Jefferson River - First Peoples

First Peoples

Archaeologists believe that the first Americans migrated across the Bering land bridge from Asia between 12,000 and 30,000 years ago. They followed the Great North Trail, which dipped down into Montana along the east slope of the Rocky Mountains. These Paleo-Indians or Clovis people hunted the now-extinct mammoths and bison with Clovis points. Clovis points dated 12,000 to 13,000 years old have been found along the Missouri River near Townsend, Montana, about forty-five miles beyond the Jefferson. Paleo-Indians seldom entered the Rockies, where glaciation persisted.

Upstream from the Jefferson, at Barton Gulch, a tributary of the Ruby-Jefferson River system, archaeologists excavated an extensive complex of Paleo-Indian cooking pits and earth ovens dated to 9400 RCYBP (radio carbon years before the present).

Between 6,000 and 7,000 years ago, climate change brought dramatically drier conditions to the Northern Rockies. It is thought that far fewer animals survived in the region and the native peoples likely migrated elsewhere. Montana was apparently only intermittently inhabited after that until relatively recent times.

In the 1500s, the Kootenai came into Montana from the north. The Salish and Pend d'Oreille migrated in from the north and northwest, venturing south to the Jefferson River/Missouri Headwaters and eastward. Major population shifts started in the early 1600s, bringing several new tribes into Montana. With horses of Spanish origin, the Shoshone migrated into Montana from the Great Basin and hunted buffalo, becoming the dominant tribe in the area. However, the arrival and expansion of European settlers on the east coast pushed Native Americans west, in a domino effect that extended all the way into Montana. The Crow migrated into Montana from the east in the 1600s, followed by the Blackfeet, Gros Ventre, and Assiniboine in the 1700s. With the acquisition of guns and horses, the Blackfeet became the dominant tribe on the plains in the 1700s. The Shoshone were largely pushed back over the continental divide into Idaho, but still ventured into Montana hunting and foraging. By 1800, the Missouri headwaters and much of southwest Montana was a crossroads frequented by the Lemhi Shoshone, Bannock, Nez Perce, Flathead, Crow, Sioux, and Piegan Blackfeet.

Sacagawea, of the Lemhi Shoshone, was captured by the Hidatsa on the lower Jefferson River in 1800, when she was about twelve years old. She was later married to Toussaint Charbonneau and both of them joined the Lewis and Clark Expedition when Lewis and Clark wintered with the Hidatsa in North Dakota in 1804-05.