Historical Overview

• Migration     Archaeologists     Diversity
• Tribal Elders     Lewis and Clark

A Corridor for the Peopling of the Americas -- It All Started Along the Front

    Many of the Front's majestic peaks and drainages were used by Native Americans, the earliest inhabitants of the area.  Archaeologists theorize the Rocky Mountain Front was a north/south corridor for early human migration that occurred over thousands of years in the settling of the Americas.

    Today, archaeologists and wildlife biologists agree that the Front's amenities most likely offered early-day travelers and inhabitants a life-giving landscape.  Luckily, the nature of the Front has changed very little.  These same amenities attract current-day travelers and inhabitants as well.  The Front represents a "transition zone" of plants and animals.  The diversity of plant and wildlife species brings out the best that mountains and plains can offer. 

    The diversity and abundance of plant and wildlife - across changing seasons - offered a year-round setting for early inhabitants to thrive and prosper as they moved across the transition zone.  It is here that bands of tribal natives moved north and south along the Old North Trail, benefiting from the myriad streams and rivers that nourished plants and animals for food.  The diversity of food and medicinal plants supplemented the diets of native travelers.  Shrubs and trees provided protection from the harshness of quickly changing weather patterns characteristic to the Front.

    The Front also provided corridors for east-west seasonal travel; enabling native peoples to hunt the buffalo of the eastern plains, or fish the rivers of the Columbia River Basin to the west. 

    Archaeologists and tribal elders attest to site-specific travel routes through the mountains which linked the plains of north central Montana to the mountain valleys of western Montana.  One such mountain route is well-documented in the journals of Meriwether Lewis in 1806.  Lewis and a small party of explorers followed the ". . . river of the road to the buffaloe . . ." which led them from today's Missoula, Montana, up the CokahlaHishkit River (today's Blackfoot River), over Lewis and Clark Pass (even though Capt. Clark was not on that segment of the journey), and on to the vast buffalo herds inhabiting the Missouri River watershed.

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