Priest Lake: Three Names, One Crown Jewel
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.