For ten days in July 1855, near the confluence of the Bitterroot and Clark Fork Rivers, Salish, Pend d’Oreille, and Kootenai people met in council with US officials. The tribes struggled to understand the negotiations because of inept translators. In the end, the chiefs put their "x" marks on a paper saying the tribes ceded to the US most of western Montana while reserving certain areas, including the Flathead Indian Reservation, for their own exclusive use and benefit. On ceded lands, the tribes also reserved the right to continue hunting, fishing, gathering plants, and pasturing animals. As western Montana’s transformation intensified in the late 1800s, tribal leaders defended the treaty’s guarantees, but many officials and settlers pressed to open the reservation to non-Indian settlement. In April 1904, Representative Joseph Dixon pushed the Flathead Allotment Act through Congress despite overwhelming tribal opposition. The act broke up communal lands, allotted individual tracts to tribal members, and designated the remaining lands as surplus. In 1910, the government opened those lands to homesteaders. In 1971, the U.S. Court of Claims ruled that the Flathead Allotment Act was a breach of the Hellgate Treaty. Following passage of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, the Tribes began rebuilding their sovereignty. Today, the Flathead Reservation and Flathead Lake remain places shaped by the Hellgate Treaty and the Flathead Allotment Act.