Staff members also recorded what the elders had to say at the various places.

"We are now working with elders who as small children heard first-hand accounts of traditional use of these most easterly of the place names in...(their) aboriginal territory," the culture committee report states.

Today's elders heard the stories from their grandparents and great grandparents, so the stories are now second hand, two generations removed.

Yet the stories have survived.

When the elders went out to cultural sites along the Musselshell River and elsewhere, those stories came alive - stories about things like hunting antelope that were "like grasshoppers," in the words of Eneas Vanderburg's grandfather Victor.

"The elders today were raised to have the eyes to see how these places were used," Ethnogeography Project consultant Thompson Smith explained. "They are more informed about these places. These trips were also a way of recognizing and asserting the elders as being the preeminent experts in Tribal culture and history."

Some Background
Before horses, firearms, and diseases like smallpox, the Salish people were based in five bands east of the Continental Divide. They used areas to the west such as the Big Hole Valley, the Butte area, and the Missouri headwaters near what is now Three Forks.

One band was in Helena, along the Missouri River, and into the White Sulphur Springs area and the upper Musselshell River. The Musselshell Country was partly an old Salish homeland, and partly a shared hunting area.

The Pend d'Oreille people were also found on both sides of the mountains. The related "Tunaxn" tribe called the Rocky Mountain Front their homeland, especially along the Sun and Dearborn Rivers.

Over the course of the 1700s, tribal ways of life, territories, relationships, and populations changed radically.

With horses came much more contact between tribes, both peaceful and conflict-ridden contact.

Between 1780 and 1805, deadly diseases spread among the people through inter-tribal contact. It's estimated that between half and two-thirds of the total Plateau Indian population died from diseases, mainly smallpox.

Then there was the issue of firearms. The Blackfeet had access to them after about 1780 because of fur trading posts on the plains to the northeast, including the Hudson Bay Company's Buckingham House on the North Saskatchewan River.

Eneas Vanderburg related stories of buffalo in front of the buffalo jump. (photo by Tim Ryan)

That put Salish and Pend d'Oreille warriors at a huge disadvantage for about 30 or 40 years, as they pitted themselves against Blackfeet guns. The unarmed people had to shift territories as the armed Blackfeet moved into northern Montana, pushing out other tribes already weakened by smallpox.

The Salish, Pend d'Oreille and Kootenai moved their winter camps west of the Divide but continued to use the Musselshell and other buffalo hunting grounds east of the mountains - despite a constant threat of Blackfeet raids. They viewed the Blackfeet and other tribes as interlopers: the buffalo hunts were an ongoing claim to a homeland they had never surrendered.

East to the Musselshell

Here is a close-up of some mussel shells found along the river. (photo by Tim Ryan)

Smith and others relied on material gathered 70 years ago by Claude Schaeffer, an ethnographer whose papers are archived at the American Museum of Natural History. Schaeffer interviewed tribal elders about their traditional culture and many of them referred to the Musselshell River. Three of the elders provided Schaeffer with information on the camps, trails and place names along the river, Smith explained.

He and consultant Tim Ryan took a preliminary trip during which they got permission from private landowners on the Musselshell River to visit sites with the elders. They also checked out lodging, inspected some sites and documented some that the full group wouldn't be able to visit.

It was a little more than two years ago when the five-day "Salish-Pend d'Oreille Ethnogeographic Field Research trip to the Musselshell River Area" left the Longhouse in St. Ignatius, with a total of 12 people along. It was "...as far as we knew, the first group journey of Salish people to the Musselshell in at least a century," the final report of the journey states.

On the trip were elders Felicite "Jim" Sapiye McDonald, Eneas Vanderburg, Mike Durglo Sr., and Johnny Arlee; some of the culture committee staff went, as did professional still photographer Todd Kaplan of Ketchum, Idaho and videographer Roy Bigcrane of Salish Kootenai College.

Elder Eneas Vanderburg walked around on top of the buffalo jump south of Two Dot. (photo by Tim Ryan)

Their task was to locate major campsites, which were about a day's ride apart and generally near major river confluences. The easternmost camp was not far from the present day town of Melstone.

Some Musselshell places were named for a type of willow the people used to make pipe stems and whips. Others were named for events that took place there, such as Three People, named for three Salish killed by Crows and buried there.

Other names reflect traditional trail junctions.

On the first day of the trip, May 16, 2005, the group traveled to Roundup, stopping for lunch at another ancient Salish place, Three Forks.

On day two, they went to a place called "Bend in the River" and to pictograph sites.

Day three involved travelling west from Roundup, looking at pictographs, taking back roads on the south side of the river, and driving across huge open valleys with views north to the Big Snowy Mountains.

The next day, the group left Harlowton for Two Dot and a ranch that includes a major buffalo jump. The ranchers were generous and welcoming, and showed the travelers their collection of artifacts.

Many group members walked out on the huge buffalo jump in stormy weather. Johnny Arlee sang the Salish buffalo song in front of the jump. He and Eneas Vanderburg described their intense feelings about being there and imagining the ancestors at that place.

West of Two Dot they stopped and looked at willows, talking about willow-related place names in the area. The knots in one type of willow bush wood, when peeled and polished, look like eyes that are wide open, as if in surprise. That's where the name "ciliyalalqw" or "eyes-wide-open wood" comes from - the Salish name for the Musselshell River and also the name of the camp near the headwaters of the river's North Fork.

From White Sulphur Springs, the group headed west, discussing probable traditional routes across the Big Belt Mountains. They met with Helena National Forest archaeologist Carl Davis at Hellgate Canyon of the Big Belts, and examined a pictograph site the U. S. Forest Service is trying to protect.

After the trip, Smith and others translated, transcribed, archived, and organized the material they'd gathered, developing a summary of Salish place names and locations along the Musselshell to be included in the upcoming atlas.

Those who went on the journey felt that it confirmed and deepened their understanding of their people's relationship with the Musselshell country.

In the end, there's no substitute for physically going to a place.

Being there makes it possible to take in the expansive contours of the land and inhale the scents of the plants, the dirt. It enables a person to experience the power of that place, to vividly, emotionally imagine what it was like for the ancestors.
This 1887 postcard shows Salish people at White Sulphur Springs. (photo courtesy of the Salish-Pend d’Oreille Culture Committee)