page_title: Coeur d'Alene people
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Coeur d'Alene people / History
caption_attribution_description: English: A map of the original Coeur d'Alene territory and the subsequent reservation.
context_page_description: The Coeur d'Alene are a Native American nation and one of five federally recognized tribes in the state of Idaho.
  The Coeur d'Alene have sovereign control of their Coeur d'Alene Reservation, which includes a significant portion of Lake Coeur d'Alene and its submerged lands. In Idaho v. United States, the United States Supreme Court ruled against the state's claim of the submerged lands of the lower third of Lake Coeur d'Alene and related waters of the St. Joe River. It said that the Coeur d'Alene were the traditional owners and that the Executive Branch and Congress had clearly included this area in their reservation, with compensation for ceded territory. This area was designated in 1983 by the Environmental Protection Agency as Bunker Hill Mine and Smelting Complex, the nation's second-largest Superfund site for cleanup.
  Concerned at the slow pace of progress, in 1991 the tribe filed suit against mining companies for damages and cleanup costs, joined in 1996 by the United States and in 2011 by the state of Idaho.
context_section_description: The tribe's oral history tells their creation story and their lengthy connections to this territory.
  The earliest written description of the Coeur d'Alene people comes from the journals of Alexander Henry the younger, a fur trader with the North West Company. He and British explorer David Thompson traded and traveled in the area from 1810 to 1814. He wrote about the Coeur d'Alene:
  The Skeetshue [Skitsuish] or Pointed Hearts [Coeur d'Alene] Indians dwell further southward [than the Kallispell or Pend d'Oreille tribes], about Skeetshue [Coeur d'Alene] Lake and [Spokane] River; they are a distinct nation, and have a different language [Salish] from the Flat Heads. They are very numerous, and have a vast number of horses, as their country is open and admits of breeding them in great abundance.
  Ross Cox, a clerk with the Pacific Fur Company and then the North West Company, spent considerable time at the trading post of Spokane House between 1812 and 1817:
  The Pointed Hearts, or as the [French] Canadians call them, les Coeurs d' Alênes (Hearts of Awls), are a small tribe inhabiting the shores of a lake about fifty miles to the eastward of Spokan House. Their country is tolerably well stocked with beaver, deer, wild-fowl, &c.; and its vegetable productions are similar to those of Spokan. Some of this tribe occasionally visited our fort at the latter place with furs to barter, and we made a few excursions to their lands. We found them uniformly honest in their traffic; but they did not evince the same warmth of friendship for us as the Spokans, and expressed no desire for the establishment of a trading post among them.
  About twenty years before our arrival [hence in the early 1790s], the Spokans and Pointed Hearts were at war, caused by a kind of Trojan origin. A party of the former [Spokane Indians] had been on a hunting visit to the land of the latter [Coeur d'Alene], and were hospitably received. One day, a young Spokan discovered the wife of a Pointed Heart alone, some distance from the village, and violated her. Although she might have born this in silence from one of her own tribe, she was not as equally forbearing with regard to a stranger, and immediately informed her husband of the outrage. He lost no time in seeking revenge, and shot the Spokan as he entered the village. The others fled to their own lands, and prepared for war. A succession of sanguinary conflicts followed, in the course of which the greatest warriors of both side were nearly destroyed. At the end of a year, however, hostilities ceased; since which period they have been at peace. The two nations now intermarry, and appear to be on the best terms of friendship.
  Many of the tribe were converted to Roman Catholicism in 1842 by Fr. Pierre-Jean De Smet, a Belgian Jesuit missionary from St. Louis, Missouri, who was active throughout the Northwest. The twin towns of De Smet and Tensed (originally Temsed), Idaho, are named for him. The United States acquired this territory in 1846 by treaty with Great Britain. European-American settlers and other immigrants began to move from the United States into parts of the territory in the 1840s. After the Indian defeat in the Skitswish War of May–September 1858, many more speculators were attracted after the discovery of silver in 1863 in the north Panhandle near the city of Coeur d'Alene. Mining and development revealed this to be an area of the second-largest silver deposits in the United States.
  In 1873 the Coeur d'Alene lands were reduced to approximately 600,000 acres (940 sq mi; 2,400 km²) when President Ulysses S. Grant established the Coeur d'Alene Indian Reservation by executive order. Chief Peter Moctelme traveled to Washington D.C. to meet with the President to discuss his disagreement of allotments. Upon ratification, Chief Peter Moctelme's land was reduced by 1/3 and sold to white settlers. The US agreement with the tribe "expressly included part of the St. Joe River (then called the St. Joseph), and all of Lake Coeur d'Alene except a sliver cut off by the northern boundary."
  As of 1885, Congress had neither
caption: Coeur d'Alene Tribe original territory
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