By Michael Howell
Members of the Bitterroot Salish, Pend d’Oreille and Kootenai tribes joined together last week to walk from the Flathead Reservation, where the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes now live, to the homeland of the Salish in the Bitterroot valley near Stevensville. The walk was done in honor of their ancestors who were forced to leave the Bitterroot Valley, which they had called home for thousands of years, and walk to the Flathead Reservation in 1891 in what they call the “Salish Trail of Tears.”
Many tears were also shed on the cemetery grounds of St. Mary’s Mission when the Salish arrived in Stevensville last Saturday, 125 years later, to honor their ancestors who spent their lives here. A stone monument at the back of the cemetery is inscribed with the names of sixty-five of the Bitterroot Salish who lived here.
The descendants of Topsseh, one of those named on the stone, continue to play a major role in maintaining a vital connection with the tribe’s homeland in the Bitterroot. Mary Ann Pierre Topsseh Coombs was ten years old when she and her family made the long walk. One thing she remembered well was all the crying. Twenty years elapsed before they returned and began what for some became an annual “pilgrimage” to the homeland. Once they did, Mary Ann Combs became a strong voice in the rekindling of that connection. A maroon shawl made by Mary Ann Combs was carried on the walk. A yellow shawl made by Louise Combs was also carried on the walk.
The following historical information is from Women’s History Matters, a special publication by the Montana Historical Society on October 14, 2014, celebrating the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage.
Mary Ann Pierre Topsseh Coombs and the Bitterroot Salish
Mary Ann Pierre was about ten years old in October 1891, when American soldiers arrived to “escort” the Salish people out of the Bitterroot region and to the Jocko (now Flathead) Indian Reservation. With her family and three hundred members of her tribe, Mary Ann tearfully left the homeland where her people had lived for millennia. The Salish left behind farms, log homes, and the St. Mary’s Mission church—evidence of all they had done to adjust to an Anglo-American lifestyle. Nearly eighty-five years later, Mary Ann Pierre Coombs returned to the Bitterroot to rekindle her people’s historical and cultural connections to their homeland.
The Bitterroot region and the Salish people share a long mutual history. Salish travel routes to and from the Bitterroot testify to centuries of regular use as they moved seasonally to hunt bison and trade with regional tribes in well-established trading centers. Linguistic studies of the inland Salish language reveal ten-thousand-year-old words that described specific sites in the Bitterroot region and testify to the tribe’s knowledge of the region’s geography and resources.
When Lewis and Clark entered the Bitterroot in 1805 in destitute condition, the hospitable Salish presented the bedraggled strangers with food, shelter, blankets, good horses, and travel advice. In 1841, Jesuit missionaries established St. Mary’s Mission at present-day Stevensville, and many Salish adopted Catholicism alongside their Native beliefs.
In 1855, Washington territorial governor Isaac Stevens negotiated the Hellgate Treaty with the Salish, Pend d’Oreille, and Kootenai tribes. The necessity of translating everything into multiple languages made the negotiations problematic. One Jesuit observer said the translations were so poor that “not a tenth . . . was actually understood by either party.” While the Kootenai and Pend d’Oreille tribes retained tribal lands at the southern end of Flathead Lake, the fate of the Bitterroot was not clear. Chief Victor believed the treaty protected his Salish tribe from dispossession, as it indicated a future survey for a reservation and precluded American trespass. However, the Americans claimed the treaty permitted the eventual eviction of the Salish at the American president’s discretion.
Following Chief Victor’s death in 1870, President U. S. Grant issued an executive order demanding the Salish remove to the Flathead and sent General James Garfield in 1872 to force their consent. When Victor’s son, Chief Charlo, refused to sign the “agreement,” Garfield forged Charlo’s “X” on the document and the United States seized most of the tribe’s land. Three hundred Salish people refused to leave, and instead worked hard to maintain peace with the increasing number of intruding whites. Many Salish families, including Mary Ann’s, built log homes, took up farming, planted orchards and vegetable gardens, and minimized their traditional seasonal travels. Her family got along well with their white neighbors. The Salish even refused aide to their allies, the Nez Perce, during that tribe’s conflicts with the United States in 1877. The Salish hoped that such efforts to maintain good relations would appease the Americans’ determination to drive them from their homeland.
Over the next twenty years, however, Americans continued to trespass into the disputed territory, establishing new towns and building a railroad for the timber industry. Just after Montana became a state, Congress ordered General Carrington and his soldiers to remove Chief Charlo’s tribe to the Flathead. On October 14, 1891, armed soldiers evicted three hundred Salish, some of whom left on foot. Later, Mary Ann recalled that “everyone was in tears, even the men,” and said the procession was like “a funeral march.” Other elders who had been children at the time of the removal remembered women weeping as American troops marched them through Stevensville in front of white onlookers.
The government promised to compensate the Bitterroot Salish for the homes, crops, and livestock they left behind, but it was an empty promise. So, too, was the government’s promise to provide for their survival on the Flathead Reservation. Mary Ann’s family lived in poverty on the new reservation, where the rocky soil made farming difficult.
Mary Ann attended two years at the Jocko agency school, but never learned to speak English fluently. As a teenager she worked as a laundry maid for Indian Agent Peter Ronan’s family. While working for the Ronans, she met Louis Topsseh Coombs, whom she later married. They raised a family on the Flathead Reservation, and many years passed before Mary Ann Coombs returned to the Bitterroot.
By the 1970s, only three of the hundreds of Salish people who had made the sorrowful trek from the Bitterroot to the Flathead were still alive, among them Mary Ann Coombs. In 1975, those three joined several descendants on a trip back to the Bitterroot. During the journey the elders recounted childhood memories and tribal histories associated with particular places. They visited the graves of ancestors and showed younger relatives places where generations of Salish people had gone to receive medicine through visions.
Recently, Montana’s Fish, Wildlife and Parks and the Metcalf Wildlife Preserve relied on oral histories passed down by Coombs and her peers to create interpretive signs describing Salish history throughout the Bitterroot. The tribe has created an extensive project to map and record historical Salish sites using ancient place-names. Although Mary Ann Pierre Topsseh Coombs—who once woke up to see the red tops of the mountains of her homeland—is gone, the Salish peoples’ connections to the Bitterroot remain.
Some of the recent marchers walked the entire 51 miles from the Jocko Church cemetery to Stevensville, camping out two nights along the way. Many others participated in portions of the journey along the way. The ranks swelled to about one hundred as they crossed the Bitterroot River and walked into Stevensville.
After making their way through the town, the entourage arrived at the mission grounds and proceeded through the cemetery to its western edge overlooking Red Top mountain, now called St. Mary’s peak. Here the elders gathered under the large cross bearing the inscription “Indian Graves” at the back of the cemetery grounds and Tony Incashola, director of the Salish-Pend d’Oreille Culture Committee, gave a commemorative talk and led the people in prayer.
Willie Stevens from St. Ignatius, who led the entourage into town on horseback, said that many of the Salish have been returning annually to the Bitterroot Valley for over a hundred years but this time they decided to make the journey on foot to bring into focus the hardship and the heartbreak that was endured.
“We got a taste of what our ancestors endured,” said Stevens. “But our walkers had camps ready for us each evening along the way and a meal already prepared. It wasn’t like that in the forced march to the Flathead. After walking all day, they had to make their own camps and then prepare their own meals. They walked so that we could live. We walked back to our homeland to honor them.”
As Incashola put it later in his address to the walkers, “We have ancestors buried here. This is an emotional and happy occasion for all of us here. I hope our young people will never forget these last three days and these events. It’s because of our ancestors’ strengths and their values that we’re here today. Our next generations will be carrying that on from here. If we forget our ancestors, we will disappear.”