Gathering Place
The Gathering Place
This natural prairie was a gathering place for the Pend d’Oreille people digging camas, the Swan Valley’s first homesteader Ben Holland who in the late 1800s-early 1900s brought hunters together for pack trips, mapmakers and surveyors gathering to resupply and camp, Dr. Gordon and family celebrating their new lodge at the Gordon Ranch, and many hardy souls who sought shelter, companionship and sustenance here.
Margaret MacDonald, a young Scottish woman, visited the Gordon Ranch in 1905 and wrote: “None of us had any idea that it would be so beautiful…. The lodge is erected in the midst of a meadow, close at hand is quite a large creek and all around are the woods and those noble trees.”
Members of a U.S. Forest Service survey party camped here in 1907-08. John B. Taylor, an 18-year-old surveyor, wrote: “…we learned that our party was to make a rough map and timber estimate of some half million acres, covering the entire drainage of the Swan River and of the Clearwater River, a tributary of the Big Blackfoot River to the south.” The crews camped rough on the trail, but at the Gordon Ranch conditions were “…relatively luxurious. …we had tents and a cook for the crew of about 20 men,” Taylor wrote.
Early on Sunday morning in 1908, a state game warden and a deputized civilian rushed into the camp of a small family hunting party from the nearby Flathead Indian Reservation. The tribal group of eight men, women and children had crossed the Mission Mountains from the west to gather their winter meat. After a brief exchange of words, the warden and his deputy shot and killed the four male members of the party. As the warden attempted to reload and shoot the women, one of them used her husband’s rifle to kill the warden.
The Salish - Pend d’Oreille Culture Committee tells this story on the Swan Massacre sign at milemarker 35, MT Highway 83 and in a more detailed account in the Upper Swan Valley Historical Society’s book, The Gathering Place, Swan Valley’s Gordon Ranch, available at the Swan Valley Museum.
