The Unbroken Chief:

Charlo and the Long Dispossession of the Bitterroot Salish

Origins and Inheritance

The man the United States government spent two decades trying to move was born around 1830 in the Bitterroot Valley of what is now western Montana. His Salish name was Slem-hak-kah, rendered in various transcriptions as Slm̓xe Q̓woxqeys — meaning “Claw of the Small Grizzly Bear.” He would become known to the wider world as Charlo or Charlot, the last independent chief of the Bitterroot Salish, and his story is inseparable from the land his people had occupied for thousands of years.

The Bitterroot Salish were not newcomers to their valley. Linguistic studies of the inland Salish language document terminology for specific geographic features in the Bitterroot region that extends back at least ten thousand years, evidence of a deep and continuous relationship with a landscape that was, for them, not merely a homeland but a repository of identity, ancestry, and spiritual meaning (Bitterroot Star, 19 Oct. 2016). When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark stumbled into the valley in September 1805, lean and destitute after crossing the Bitterroot Range, the Salish people they encountered gave them horses, food, and guidance. Decades later, Charlo would note with bitter irony how that hospitality had been repaid.

Charlo’s father was Chief Victor, known in Salish as Xwelxltcin — Many Horses or Plenty of Horses — who led the tribe during its first sustained contact with Euro-American settlement. In 1841, Jesuit missionaries established St. Mary’s Mission near present-day Stevensville, Montana’s first permanent white settlement, and many Salish incorporated Catholicism alongside their existing beliefs. Victor guided his people through these transformations, but his most consequential act was the position he staked at the treaty council of 1855. When Washington Territory Governor Isaac Stevens arrived at Council Grove near present-day Missoula to negotiate what would become the Hellgate Treaty, Victor refused to yield the Bitterroot Valley. According to the historical record, Stevens grew so frustrated with Victor’s resistance that he called him “an old woman” and “dumb as a dog,” prompting Victor to walk out of the negotiations entirely (Intermountain Histories, intermountainhistories.org/items/show/342, accessed 10 June 2026).

Stevens eventually made a concession. Article Eleven of the Hellgate Treaty, signed July 16, 1855, and ratified in 1859, specified that the Bitterroot Valley would be surveyed, and that the President would determine whether it was better suited as a reservation for the Bitterroot Salish or for white settlement. If it was determined unsuitable for the Salish, they would relocate to the newly established Flathead Reservation in the Jocko Valley to the north. Victor understood this as a guarantee that his people would remain in the Bitterroot. The United States government would interpret it differently (Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, csktsalish.org, accessed 10 June 2026).

The Forgery and Its Consequences

Victor died in 1870, and his son Charlo succeeded him as head chief of the Bitterroot Salish. Almost immediately, Charlo found himself confronting a federal reversal that would define his entire leadership. In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant issued an executive order declaring that the required survey of the Bitterroot had been completed and that no land there needed to be set aside for the Salish — assertions that were factually unsupported, as no proper survey had ever been conducted as specified in the treaty. Grant ordered the Salish to remove to the Flathead Reservation (Flathead Reservation Timeline, Montana Office of Public Instruction, opi.mt.gov, accessed 10 June 2026).

To formalize the removal, the Secretary of the Interior dispatched Congressman James A. Garfield — the future president — to Montana in 1872. Garfield met with Charlo and the other Salish chiefs near Stevensville to negotiate an agreement. Charlo refused to sign. The Bitterroot, he told Garfield, was where the bones of his ancestors were buried, and he would not leave (Missoulian, 10 Sept. 2024). Sub-chiefs Arlee and Adolphe, willing to accept the terms, placed their marks on the document. Garfield then published a version of the agreement that bore Charlo’s mark as well — a mark that historians and the Montana Department of Transportation’s own historical marker acknowledge was forged onto the document without Charlo’s consent (Historical Marker Database, hmdb.org/m.asp?m=123513, accessed 10 June 2026).

The consequence was immediate and divisive. Arlee led approximately one-fifth of the Bitterroot Salish north to the Jocko Valley in 1873. Charlo and the majority remained. The government proceeded to treat the Salish who stayed as individual U.S. citizens who had severed tribal relations, requiring them to take individual land allotments and opening the remainder of the valley to white settlement. Charlo never forgave Arlee for leaving, and according to contemporaries, never spoke to him again. For the next nearly two decades, Charlo governed what amounted to a de facto independent tribal community in the Bitterroot, insisting on his people’s legal rights under the original treaty while white settlement pressed relentlessly around them (Montana Historical Society, mhs.mt.gov/education/Montanans/charlo.pdf, accessed 10 June 2026).

Endurance and Its Price

For twenty years following the fraudulent Garfield Agreement, Charlo pursued a strategy of deliberate peace and legal persistence. His people adapted without capitulating. Salish families built log homes, planted orchards and vegetable gardens, and reduced their traditional seasonal movements to minimize conflict with white neighbors — accommodations that were, in their way, concessions to a new reality (Bitterroot Star, 19 Oct. 2016). Charlo maintained communication with federal officials and continued to assert, in every available forum, that his people retained rights under the Hellgate Treaty that no executive order could legitimately revoke.

The most celebrated expression of his views came in 1876, when the territorial government of Montana proposed taxing Indian property. Charlo’s response, published in the Weekly Missoulian on April 26, 1876, was a measured and searing indictment. In the speech he declared: “Since our forefathers first beheld him…the whiteman has filled graves with our bones…His course is destruction. He spoils what the Spirit who gave us this country made beautiful and clean” (Lewis and Clark Journals, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/item/lc.mult.white_audio09, accessed 10 June 2026). The speech was not the lament of a defeated man but the argument of a leader who understood that his people’s survival depended on making their grievances legible to a wider audience.

The following year brought a test of a different kind. In the summer of 1877, Chief Joseph’s Nez Perce band entered the Bitterroot Valley while fleeing U.S. Army forces in one of the most consequential episodes of the post-Civil War West. The Salish and the Nez Perce were old allies with long-established trade and kinship ties. Charlo’s response was carefully pragmatic. With twenty warriors, he met the Nez Perce chiefs and made clear that the Salish would side with the settlers if the Nez Perce brought war into the Bitterroot. The Nez Perce were granted peaceful passage through the valley and traveled north without incident (Ravalli Republic, ravallirepublic.com/news/local/sod-forts-of-the-bitterroot-valley, accessed 10 June 2026). The Salish had weighed their options and chosen a course they believed gave them the best chance of remaining in their homeland. The Americans took note — and then continued to press for removal regardless.

By the mid-1880s, the material circumstances of the remaining Salish were deteriorating. The great buffalo herds of the northern plains, which had anchored the Salish economy and provided essential protein for generations, had been destroyed. A group of eighteen families had drifted north to the Jocko Reservation by 1884. The Missoula and Bitterroot Valley Railroad was completed in 1888, and with it came a new surge of white settlers who demanded the remaining Salish land. Then, in 1889, an unprecedented drought destroyed crops across the Bitterroot Valley, bringing Charlo’s people to the edge of starvation (Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, csktsalish.org, accessed 10 June 2026).

The Decision and the Departure

In October 1889, retired General Henry B. Carrington arrived in Stevensville to negotiate the terms of a final removal. Carrington, whose papers are preserved at the University of Montana’s Mansfield Library Archives and Special Collections, recorded his extensive negotiations with Charlo in a manuscript titled The Exodus of the Flatheads from Their Ancestral Home in the Garden Valley, Montana to the Jocko Reservation, Montana (Archives West, archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:80444/xv65682, accessed 10 June 2026). The encounter between the two men, as reported in the Montana press, was frank and unsparing. Charlo told Carrington: “I will go — I and my children. My young men are becoming bad; they have no place to hunt. My women are hungry. For their sake I will go. I do not want the land you promise. I do not believe in your promises. All I want is enough ground for my grave” (Missoulian, 14 Oct. 2017).

On November 3, 1889, Charlo signed the removal agreement. His reason, as recalled by Victor Vanderburg — son of Charlo’s principal sub-chief — was that the conditions of his people had become intolerable, and that remaining had ceased to protect anyone (Salish-Pend d’Oreille Culture Committee document, salishaudio.org/resources/2014SPCCre.pdf, accessed 10 June 2026). Congress, however, failed to appropriate funds for the removal that spring, and again the following year. The Salish, expecting to move in the spring of 1890, had not planted crops and now had neither their Bitterroot farms nor the promised reservation lands. Some were near starvation and were forced to sell household belongings to survive.

Finally, on October 14, 1891, General Carrington arrived with troops. Charlo gathered his people and declared the time had come. Approximately three hundred Salish departed the Bitterroot Valley under military escort, some on horseback, some on foot. Women wept as the procession moved through the streets of Stevensville in front of white onlookers. Soldiers did not permit the column to stop. Children riding behind their mothers could not understand why the adults were crying. Sophie Moiese, who was a child at the time, would suffer flashbacks in old age, hearing in her memory the sound of women weeping as the people rode north toward the Jocko Valley (Montana Department of Women’s History, montanawomenshistory.org/mary-ann-pierre-topsseh-coombs-and-the-bitterroot-salish, accessed 10 June 2026). The march took three days.

Before entering the Jocko Valley, Charlo directed his people to present themselves in their finest ceremonial dress. Warriors rode ahead on horseback, firing their guns into the air and singing. The women who followed were still weeping. At the church in the Jocko Valley, a gathering of reservation tribal members waited to welcome them (Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes Fish, Wildlife, Recreation and Conservation, fwrconline.csktnrd.org/Fire/FireOnTheLand/History/19thCentury/BitterrootRemoval, accessed 10 June 2026). It was an act of deliberate dignity in the face of comprehensive defeat.

Last Years and Legacy

Charlo spent the remaining nineteen years of his life on the Flathead Reservation, continuing to press the federal government on its promises. The government had pledged farms, fencing, plowing assistance, cattle for families with children, and food support until the Bitterroot lands were sold. Most of these commitments went unfulfilled. Indian Agent Peter Ronan, who dealt with Charlo directly during this period, offered what amounted to a tribute in exasperation: “I have no complaint to make against Chief Charlot — he is a just and agreeable man, but is a believer in the fulfillment of promises” (Montana Historical Society biographical record, mhs.mt.gov/education/Montanans/charlo.pdf, accessed 10 June 2026). Charlo died on the Flathead Reservation on January 10, 1910, two years before the implementation of allotment policies stripped the reservation of more than half its remaining acreage.

Robert Bigart, in his 2010 article “Charlot Loves His People: The Defeat of Bitterroot Salish Aspirations for an Independent Bitterroot Valley Community,” published in Montana: The Magazine of Western History, identifies the central tension of Charlo’s leadership as precisely this gap between political realism and legal principle — a man who understood the limits of what he could obtain but refused to stop demanding what was owed (Bigart, Montana: The Magazine of Western History, vol. 60, no. 1, Spring 2010, pp. 24-44). Bigart’s subsequent monograph Getting Good Crops: Economic and Diplomatic Survival Strategies of the Montana Bitterroot Salish Indians, 1870-1891 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2012) provides the fullest available account of how the Salish community managed its material survival during the two-decade standoff — farming, negotiating, adapting — under Charlo’s direction.

Sally Thompson’s more recent Black Robes Enter Coyote’s World: Chief Charlo and Father De Smet in the Rocky Mountains (University of Nebraska Press, 2024) situates Charlo’s life within the broader context of Jesuit missionary activity and the transformation of the Salish world from the 1839 to the 1891 removal, examining how Charlo came to understand the missionaries and the settlers as part of the same project of dispossession (Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/book/123841, accessed 10 June 2026).

What emerges from these accounts is a portrait not of a passive victim but of a skilled political actor working within systems that were designed to ensure his failure. Charlo did not sign the Hellgate Treaty — his father did. He did not sign the Garfield Agreement — his signature was forged. He did not lead his people off their land until they were too hungry, too impoverished, and too surrounded by soldiers and settlers for any other course to remain viable. At every point, his decisions were calibrated to preserve what could be preserved — the community, its dignity, its identity — when the land itself was beyond saving.

The Bitterroot Valley today bears few visible reminders of the people who lived there for millennia before white settlement arrived. A street in Stevensville is named for Charlo. A state historical marker near that town notes the removal and the forgery. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes continue to hold periodic commemorative walks retracing the 1891 march. Charlo’s measured indictment of the American settler project, published in a territorial newspaper in 1876, remains as precise and legible as the day it was printed.

Works Cited

Bigart, Robert. “‘Charlot Loves His People’: The Defeat of Bitterroot Salish Aspirations for an Independent Bitterroot Valley Community.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, vol. 60, no. 1, Spring 2010, pp. 24-44. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/25701716.

Bigart, Robert. Getting Good Crops: Economic and Diplomatic Survival Strategies of the Montana Bitterroot Salish Indians, 1870-1891. University of Oklahoma Press, 2012.

Carrington, Henry B. “The Exodus of the Flatheads from Their Ancestral Home in the Garden Valley, Montana to the Jocko Reservation, Montana.” Undated typescript manuscript, ca. 1900. University of Montana, Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library, Archives and Special Collections. Archives West, archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:80444/xv65682. Accessed 10 June 2026.

Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. “Bitterroot Removal.” Fish, Wildlife, Recreation and Conservation Division, fwrconline.csktnrd.org/Fire/FireOnTheLand/History/19thCentury/BitterrootRemoval/. Accessed 10 June 2026.

Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. “History.” Selis-Ql̓ispe Culture Committee, csktsalish.org/index.php/publications/cd-brochures/2-uncategorised/6-history. Accessed 10 June 2026.

Flathead Reservation Timeline. Montana Office of Public Instruction, Indian Education Division, opi.mt.gov/Portals/182/Page%20Files/Indian%20Education/Social%20Studies/K-12%20Resources/Flathead%20Timeline.pdf. Accessed 10 June 2026.

“Mary Ann Pierre Topsseh Coombs and the Bitterroot Salish.” Montana Women’s History, montanawomenshistory.org/mary-ann-pierre-topsseh-coombs-and-the-bitterroot-salish/. Accessed 10 June 2026.

Montana Historical Society. “Charlo (ca. 1830-1910): Salish Patriot.” Montana Historical Society Education Resources, mhs.mt.gov/education/Montanans/charlo.pdf. Accessed 10 June 2026.

Salish-Pend d’Oreille Culture Committee. “Information RE: Portraits of Chiefs in Council Chambers.” salishaudio.org/resources/2014SPCCre.pdf. Accessed 10 June 2026.

Thompson, Sally. Black Robes Enter Coyote’s World: Chief Charlo and Father De Smet in the Rocky Mountains. University of Nebraska Press, 2024. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/book/123841. Accessed 10 June 2026.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “Lewis and Clark and the Indian Country — Excerpt 9.” Lewis and Clark Journals, lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/item/lc.mult.white_audio09. Accessed 10 June 2026.