Cabinet Mountains & The Kootenai War of 1974

Updated: Mar 17

I woke up that morning along Howard Lake, under the watchful eye of Elephant Peak and was greeted with a bit of fresh snow on top of an icy crust that had been there the night before. The recent flying flurries had left behind a thick, frozen fog over the lake right outside my window, making for a nice view to kick off the day. The goal was to amble over Silver Butte Pass and meet up with the Clark Fork River on the other side. I continued down West Fischer Creek Road and took in the views along the creek in the morning light. The route I was following had currently placed me on the eastern edge of the Cabinet Mountains. The range is just a valley over from the Montana/Idaho border and remains relatively isolated to this day. That high country is the realm of the mountain goats, with its numerous lakes continually letting water tumble down to nourish great groves of cedars and larches towering below the peaks.

The Clark Fork River makes up the southwestern border of the Cabinet Mountains, and from that winding waterway is where the wilderness area got its name. Early French explorers had seen boxy cabinet-like rocks along the Clark Fork back in the day, and the name stuck. A few of these cuboidal formations are still visible, but many are now under the waters of the Cabinet Gorge Reservoir. The highest peak in the Cabinet Mountains is Snowshoe Peak, standing at just over 8700 feet in elevation. On the northern slope of Snowshoe Peak, a small glacier, Blackwell Glacier, hangs on. I hope to be able to come back in the summer sometime and hike to the glacier itself, perhaps even see if there's any skiable snow.

From my spot along the lake, I had gone a full 17 miles by the time I turned onto asphalt for a brief jaunt on Highway 2 before I was soon back onto "dirt," aka snow and ice in my case. I was now on the trail for Silver Butte Pass, which would bring me through the mountains to the Clark Fork. The road started off decent enough, but that soon changed, with a creek deep in a crevice exposing itself close to the road, creating a harrowing drop. The snow certainly didn't help, making the edge of the road and the start of the drop-off blend together. On top of this, branches began to drop lower and lower over the road, prompting me to begin weaving a bit to avoid the lowest ones. Thankfully, I had good tires, kept my direction sound and throttle in rhythm, and therefore maintained the traction I had to keep me from sliding off the road. I was intent on making it through into Idaho before long, thankful for the previous experience driving through winter storms in Illinois and across the West.

As for any mining history in the area, there has been a bit of sporadic activity since the late 1800's investigating various minerals, but no big mining booms have come from it in the immediate vicinity. That may be all for the better though, since a diverse spread of mammals remains, though fewer in number than in the past. Mountain goats are still found in the Cabinets and all throughout high elevations in the rockies, though much more isolated than they used to be. Woodland Caribou, however, have all but disappeared from the lower 48, except for a tiny population that still exists in this area of northwest Montana and northeast Idaho. On account of all that big wildlife around, the area was a key hunting grounds for the Kootenai tribe in the past. The Kootenai are a proud people, and they even declared war on the United States in 1974 because the conditions their people were living in were abysmal and the government had not even recognized the band in Idaho; they didn't even have a single deeded acre to themselves.

Image Courtesy of the Boundary County Historical Society and Museum & Idaho Experience

Most bands of the Kootenai were part of a group of tribes that signed the Hellgate Treaty in 1855. Those six bands were consolidated onto the Flathead Reservation, along with the Salish and Pend d'Oreille tribes, but the government failed to realize that a tribe couldn't always be consolidated together and have one strange chief speak for them all. Therefore, the Kootenai people of Idaho, located further west, found themselves never receiving anything, not even basic recognition as a part of the Kootenai tribe. The war declared in 1974 was meant to be a peaceful one from the start, with the tribe just wanting some recognition of their remaining people in Idaho and some sort of land upon which to make a better life with homes that actually had heat. The person heading the push was Amelia Cutsack Trice, who had recently been elected the first woman to head the tribal council.

Trice drafted a letter to Washington, demanding that the government return 128,000 acres of tribal lands and provide a few million dollars in compensation for the hunting, fishing, water, and mineral rights given up by the people. The letter also made the statement that if their requests were not met, the Kootenai Nation would assume the United States had relinquished its "power of domain" over the land and a state of war would exist. They sold war bonds and charged a 10-cent toll on the roads coming into the small community of Bonners Ferry, and donations came in from as far away as Europe and Israel.

Two US Senators soon took the tribe's concerns to heart and advocated for them in Washington. Trice traveled there with another representative from the tribe as well as a lawyer to make their case in the halls of Congress. A resolution was soon signed by President Gerald Ford, which gave them federal recognition and deeded the tribe 12.5 acres around the original mission in the area. It wasn't much, but it was a start. In the decades since, the Kootenai people have continued to acquire land and now have over 2,500 acres.

Image Courtesy of the Bonners Ferry Herald

At one point along the road over the pass, the creek began to disappear into the trees as they closed in, blocking off most of the scant sunlight that was making its way through in the first place. A thick trunk from a downed tree jutted into the road, and I had no room to move over. I thought I might be able to just barely squeeze by, but then, of course, the snow shifted just a tad and allowed the trunk to barely scrape the camper as I rolled by. Before I knew what happened, I was past it and got out to access the damage.

There were a few scuffs on the propane storage door and a small crease along the generator door near the back. The large vented fridge door in the center had taken the brunt of it and was a bit mangled but not torn off and not totally unusable; thankfully, it could've been much worse. Soon after this, there was a downed tree around a foot thick hanging too low above my head diagonally across my path, far too short for me to meander around in the nearly 12-foot-tall camper. I was already far from the main highway and wasn't about to turn around just because of this obstacle in my path, even if I had the space to do so. I had spent hours getting there and was confident I could make short work of the tree, dismantling it and moving it out of the way in the snow.

Getting out of the truck, I found the saw that my winter-savvy Swedish mountain friends had thankfully given me in Leadville, Colorado, weeks before. It was smaller than I recalled, and looking at the mature trunk over the road, I wished that I had brought a proper chainsaw along for the task. Turning my head, I saw where the tree met its base, also high above my head, on an inconveniently steep slope that the roadway had been cut from. It had been hard to notice before from inside the cab as the frozen ground cover had obscured the angles of the terrain itself. I realized that the short hike would require all my anchor points, so I stowed the saw in my waistband and began to climb, not bothering to put on a thick jacket as I figured I'd be through the trunk in a few short minutes. I was wrong.

Nearly an hour later, sweating through the couple thin layers I had on, I finally managed to free the fallen truck from its earthly anchor frozen into the mountainside. The heavy trunk crashed down the bank into the road below, presenting me with the new problem of how I would move it out of my way. After skittering and half sliding down the embankment, I stared at the tree for a moment or two, debating cutting it in half to make it easier to budge. I quickly decided against it after figuring I didn't have the time; the sun was sinking now and I needed to get moving to find a decent camp spot before dark. Grabbing the end of the truck, I linked my palms under the truck and proceeded to squat it up and down, moving it over a few inches at a time in a crab walking sort of way. After having spent so much time on the task, it seemed to move easier now, using a bit of adrenaline I reckon, to get the last of it out of the road so I could continue onward. Finally, the decaying pine was out of my way, and onward I went.

Soon enough, I was over the worst of the pass, and after clearing one more smaller branch in my way, and navigating a hairpin turn on the last switchback, the trees began to open up in front of me. In addition to the pines and cedars, there were other coniferous-looking trees that grew taller and perhaps a bit skinner than the rest, although they surprisingly seemed nearly stripped of their foliage. I soon passed a sign discussing the larch seeding in 1910 and subsequent thinning in the 1960s to allow the trees to grow stronger and taller. I also found out that larches are one of the few species of deciduous conifer trees, which was why they were already mostly bare. Usually their needles turn a brilliant yellow in autumn before they drop them for the winter, and I must've just missed the scene by a few weeks with it only being late October.

The sun fully broke through across the sky at that point, and it made for a welcome sight, with a bit of warmth making it down through the rays. Before I knew it I was rolling out of Twenty Odd Gulch and a wide, deep bay of the Clark Fork spread out before me in the snow and the sunshine. Pavement started up again, but I still didn't see a soul as the whole surface of the water softly stirred about in the late afternoon.