Priest Lake has worn three names, and each one tells a story. In 1846, Jesuit priest Pierre-Jean De Smet mapped the lake and named it Roothaan Lake, for his superior in Rome. In 1865, Captain John Mullan — building the road that would bear his name from Walla Walla to Fort Benton — renamed it Kaniksu, from the Kalispel word for "Black Robe," the name Native people gave the Jesuit missionaries. The name that stuck honors the Jesuit priests who kept a base camp at Kalispell Bay in the 1840s.
The lake the Forest Service calls Idaho's "crown jewel" — 19 miles long, over 300 feet deep, flanked by the rugged Selkirks near the Canadian border — later became a working lake. Logging crews drove timber down the Priest River, and the greatest drive took place in 1931, when 50,000 cedar poles and 125 million board feet of logs were herded down the river by crews the old-timers called river pigs.
In the 1920s the lake briefly went Hollywood. Silent-film pioneer Nell Shipman moved her independent production company to Priest Lake, building her studio camp, Lionhead Lodge, on its shores. Between 1922 and 1925 she produced the feature The Grub-Stake and a series of five wilderness shorts, working with a menagerie of wild animal actors — dogs, bobcats, bears — that she refused to train with whips or prods. She lived at the lake for two and a half years.
The company went bankrupt in 1925 and Shipman left Idaho, but she later wrote that Priest Lake was where she achieved her artistic ideals while staying true to her independent spirit. Today the entire shoreline of Upper Priest Lake is protected as a scenic area, and the lake still holds a record: the world's largest Mackinaw trout was caught here in 1963.
Three names, one crown jewel — and it all started with a priest's map.