Long before there was a ski lift on Schweitzer or a town called Sandpoint, Lake Pend Oreille was Kalispel country. The Kalispel people lived along the lake and the Pend Oreille River, traveling by canoe, fishing its waters, and gathering roots and berries in season. In the fall of 1809, that homeland became the setting for a meeting that changed North Idaho: the arrival of David Thompson, a surveyor and fur trader for the North West Company of Montreal, who came to build a trading post among the Kalispel.
Thompson reached the lake on September 8, 1809, and two days later went out with two Kalispel companions to choose a building site. He picked a spot on the Hope Peninsula, on the northeast shore of the lake near the mouth of the Clark Fork River, directly on the line of canoe travel. Work began on September 11, when his crew raised a scaffold to protect their provisions and goods, and by September 23 they had finished a strong log store house for goods and furs. Thompson named it Kullyspell House, using his own spelling of the name the Kalispel people called themselves.
Idaho historians regard Kullyspell House as a genuine first. The Idaho Historical Society marker near Hope calls it the earliest fur trade post in the American Pacific Northwest, and Thompson's journals record the first commercial transaction within what is now Idaho. Yet the post existed only because the Kalispel allowed it, traded at it, and knew the country far better than its builders did. When Thompson set out on September 27, 1809, to explore the river flowing west out of the lake, he traveled with one employee and a Kalispel boy as his guide.
That journey showed how much the newcomers depended on Native knowledge. On September 30, Thompson met a party of Kalispel who had had so little contact with outsiders that they had no iron tools. They welcomed the travelers warmly, presenting them with bread, roots, and salmon, and shared information about the route downstream. Thompson followed the river for two days before turning back at Box Canyon on October 2, and he returned to Kullyspell House on October 6, guided the whole way through a landscape the Kalispel had navigated for generations.
The post itself was short-lived. Thompson left his clerk, Finan McDonald, in charge, and Kullyspell House served for about two winters before it was abandoned in 1811, its operations removed to Spokane House, built the year before near present-day Spokane. The log buildings vanished, and local history accounts say the site was lost until 1923, when a Kalispel man led searchers to the ruins on the lakeshore. A state historical marker near Hope now tells the story to passing travelers.
Did you know that the lake you can see from Schweitzer's slopes was a center of trade more than fifty years before Idaho Territory even existed? The next time you look out over Lake Pend Oreille from the mountain, remember that its first trading post carried a Kalispel name, was built in a Kalispel homeland, and survived its first autumn on Kalispel knowledge and Kalispel generosity. The fur trade came and went in two winters. The Kalispel, whose name Thompson borrowed for his little log house, remain part of this region's living heritage today.