As She Remembered It, Stories Of The Last Remaining Member Of The Bitterroot Salish Band

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Mrs. Mary Ann Toppseh Combs of Arlee was the last surviving member of the Salish Indian band of about 250-300 people forced in 1891 from the Bitterroot to the Flathead Indian Reservation by way of the Jocko Valley.

Led by Chief Charlo, this band of Salish for decades defied the government’s orders to move north to the reservation.

In her later years, in oral histories preserved by Char-Koosta News, the official news publication of the Flathead Indian Nation, Combs said she didn’t remember hardship in the Bitterroot Valley. She spoke of a garden with melons, squash and onions, and neighbors who were nice to her family, in particular a blacksmith. She said it was the government who made them move out, not their neighbors.

On the trip north she said all the people cried, dragging their tipi poles behind their horses as they passed along wooden rail fences that by then crisscrossed what had been the vast, unmarred homelands of her Salish ancestors.  

Two people were hurt during the journey that took a little under a week. Chief Charlo held a prayer in the evenings to help the grieving people.

Combs said she also grieved leaving the Bitterroot and felt a great sadness that the government failed to keep promises that would have helped her people. But, she said her greatest sorrow was at times when the faith of her people failed. In her later years she was a spiritual traditionalist and devout Catholic who was respected as a spiritual leader of the tribe.

Even in her nineties she would walk the nearly two miles from her cabin, where she lived by herself, into Arlee. Mary Ann Toppseh Combs died June 16, 1978.