Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes
The government includes members of several Bitterroot Salish, Kootenai and Pend d'Oreilles tribes and is centered on the Flathead Indian Reservation.
[citation needed] The Salish (Flatheads) initially lived entirely east of the Continental Divide but established their headquarters near the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains.
This tribal homeland included the present-day counties of Broadwater, Jefferson, Deer Lodge, Silver Bow, Madison and Gallatin and parts of Lewis & Clark, Meagher and Park.
West of the Rocky Mountains held the Pend d'Oreille the territory around Flathead Lake, and south of them occupied the Semteuse a relatively small area.
[1]: 317 Later well-established plains tribes like the Sarsi, Assiniboine, Cree, Crow, Gros Ventre, Arapaho, Cheyenne and Sioux lived far away.
Newly acquired mounts made it possible to overtake the American bison and the secured meat and skins could easily be carried by packhorses.
The first written record of the tribes is either from their meeting with trapper Andrew Garcia, explorer David Thompson, or the Lewis and Clark Expedition (September 4,[2] 1805).
The Flatheads also appear in the records of the Roman Catholic Church at St. Louis, Missouri, to which they sent four delegations to request missionaries (or "Black Robes") to minister to the tribe.
Isaac Stevens, the new governor and superintendent of Indian affairs for the Washington Territory, was intent on obtaining cession of the Bitterroot Valley from the Salish.
Because of the resistance of Chief Victor (Many Horses), Stevens ended up inserting into the treaty complicated (and doubtless poorly translated) language that defined the Bitterroot Valley south of Lolo Creek as a "conditional reservation" for the Salish.
[4] After the 1864 gold rush in the newly established Montana Territory, pressure upon the Salish intensified from both illegal non-Indian squatters and government officials.
In 1871, they successfully lobbied President Ulysses S. Grant to declare that the survey required by the treaty had been conducted and that it had found that the Jocko (Flathead) Reservation was better suited to the needs of the Salish.
On the basis of Grant's executive order, Congress sent a delegation, led by future president James Garfield, to make arrangements with the tribe for their removal.
Conditions had become intolerable for the Salish by the late 1880s, after the Missoula and Bitter Root Valley Railroad was constructed directly through the tribe's lands, with neither permission from the native owners nor payment to them.
In October 1891, a contingent of troops from Fort Missoula forced Charlot and the Salish out of the Bitterroot and roughly marched the small band sixty miles to the Flathead Reservation.
A dispute over off-reservation hunting between a band of Pend d'Oreilles and the state of Montana's Fish and Game department resulted in the Swan Valley Massacre of 1908.
The Tribal Council represents eight districts: During World War II, a 422-foot (129 m) Liberty Ship, the SS Chief Charlot, was named in his honor and built in Richmond, California, in 1943.
