blackfoot-valley

designated as the country’s first national park in 1872. In 1806 however, Colter and the two companions / trappers he joined were the vanguard of an American “Fur Rush” that became the stuff of legend. A British penetration into the Montana area took place shortly after the Lewis and Clark expedition. In November 1809, the English explorer-geog- rapher David Thompson ascended the Clark Fork of the Columbia River and built his noted Saleesh House near Thompson Falls as part of a survey of the Columbia. He was in Missoula Valley on February 25, 1812, and continued upriver as far as the Silver Bow Valley around present day Butte. The great Pacific Northwest region beyond the Continental Divide, known as the Oregon Country, was for decades disputed between the United States and Great Britain, while an interim treaty allowed for joint usage. Mountain men, both American and British / French Canadian, operated on both sides of what would later become the border, the 49th Parallel. There were Hudson Bay Company posts south of that line until a compromise treaty divided the Oregon Country into American and British sovereignties in 1846. Lewis and Clark’s exploration, forty years earlier, was a key factor in securing the southern half of Oregon Country with the lower Columbian Basin, includ- ing western Montana, for the United States. The mountain men led a hard and dangerous life that now seems ro- mantic in our comfortable but often myopic retrospective view, as did the voyageurs before them, with whom the mountain men occasionally met and mingled for decades. The main difference between the two was the Brit- ish / American heritage, as opposed to the French. In a real sense, though, there was a romance to it even in their own view. The mountain men were supremely independent in a way few have been since, and whatever hard- ships and hazards they endured it was a life they had chosen - those who stayed with it would have no other. It was a great winnower of weaklings who either soon perceived their unsuitability for it and returned to civilization, or didn’t survive. But even the most able, fit, and canny, can make mistakes and oversights, and just one of these at the wrong time could prove fatal. An uncounted number of men disappeared into the wilderness and were never heard from again. But those who endured, completed the white-man’s explo- ration of the Northwest that Lewis and Clark had put on the map. A direct result from this activity was the expansion and further commer- cial organization of the fur trade. The New York - based American Fur Com- 68