For more literature, visit the Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area Administrative History, the Spokane Tribe of Indians, and the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Indian Reservation websites. Visit our Links page for additional information, including tourist attractions and learning opportunities for those passing through.

Throughout time, the Lake Roosevelt area has been a crossroads for the forces and desires of both nature and man.

Today, the area largely reflects the character and characteristics of human development and settlement over the past 150 years. With a closer look, however, one can appreciate a natural and cultural history as rich as any in America. This brief history merely touches the surface of why this area is so special.

For more literature, visit the Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area Administrative History, the Spokane Tribe of Indians, and the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Indian Reservation websites. Visit our Links page for additional information, including tourist attractions and learning opportunities for those passing through.

About two hundred million years ago, the landforms drifted into their current configuration as continents.

Sixty-five million years ago dinosaurs became extinct. Twenty to fifty million years ago, volcanoes spewed molten lava and tectonic shifts helped form mountainous areas in the Northwest.

Seventeen million years ago, some scientists believe a giant meteorite struck southeastern Oregon, causing floods of basalt lava. For a period of approximately four million years, lava spilled across the western lowlands and the Columbia Plateau began to form one of the largest basalt Plateau’s in the world. Indeed, 42,000 cubic miles of lava flooded the Northwest from present day Lake Roosevelt into Oregon. In some places, the basalt is more than two miles thick.

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The big glaciers of the last ice age covered all the northern fringe of Washington and Idaho.

In Washington, these glaciers advanced down the western part of the Okanogan Valley about as far south as Chelan. In Idaho, a finger of the ice sheet came down to Sandpoint, where it blocked the mouth of the Clark-Fork River. In so doing, an ice dam almost one-half mile high was created.

This ice dam resulted in the creation of Lake Missoula, which was 2,000 feet deep and stretched eastward some 200 miles into Montana. Approximately the size of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie combined, the dam holding this vast inland sea first burst 15,000 years ago. Torrents of ice- and dirt- filled water rushed down the Columbia River toward the Pacific Ocean. The floods cut deep canyons, also called coulees, into the underlying bedrock. Over approximately 2,500 years, the cycle of nature creating an ice dam, forming of a lake behind the dam, the dam failing, and catastrophic flooding would repeat itself up to seventy times.

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The Paleo-Indian times date back more than nine thousand years.

Indigenous peoples used Kettle Falls as a base for food gathering and fishing. The people of this period used the natural resources of laminated quartzite (for chopping) and black argillite (for small tools).

The Ksunku period began about 6000 years ago. Archaeological evidence shows them to be accomplished hunters of fish and wildlife, and gatherers of native plants. About 2000 years ago, the Salish speaking people came to Kettle Falls. Over a period of one thousand years, it’s believed that their numbers increased substantially.

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Beginning in the early 1800s, Indian tribes in the area began coming in to regular contact with European-American cultures.

Fur traders, explorers and missionaries brought people of vastly different cultures to this area for the first time.

David Thompson, who was active in the fur trade, is the most well known early “explorer.” He arrived in Kettle Falls during salmon fishing season in 1811. He writes of tribal members with their “big woven baskets at the bottom of the falls (Kettle) … capturing fish.” His diaries talk of well constructed houses and he describes the village area as “a kind of general rendezvous for news, trade, and settling disputes, in which these villagers acted as arbitrators, never joining any war party.” By the beginning of July he was on his way down the Columbia looking for a trade route to the Pacific Ocean. He succeeded by making it to Fort Astoria and the Pacific Ocean.

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By the 1930s, America could be seen from two very different perspectives.

One perspective is that of a relatively youthful nation coming of age in the world. Over the previous 130 years, America had grown from an agrarian society to one which used its wealth of natural resources and labor to embrace the industrial revolution. Westward expansion had brought America to the Pacific Ocean, the Civil War assured the union of the states, and World War I further established America as an international power.

A second perspective is one of poverty and uncertainty. With the stock market crash of 1929, droughts never experienced before and high unemployment, the 1930s were a time of crisis. In the Columbia Basin area, 40 percent of those that had come to till the soil had fled.

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