CHEWELAH - Anyone with a little imagination can walk back in time Thursday to the 50-year-period when fur-trading adventurers, missionaries and the Salish natives of the Colville Valley met and mingled.
Grizzled fur traders on horseback and black-robed Jesuit priests will lead the way in a 2 1/2 mile interpretive walk here that kicks off a four-day historical extravaganza called the Journey Past Heritage Celebration.
The free public program, sponsored by the U.S. Forest Service and others, will be a marathon of encampments with hands-on demonstrations of frontier skills, historical talks, native storytelling and the music and dances of various cultures that thrived here from 1800 to 1850.
Settlement of the disputed U.S.-Canadian border in 1848 ushered out the Canadian fur trade.
"As we began to research this era, we were struck by how many of the family names we read in the journals and records of the early fur trade are still present in this valley," said Daniel Mattson, a Colville National Forest archaeologist.
There are numerous descendants of the furmen in Indian reservations and communities throughout northeastern Washington. Among the prominent family names are Finley, Flett, Gendron, Inkster, Louie, Marchand, Narcisse, Stensgar and Wynne.
"This even is an excellent way to share with area residents this history and, in many cases, their own history," said Mattson, who is producing Journey Past with the help from Spokane historical author Jack Nisbet and numerous others.
Nisbet's "Sources of the River" illuminates the diaries of North West Co. trader David Thompson. Thompson crossed the Continental Divide with his Cree wife and their three young children, and explored this region extensively.
Like the free-ranging people of the period, the Journey Past Program will move to Colville on Friday and to Kettle Falls on Saturday and Sunday. Different aspects of the fur era's colorful cultural stew will be traced at each location.
Some people may learn, for example, that Colville is named after Andrew Colvile, an English director of the North West Co. who never set foot in the area.
Unlike the monoculture of American prospectors and settlers who poured into the region after 1850, the North West Co and Hudson's Bay Co. furmen were liberally blended with native peoples.
Among the ethnic groups that came here in the fur era were French Canadians, Scottish-Irishmen, Hawaiians, Eastern woodland Indians such as the Crees, Iroquois and Chippewas, and an amalgamation of French Canadians and Indians known as Metis.
So many mixed-blood Cree Indians came here in the fur era that they were later able to establish their own agricultural village at Chewelah. The Rev. Pierre DeSmet, a Jesuit missionary from Belgium, established a Catholic mission for the Crees in 1845.
"I gave the name of St. Francis Regis to this new station, where a great number of the mix race and beaver hunters have resolved to settle with their families," DeSmet wrote.
The mission was relocated near Kettle Falls in the 1850s. The Metis community had dissolved because of disease, strife between white settlers and Indigenous Indians, and the lure of the California gold rush of 1849.
Among those on the mission roll in 1847-48 was North West Co. scout Jaco Finlay. The son of an English fur trader and Chippewa woman, he established the Spokane House trading post near what is now the community of Nine Mile Falls.
Finlay acquired three Salish wives and has numerous descendants, some of whom spell the name Finley.
Mixed marriages were less accepted after the era ended, Mattson said: "You had to decide whether you were white or Indian, and there was not room for anybody else."
Thursday's kick-off hike will follow a route that Thompson used and will end at the St. Francis Regis mission site on the west edge of Chewelah, where a new historic marker will be dedicated.
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