David Thompson was the first Euro-American to record his travels along this stretch of the river, passing through in early 1809 while searching for an ideal site for a fur trading post and later that fall building Saleesh House northwest of here near present-day Thompson Falls. Over the next fifty years, miners, trappers, and traders moved through this canyon, and settlers began homesteading the Wild Horse Plains Valley twelve miles downriver. In the late 1880s, a railroad linking Missoula with Lake Pend Oreille, Idaho, was completed, connecting Puget Sound and Lake Michigan and dramatically increasing the number of settlers moving west. Across the river are the ruins of an old homestead established in the early 1900s whose residents, lacking any road to the site, had to ferry themselves across or follow the perilous railroad track. Thompson, a trader and noted geographer who often studied natural features through a telescope, was given the Salish name Koo Koo Sint, or sxw cl xlkw ukw usm, meaning “He Who Looks at Stars.”