Saleesh

The Saleesh, better known as the Bitterroot Salish or Flathead and calling themselves Selish, are an Interior Salish people of western Montana, whose language gave the entire Salishan family its name.

Their early homeland lay east of the continental divide, but in the 1700s pressure from Plains nations, above all the Blackfeet, together with smallpox, drove them into the Bitterroot Valley. There they crossed the divide once or twice a year to hunt buffalo on the plains and built alliances with plateau tribes to their west.

The expedition of Lewis and Clark met them in the valley in 1805, and by the 1830s Iroquois trappers schooled by Jesuits had settled among them; their accounts moved the Saleesh to send delegations to St. Louis in 1831, 1835 and 1837 asking for priests.