The Salish and Pend d'Oreille People and the Jocko Valley

The Finley the panel names was Jacques Raphael Finlay. He was born about 1768 to a Scottish North West Company trader and a Saulteaux mother, and was in the company's service by 1798. In 1806 he crossed the pass later named for Joseph Howse, and the next year he cut out a trail and built a canoe for David Thompson's crossing to the Columbia. From 1806 to 1809 he trapped and traded in the Kootenai and Flathead country on his own account. The records spell him Jacco, Jaccot, Jacka and Jackio.

What the plaque says

The Salish and Pend d'Oreille People and the Jocko Valley For thousands of years, western Montana, including the Jocko Valley, has been home to the Qlispé (Kalispel or Pend d'Oreille) and Séliš (Salish or "Flathead") people. In their traditional creation stories, tribal elders tell how Coyote traveled across this "island," North America, preparing it for human beings who were yet to come. He left signs of his deeds upon the land, some of which can still be seen today. Here in Jocko, Coyote killed a gigantic monster who swallowed all living things. Long before the arrival of non-Indians, Salish-language place names covered this area, including Snlacnálqʷ (Edge between Forest and Prairie-Schley area) and Nlqálqʷ (Place of Wide Trees-Arlee area). The more recent name "Jocko" came from Jacco (Jacques) Raphael Finley, a fur trapper with the North West Fur Company 1806-1809) who intermarried with local Indian people and has many descendants here. In the Hellgate Treaty (1855), U.S. officials tried to force the Salish, Pend d'Oreille, and Kootenai people onto a single reservation. The Salish resisted removal from their ancestral Bitterroot Valley. When troops finally forced them north in 1891, the Salish came only as far as they had to, stopping at the Flathead or Jocko Reservation's southern edge. To this day, many Salish people live in the area, which now faces a new kind of "swallowing monsters," as suburban sprawl presses north from Missoula.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. Ignatius Mission — 12 mi
  A brick church painted wall to ceiling by the mission cook, beside the boarding schools the mission ran for Native children.
• Missoula Smokejumper Visitor Center — 15 mi
  The base of the crews descended from the first two men ever to parachute onto a forest fire.
• Ninemile Remount Depot — 17 mi
  The Forest Service's mule ranch, built because the fires of 1929 ran out of packers.
• CSKT Bison Range — 18 mi
  The herd the tribes saved, the government forced them to sell, and the range they finally got back.

More markers nearby

• The Flathead Indian Reservation — 12 mi
• The Mission Valley — 12 mi
• Fort Connah — 19 mi
• Many Cultures Forged Strong Communities — 20 mi