īonners Ferry in the 1880s flourished due to the mines in the north. Government surveyors of the Boundary Commission came in 1858 to establish the border between the United States and British Columbia. The Oregon Question was settled by the Oregon Treaty of 1846 which established the 49th Parallel north as the boundary between the US and British North America. He was followed in 1846 by Jesuit Priest Father DeSmet, a missionary to the Kootenai Tribe. Thompson returned the next year and established a trading post on Lake Pend Oreille. The local natives gave Thompson's party dried fish and moss bread. Thompson and four fellow fur traders arrived in 1808 to trade with the Lower Kootenais. In 1875, Richard Fry, and his Sinixt wife, Justine Su-steel Fry, leased the business, but the location retained the name of the original founder and later became the town of Bonners Ferry.īefore the gold rush, only a few visitors had come to the region one of the first was explorer David Thompson, a cartographer for the North West Company. Edwin Bonner, a merchant from Walla Walla, Washington, established a ferry in 1864 where the trail crossed the broad Kootenai River. When gold was discovered in the East Kootenays of British Columbia in 1863, thousands of prospectors from all over the West surged northward over a route that became known as the Wildhorse Trail.
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