Kalispell, Kulispel, Calispell

If any of you good readers have wondered like me, "What ever happened to the Kalispell Indians?"… then the following may at least partially answer the question. Sometime in the mid seventies, curiosity got best of me and I went digging in old newspapers, books and government records. Once I had found "The People Above the Water" had acquired a reservation of their own, I even called and talked to some the members. Here is part of what I wrote at that time, 30 years ago. (This was not a column)

"Man for man, woman for woman, and pound for pound, the Kulispels may have been the toughest, the gentlest, the smartest, the proudest, the most peace loving, and adaptable of all the Northwest Indians. They were respected by every other tribe from the Rockies clear to the Pacific Ocean. Yet today, they may well be the most messed up and incongruous people in North America.

"What Happened?"

"The first know histories report the Kulispels as nomadic buffalo hunters on the prairie, but with the coming of the horse and then the gun, they moved west to the Pend Oreille River in northeast Washington. Though only 1,500 strong, they were respected for bravery, even defeating a couple of Blackfeet raiding parties.

"Survival was the name of the game and they were better at it than any of their neighbors. They seemed to get-by better than other tribes in this area and were generally well adjusted; but when the Indian Treaties were drawn up in 1854 the Kulispels were passed by and it was 1914 before a 'vague settlement' was reached for them to have some land; however it wasn't until the Kennedy Administration under a bill by Senator "Scoop" Jackson, officially set the Kulispels up on a seven square mile reservation there in northern Washington.

"A 1910 government report set the number in the tribe at "not more than a hundred," however it is believed there were more elsewhere, mainly in skid row conditions in and around Spokane. A 1970 report said only about a dozen men on the reservation held a regular job and most of those were with the government. Only one member had ever made it through high school. 'One boy who won a Rockefeller art scholarship ended up back on the reservation, driving a garbage truck part time'."

One of my sources described the present tribe as "naive, innocent, and somewhat taciturn hillbillies."

During my research I found a few pictures. Under one showing a family was written: "Kulispel, Kalispell, and Calispell, are all spellings for the tribe that the town of Kalispell gets its name from. This small tribe played a role in the history of the Northwest that was all out of proportion to its size, yet today has trouble adapting to the modern. Taken about 1902, this is the summer camp of tribal Chief John Bigsmoke and his family. (Probably in the Flathead Valley) Baptiste Bigsmoke who later became the last Chief of the tribe holds the rifle." The boy holding the rifle appears to be ten or eleven years old. Beside his was a little girl of maybe six, while a woman is holding a crib board with a baby. They are all dressed in neatly kept cloth clothing and are standing next to a canoe of some kind amid several teepees.

Another of my photos was recently taken and sent to me by people on the reservation. It shows a smiling seven-year-old boy, Jan Sam, and underneath that one is a note that his future doesn't look bright because his tribe is bound up in ignorance, prejudice, and poverty. Another old-time photo shows an elderly man with a handsome but deeply lined face. Writing says he was Chief Masselow, head of the Kulispels between 1887 and 1912. "He held his declining and besieged tribe together during the crucial quarter century it took to win government recognition and eventually a seven square mile reservation."

"Ironically…the isolation, independence and small tribe size that kept the Kulispels from domination by other tribes for many generations and later by the whites…has now left them in a twilight world neither red nor white, neither 19th or 20th Century."

*(Ostrom Note: It would be great if an FVCC student, or someone else out there, was interested enough to do a current paper on the Kulispels. I'd really like to know if things are looking up for them, but I'm not very optimistic.

If anyone is seriously interested in doing a follow-up paper on the Kulispels, I'd help some.