Kettle Falls

The panel quotes David Thompson, and his sentence of June 1811 is the one to stop for. He found a considerable village here where people from several surrounding tribes met as at a general rendezvous for news, trade and settling disputes, the villagers acting as arbitrators, and noted that they never joined any war party. Salish speakers called the falls Shonitkwu, roaring water; the people of the village are the Colville, sx̌ʷyʔiɬpx in their own language. French traders called the people and the falls Les Chaudières, the kettles, for the potholes the water had drilled in the rock.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. Paul's Mission — 1.8 mi
  A log church built in 1847 for the summer salmon gathering at Kettle Falls, ruined by the 1930s, and rebuilt in 1939, a year before the reservoir rose over the falls it was built to serve.