For thousands of years, western Montana, including the Jocko Valley, has been home to the Qluspé (Kalispel or Pend d'Oreille) and Séliš (Salish or "Flathead") people. In their tradition creation stories, tribal elders tell how Coyote traveled across this "island," North America, preparing it for human beings who were yet to come, and left signs of his deeds upon the land, some of which can still be seen today. In Jocko, Coyote killed a gigantic monster who swallowed all living things. Long before the arrival of non-Indians, Salish-language place names covered this area, including Snlacnála (Edge between Forest and Prairie-Schley area) and Nlqála (Place of Wide Trees-Arlee area). The more recent name "Jocko" came from Jacco (Jacques) Raphael Finely, a fur trapper with the North West Fur Company (1806-1809) who intermarried with local Indian people and has many descendants here. In the Hellgate Treaty (1855) U.S. officials tried to force the Salish, Pend d'Oreille, and Kootenai people onto a single reservation. The Salish resisted removal from their ancestral Bitterroot Valley, and when troops finally forced them north in 1891, they came only as far as they had to, stopping at the Flathead or Jocko Reservation's southern edge. Many Salish people still live in the area, which now faces a new kind of "swallowing monsters" as suburban sprawl presses north from Missoula.