Early territory The Flathead and the Pend d'Oreille both agree that the Flathead once occupied a large territory on the plains east 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. This was about the time when they got the first horses. The tribe consisted of at least four bands. Respectively, they had winter quarters near present-day
Helena, near
Butte, east of Butte and in the Big Hole Valley. Lewis and Clark came there and asked for horses, but they eventually ate the horses due to starvation. 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. Their request was finally granted, and a number of missionaries, including
Pierre-Jean De Smet, were eventually sent. The Flatheads are also located in
Sula, Montana. The tribes negotiated the
Hellgate treaty with the United States in 1855. From the start, treaty negotiations were plagued by serious translation problems. 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 1870, Victor died, and he was succeeded as chief by his son,
Chief Charlot, aka Charlo, Claw of the Little Grizzly. Like his father, Charlot adhered to a policy of nonviolent resistance. He insisted on the right of his people to remain in the Bitterroot Valley. But territorial citizens and officials thought the new chief could be pressured into capitulating. Over time, the real reason for the Hellgate treaty meetings became clear to the Salish and Pend d'Oreille people. Under the terms spelled out in the written document, the tribes ceded to the United States more than twenty million acres (81,000 km2) of land and reserved from cession about 1.3 million acres (5,300 km2), forming the Jocko or Flathead Indian Reservation. 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. of the US federal
Indian termination policy, the Flathead Tribes were able to resist the government's plans to terminate their tribal relationship in Congressional hearings in 1954. In 2021 the Bison were returned to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes == Notable tribal citizens ==