© Photo Courtesy of Craig Davidson
Long before it can be seen,
it is heard. Tons of bright green water crash over rocks as the Kootenai River loses 300
feet in elevation traveling a few hundred yards down river.
Imagine the sound of Kootenai Falls before the railroad, before the highway with its
perpetual whine of diesel and gasoline engines. Imagine 80,000 to 100,000 cubic-feet per
second racing downstream before Libby Dam, nearly 30 miles upstream, was built.
Photo Courtesy of Jim & Marge Sullivan
The steep slopes and loose rock
cliffs forced early travelers into close communion with the falls.
The Kootenai Indians moved into the area in the 1500s, according to historians.
They were originally called the Ksunka meaning "People of the standing
arrow." To the Native Americans the standing arrow represented strength, unity and
dexterity.
However, when the French encountered the Ksunka, they referred to them as the Kootenai,
meaning "water people." The source of the word has puzzled people for many
years. It is thought to be an Algonquin word.
The Kootenai or Kutenai or Kootenaha came to be known as "flat bow" or
"flat bow people."
Confused? Other sources say the word Kootenai means "deer robes" alluding to
the natives as excellent deer hunters and tanners.
The word Yaak is the Kootenai word for bow and was the Native American word for the
Kootenai River while the Yaak River was called the Aak, meaning "arrow" by the
early local residents.
A glance at any map of the area shows today's Yaak River poised as a nocked arrow to
the Kootenai River's bow.
To the Kootenai tribe, the falls is a sacred site. They view it as the center of the
world, a place where tribal members can commune with the spiritual forces that give
direction to the tribe and to individual members.
Photo Courtesy of Gene & Bernice Yahvah
The falls area is a place
where the Kootenai go for visions or meditation.
Archaeological evidence shows the Kootenai had Native American sweat lodges and
encampments up and down he river valley from Pipe Creek — where light clay was found for
pipes — to the falls area.
The Kootenai Tribe continues to view the falls as sacred. In 1993, Universal Studios
had to negotiate with the tribe to secure permission to film "The River Wild" at
the falls.
Native American concerns included environmental degradation and excessive publicity
leading to desecration of the sacred site.
David Thompson, a Canadian explorer and employee of the Northwest Company, is
considered the first white man into the Kootenai Country.
In 1808 Thompson used the Kootenai River as a highway through the area following the
well-trod path of the Native Americans. He portaged around the falls, following cairns —
piles of rocks marking the trail — built by the Kootenais.
Photo Courtesy of Gene & Bernice Yahvah
The rock cairns were constructed to ensure that the builder would stay "in the
good graces of the many spirits which inhabited the land."
A member of the Kootenai Tribe said the cairns may have been built to give good luck to
travelers who took the risky portage route. Offerings to the traveler's guardian spirit
would be placed on the cairn to "insure the success of one's journey."
Thompson was called Kookoosint by the Native Americans. It means "man who looks at
stars." He traveled with an array of surveying instruments and a telescope.
The power of the river and the danger of the portage was not lost on the famous
explorer.
He wrote in his diary: "The River had steep banks of rocks and only 30 yards in
width; this space was full of violent eddies, which threatened us with destruction; at
wherever the river contracted, the case was always the same, the current was swift; yet to
look at the surface, the eddies make it appear to move as much backward as forward."
Thompson also wrote that he traded with two canoe loads of Indians in the area for
"12 singed muskrats and a shoulder of antelope" providing him and Finan McDonald
with something other than moss bread and dried carp to eat.
Despite his concern with the
portage route, Thompson predicted the Kootenai River Trail, the Moccasin Trail or as it
was called later, "The Wolf Creek Trail", would become a major route through this
area.
McDonald established a trading post near what became later the townsite of Jennings,
eight miles upstream from the present city of Libby.
The falls and river trail saw the continued light traffic of fur trappers and Native
Americans for nearly a half century.
In 1845 the Jesuit missionary, Pierre Jean DeSmet, passed through the falls portage
during one of his journeys to the St. Ignatius Mission in the lower Flathead Valley.
"At a place called the Portage, the river crossed a defile of mountains, or rather
of precipitous and frightful rocks; and the traveller is compelled, for the distance of
eight miles, to risk his life at every step, and brave obstacles that appear, at first
sight, insuperable."
"Whatever can be imagined appalling seems here combines to terrify the heart —
livid gashes of ravines and precipices, giant peaks and ridges of varied hue, inaccessible
pinnacles, fearful and unfathomable chasms filled with the sound of ever-precipitating
waters, long, sloping and narrow banks, which must be alternately ascended, and many times
have I been obliged to take the attitude of a quadruped and walk upon my hands."
"Amid these stern, heaven built walls of rocks, the water has forced its way in
varied forms, and we find cataracts and whirlpools engulfing crags and trees, beneath
their angry sway."
Traffic through the portage increased slowly until the later part of the 1800s when
gold was discovered on Libby Creek and the migration of miners and settlers began.
Remnants of a couple of homesteads, including hay fields and an old apple orchard, sit
along the old Kootenai Trail within the state wildlife management area.
© Photo
Courtesy of Lance Schelvan
Thompson predicted the trail and
portage around the falls would be a major transportation route some day. He also wrote
about the expanses of timber and power that could be produced on the river.
Several proposals to construct a dam have been attempted.
In 1912 preliminary surveying and engineering was completed by Joseph Coram of Boston,
according to old issues of The Western News.
Coram had secured a 10,000 cubic-foot per second water right and proposed a $6 million
project that would ultimately produce 70,000 horsepower.
The slow moving project was lost in the aftermath of World War I. 
The latest threat occurred during the late 1970s. A consortium of western Montana and
northern Idaho electrical co-ops proposed construction of a 30-foot high, 900-foot wide
concrete and steel dam immediately above the falls.
Although the Kootenai-Salish Tribes opposed the project, the Bureau of Indian Affairs
committed $400,000 to plan and promote the project.
It was stopped because proponents failed to show a need for the power and there was
concern with environmental damage. The proposal is far from dead.
Today visitors stop for a
respite from the travels on U.S. Highway 2 at the county park above the falls. Picnic and
restroom facilities greet the traveler.
Adventurous visitors enjoy the walk across the swinging bridge above the gorge.
A thin walking trail leads
through the dark forest and quickly down to the river, to the falls — a step back to another time.
Text of the above article was supplied courtesy
of The Western News - Kootenai Country Spring & Summer Guide
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